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Herman Kalckar
Peter Pauling was a prominent crystallographer and the son of world-renowned chemist Linus Pauling. In 1952, Peter began his PhD research at the Cavendish Lab and quickly befriended James Watson. Their conversations revolved around two things: women and the state of Peter’s father’s research. In the spirit of friendship and scientific openness, Peter shared his father’s letters with his colleagues. This is how Crick and Watson learned about Linus Pauling’s research on DNA. In fact, Crick and Watson returned to DNA research at the beginning of 1953 in large part because they wanted to discover its structure before Pauling. Therefore, Peter’s letters arguably played a pivotal role in Crick and Watson’s success: if Peter hadn’t tipped them off, Linus Pauling might have beat them to the double helix. Thus, Crick and Watson’s relationship with Peter Pauling raises many of the same thorny ethical questions as their collaboration with Maurice Wilkins and Rosalind Franklin.
Peter Pauling Quotes in The Double Helix
The The Double Helix quotes below are all either spoken by Peter Pauling or refer to Peter Pauling . For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
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Chapter 21 Quotes
It was from his father. In addition to routine family-gossip was the long-feared news that Linus now had a structure for DNA. No details were given of what he was up to, and so each time the letter passed between Francis and me the greater was our frustration. Francis then began pacing up and down the room thinking aloud, hoping that in a great intellectual fervor he could reconstruct what Linus might have done. As long as Linus had not told us the answer, we should get equal credit if we announced it at the same time.
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Chapter 24 Quotes
[Maurice Wilkins] emphasized that he wanted to put off more model building until Rosy was gone, six weeks from then. Francis seized the occasion to ask Maurice whether he would mind if we started to play about with DNA models. When Maurice’s slow answer emerged as no, he wouldn’t mind, my pulse rate returned to normal. For even if the answer had been yes, our model building would have gone ahead.
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Peter Pauling Character Timeline in The Double Helix
The timeline below shows where the character Peter Pauling appears in The Double Helix. The colored dots and icons indicate which themes are associated with that appearance.
Chapter 19
...He had a longer conversation with Linus’s wife, Ava Helen, who explained that her son Peter was going to do his PhD with John Kendrew at Cambridge. Watson comments that Peter...
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Chapter 20
Watson was relieved to learn from Peter Pauling that Peter’s father, Linus, wasn’t studying DNA—he was researching “coiled coils” (how alpha helices...
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Chapter 21
...mostly focused on their separate research. Otherwise, Watson spent plenty of time discussing girls with Peter Pauling. One day, however, Linus Pauling sent his son a letter declaring that he’d figured...
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Chapter 22
...that Rosalind Franklin was finally leaving his lab and stopping her research on DNA. Then, Peter Pauling got another letter in January: his father had written up his results and would...
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Peter Pauling explained that his father modeled DNA as “a three-chain helix with the sugar-phosphate backbone...
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Chapter 24
...for their molecular models. Meanwhile, Watson also went to dinner with Elizabeth, Bertrand Fourcade, and Peter Pauling (who talked about girls, as usual).
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Chapter 29
...Cambridge. He affirmed that he thought Crick and Watson were right. That night, Linus and Peter Pauling, Francis and Odile Crick, and Watson and his sister Elizabeth all had dinner together....
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Epilogue
...John Kendrew, Max Perutz, Sir Lawrence Bragg, Hugh Huxley, Francis Crick and Maurice Wilkins, and Peter and Linus Pauling. The only exception was Rosalind Franklin, who tragically died of cancer in...
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