When Nobel Prize winners misbehave

May 13, 2016 • 12:45 pm

by Matthew Cobb

This rather arsey letter was sent by the great chemist Linus Pauling to Francis Crick in 1963. Pauling is correct about the substantive issue – there are three hydrogen bonds between guanine and cytosine, something that Crick had apparently got wrong – but is this the best way of sorting the matter out? Crick’s reply is not recorded.


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Source: National Libraries of Medicine.

71 thoughts on “When Nobel Prize winners misbehave”

    3. OMG, now I’m wondering if I come off as arsey. Maybe it’s a cultural difference. People in England often find Canadians and Americans rude.

  3. Not ideal wording, but not a horrendous letter. Imagine the ad hominems that would be in there if someone like Trump wrote the letter.

    1. Puh-lease. My imagination’s burdened enough without being given a distasteful task like that …

    2. I’ve got the best hydrogen bonds. Let me tell you, everyone tells me they are the best. I guarantee it, with these bonds, you will not be disappointed.

  4. Crick could have responded, “Well, you’re wrong about Vitamin C!”

          1. Reminds me of when I took a French course in college, back when my academic ship was rudderless. I made an “F” on a paper. The instructor wrote, “Noble effort.”

    2. It is my information that Pauling had not developed his vitamin C hypothesis as early as 1963 so Crick would have had to be able to see into the future to respond in this way.

    3. Pauling hadn’t started his Vitamin C campaign yet. In fact, he found out about Vitamin C from Irwin Stone only in the late 1960s.

      1. Well, just amend my statement to begin with “Had the chronology been different, Crick may well have responded” etc.

      1. Ha! You’re the third person to have pointed that out to me. Wasn’t it Plato who said “I can lecture brilliantly for five hours and no one will say anything. But if I make ONE mistake, everyone will call it to my attention!”

  5. Sweet guy. I’ll damn sure count my bonds before saying anything.

    2. To paraphrase the old hymn, “Blest be the ties that bond . . . .”

      Though, to speak chiastically, in chemistry it would rather seem the bonds that tie, eh?

  6. I think it is interesting that the salutation is “Dear Crick” not “Dear Dr Crick”. Or am I missing something? Even if he was usually referred to as “Crick” this was a fairly formal letter, no?

    2. I say, Crick old sport, shall we go out to the polo grounds and settle our differences with some stick-and-ball models of G-C hydrogen bonds?

      2. Or as I offer as a hopefully tension-reducing alternative to students who are wont to frequently and vociferously ululate “Shut up!” to each other: “I say, Old Chap, could I trouble you to lower the decibels a wee bit, eh?”

    3. Odd as it seems to us now, that was an indication of friendliness and informality, not the reverse.

      The letter doesn’t seem bad at all to me. Sounds like he was trying to save a colleague from a moment of professional embarrassment.

      1. Me too. I think this is about the norms of communication in a different time. When I was a kid, toll calls were more expensive than they are now and not used casually by most. A letter in this situation would be normal I think, and this one seems pretty friendly to me.

          2. “If we wait, maybe they’ll call us. Then, it will be on their nickel.” That’s from back when long distance calls something like over $1/minute. The use of a “nickel” was merely a euphemism.

        3. 1963. I believe you would have to schedule a telephone call to London in advance with an international operator. I don’t know exactly what the cost would be in today’s dollars, but I would guess around $100 plus time charges.

          1. I don’t quite remember that, but I do remember seeing it on older TV shows. (I was born in 1963.) But I remember it was $10.60 for a three minute call to Europe in the 1970s and 80s, which even today we would consider expensive. Even around NZ it was up to half that for three minutes.

          2. In the early ’90s I reviewed a grant application for the NZ equivalent of NIH. The review form was on a rather purple paper. I FAXed it back. The transmission took an eternity, because, as I realized later, the damn FAX machine was digitizing the purple background. At least, the department ate the bill.

          3. When my mom moved from NZ to Canada, we had very little contact with her family because phone costs were so high. It cost something stupid like $4/min in the early 70s. We mostly kept in touch through letters and sent parcels through a slow post because in order to afford that, you had to, like today, put things on slow boats. The good thing was, I always got to open my nana’s present on Dec 24 because it was her Xmas. 🙂

    4. Pauling seems to have addressed most people who were not close friends by “Dear “.

      2. ‘Dear’ is or was a perfectly polite way to start a letter to any casual or professional acquaintance.

        The letter is just matter of fact according to standard letter writing of the time, not misbehaving or rude at all.

