Chapter 5 Summary

Word came that Linus Pauling had partially solved the structure of proteins. Watson depicts Pauling as a brilliant and dynamic speaker, who created jealousy among his fellows and zealous admiration among the young. Pauling was also a clever writer, and even though his journal articles went over Watson's head, the brilliance of their language was clear. Pauling's model was an ?-helix, and at an initial review, it seemed to be the correct model, although Watson was unable to truly understand the argument. If Pauling was correct, his method of discovering the protein structure could possibly be applied to discover the structure of DNA. Watson began to wonder how he could study crystallography, the field responsible for creating X-rays of crystals like Maurice's DNA crystal X-ray. The solution was Max Perutz, a scientist at Cambridge University in London. Watson's advisor arranged for him to...