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Linus Pauling was the most important chemist, and arguably the most important American scientist, of the twentieth century.
From his descriptions of chemical bonds in quantum mechanical terms in the late 1920s and 1930s - a series of papers that
culminated in the hugely influential book The Nature of the Chemical Bond - through his structural studies of complex inorganic and organic molecules and discovery of the chemical basis of sickle-cell
anemia, Pauling's work leaped over the boundaries of disciplines and helped to revolutionize the study of chemistry.
In 1951 he was the head of the chemistry division at the California Institute of Technology, the acknowledged world master
at solving complex molecular structures, author of hundreds of papers and several seminal textbooks, widely respected as a
genius in his field, and a role model for Watson and Crick, who adopted the method he had used to attack proteins - a combination
of model-building, chemical knowledge and modern physics - in their work on DNA.
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Linus Pauling. Cambridge, England.
- 1948
"I believe that the same process of moulding of plastic materials into a configuration complementary to that of another molecule,
which serves as a template, is responsible for all biological specificity. I believe that the genes serve as the templates
on which are moulded the enzymes that are responsible for the chemical characters of the organisms, and that they also serve
as templates for the production of replicas of themselves.
The detailed mechanism by means of which a gene or a virus molecule produces replicas of itself is not yet known. In general
the use of a gene or virus as a template would lead to the formation of a molecule not with identical structure but with complementary
structure. It might happen, of course, that a molecule could be at the same time identical with and complementary to the template
on which it is moulded."
- Linus Pauling, Sir Jesse Boot Foundation Lecture, May 28, 1948.
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