    5. That’s British academic English, from what I understand (and maybe from a few generations back). Professor Bunge (the Argentinian born, Canadian by choice philosopher of science) at McGill used to use it for some reason.

  7. If you want more, look up the back-and-forth Alexander Rich and … was it really Crick?.., over … was it Z-DNA? If not, tRNA?… I obviously can’t remember clearly – it was a thing last year or so – the exchange was churned up because Rich died … I think PCC(E) covered it here…

    1. [goes and types in Google for like 3 seconds]

      Ooo it was tRNA. I don’t even want to look at it now – I just want to cry in the closet.

  9. “Dear Pauling,

    Thank you for drawing attention to the fact. I’ll take it into account in further publications, and possibly mention you for pointing that out. In fact it helps my and Watson’s projects about DNA.

    Vitamin C in megadoses, however, do not work against cold.
    Have you considered the possibility it might be dangerous in early cancer? Could anti-oxidants not benefit the tumour more than the immune system?

    Kind regards, Your James”

    Oh how great to pretend to be a James with hindsight!:)

    1. Dr. Pauling was not into Vitamin C megadoses until a few years after this. He was kinda sorta keen on vitamins, but did not go full wingnut until later.

  11. Great post. Funny, a year later both parties would get Nobel prizes, Pauling his second the pace prize. Probably by this time he still hadn’t gotten over being wrong about a trihelical DNA structure in ’53, which was not long before Watson and Crick hit upon the right answer, which they did with considerable motivation derived from competing with the megastar Pauling. Watson has been quoted that when they saw Pauling’s mistake they figured he would hit on the right answer within 6 weeks or so, so they pulled out all the stops. Pauling’s son was at the Cavendish lab at the time.

    2. ” . . . so they pulled out all the stops . . . .”

      Including one named Rosalind Franklin, eh?

      1. Actually, I believe Watson has said that Pauling got wind of the Franklin photo and asked to see it but the Lab head at Cavendish (Bragg was his name I think) declined. Probably he got wind of it from Linus Jr., from whom Watson got the trihelix paper.

        Pauling really was a protean genius.

        1. Very punny, that “protean” remark!

          Pauling’s favorite Vitamin C is required by enzymes which crosslink the triple helical protein strands of collagen, in order to create tensile strength in all the body’s tissues.

          Very different from the double helix of DNA, but I can see where Pauling had triple helices on the brain.

      2. 1+
        At least, now, there’s a medical school named after her, and it’s up in the greater Chicago area, no less, so not too terribly far from PCC(E).

  12. Yes I agree with the Prof (E)…. Matthew must be very polite. Cordially yours does not sound like he is tearing strips off ‘Crick’ and I’m wondering weather Pauling has his tongue firmly in his cheek, but that’s just me.
    But of late and as the ‘MukherjeeGate’ h/t: Prof(E) debacle has shown, it is always better to have the science right.
    The reply would (or not) have revealed more of their working and perhaps ‘out of hours’ relationship. Beer Pauling? certainly Crick.
    Thanks Matthew.

  13. I think that if you’re Linus Pauling and you’re talking about chemical bonding you get to talk like that. It seemed a little brusque but then, do we know whether they had a personal relationship? Maybe they poked at each other like this all the time?

  15. Yes, Pauling avoided embarrassing Crick in public, as a gentleperson would do.

    I do the same when a lecturer makes a blunder, as a professional courtesy. I prefer to wait until the end of the lecture to speak privately with the lecturer.

    But I grew up in Canada and at a time when children were taught manners.

      1. Perhaps a solution is to write and deliver a private note to the lecturer at question time.

    2. Seems a quite civil and appropriate response.

      I’m reminded of Dawkins’s reflection on how it brought tears to Dawkins’s eyes on hearing a senior (emeritus?) professor remarking to a lecturer, at the end of the lecture, thanking the latter (“My dear fellow . . . .”) for the latter’s pointing out to the former that that the former had been wrong all these years about the lecture topic at hand.

  17. Well the first para. seems okay to me.

    The second para starting “I trust that…” does sound a bit arrogant and presumptuous, in that it presumes that Pauling is automatically correct. I would have thought something along the lines of “I would be interested to know your current views on the number of bonds” or something similar, would have been more diplomatic.

    cr

    1. It could, however, sound also ironic, because the number of hydrogen bonds is really very basic.
      My friend recently translated a thick book titled “Quantum biology” (advice: put on protective gear whenever you hear “quantum”). The authors had made some elementary mistakes, including hydrogen bonds. And my friend caught them, though she had not learned chemistry or any other science since high school.

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