Abstract
For Christmas 1939 a girl friend presented me with a book token — I used it to buy Linus Pauling’s newly published Nature of the Chemical Bond 1 which I would otherwise not have been able to afford. I found in it the following passage:
“Although the hydrogen bond is not strong it has great significance in determining the properties of substances. Because of its small bond energy and the small activation energy involved in its formation and rupture, the hydrogen bond is especially suited to play a part in reactions occurring at normal temperatures. It has been recognized that hydrogen bonds restrain protein molecules to their native configurations, and I believe that as the methods of structural chemistry are further applied to physiological problems it will be found that the significance of the hydrogen bond for physiology is greater than that of any other single structural feature.”
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Perutz, M.F. (1997). The Significance of the Hydrogen Bond for Physiology. In: Fleischhacker, W., Schönfeld, T. (eds) Pioneering Ideas for the Physical and Chemical Sciences. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4899-0268-9_1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4899-0268-9_1
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