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First edition, very rare offprint, signed by Pauling, of this article which summarizes research into the structure of proteins since 1920, and especially Pauling's own seminal contributions with Robert Corey in which they postulated the existence of the 'alpha-helix' and 'beta-sheet' as recurring structural motif sin proteins. "PNAS papers by Linus Pauling, Robert Corey, and Herman Branson in the spring of 1951 proposed the alpha-helix and the beta-sheet, now known to form the backbones of tens of thousands of proteins. They deduced these fundamental building blocks from properties of small molecules, known both from crystal structures and from Pauling's resonance theory of chemical bonding that predicted planar peptide groups. Earlier attempts by others to build models for protein helices had failed both by including nonplanar peptides and by insisting on helices with an integral number of units per turn. In major respects, the Pauling-Corey-Branson models were astoundingly correct, including bond lengths that were not surpassed in accuracy for >40 years" (David Eisenberg, 'The Discovery of the alpha-Helix and the beta-Sheet, the Principal Structural Features of Proteins,' Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 100 (2003), pp. 11207-10). "Linus Pauling, arguably the greatest chemist of the twentieth century, never publicly admitted that there was a race for the determination of the structure of the most important biopolymers. But according to his competitors there was a race, in fact, there were two, and Pauling won one [proteins] and lost the other [DNA]" (Istvan Hargittai, Linus Pauling?s quest for the structure of proteins, Sturtural Chemistry 21 (2010), 1-7). Pauling won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1954 "for his research into the nature of the chemical bond and its application to the elucidation of the structure of complex substances." The presentation speech for Pauling's award referred to his "deduc[tion of] some possible structures of the fundamental units in proteins," and noted that it had "become apparent that one of these structures, the so-called alpha-helix, probably exists in several proteins." Not on OCLC. 8vo, pp. 155-161, [1], with photographic portrait and biography of Pauling on last page. Self-wrappers.
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