“Pauling’s Boys” and DNA Structure: Collaborative Failure in the Transition from Structural Chemistry to Molecular Biology (2016)
In February 1953, Linus Pauling, (1901-1994) a most accomplished and versatile structural chemist1 who contributed, often decisively, to solving the structure of over 200 inorganic and organic compounds; author of best-selling textbooks, most notably the influential Nature of the Chemical Bond: An Introduction to Modern Structural Chemistry which ran into several editions since its publication in 1939; Chairman of the Department of Chemistry and Chemical Engineering at Caltech; (1937-1958) one of youngest members of the US National Academy of Science at his election in 1931; and soon to become a Nobel Laureate2, published a profoundly flawed model of DNA structure.3 Pauling’s model was disproved only two months later, in April 1953, when seven scientists from two labs sponsored by the British government’s Medical Research Council (hereafter MRC) in London and Cambridge-UK, published three back-to-back papers supporting a totally different structure for DNA, a structure which would become famously known as the DNA double helix, or just the “double helix”,4 because it revolved around two intertwined helical strands of paired polynucleotides.
...MoreBook Masanori Kaji; Yasu Furukawa; Hiroaki Tanaka; Yoshiyuki Kikuchi (2016) Transformation of Chemistry from the 1920s to the 1960s.
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Journal of the History of Biology
Historical Studies in the Natural Sciences
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