Abstract
The 1950s were an exciting period for biochemistry and molecular biology. In particular, the physicochemical studies of proteins and nucleic acids began intensively at that time. In 1951 L. Pauling and R. B. Corey discovered the α helix and β sheets as components of protein structure (Pauling et al., 1951). According to Pauling, he had been model-building with strips of paper just to keep himself busy while in bed in Oxford with a cold. Out of this came the models of the helices and pleated sheets. Also in 1951, F. Sanger solved the amino acid sequence of the 51-residue insulin, the beginning of our studies of the primary structures of proteins (Sanger and Tuppy, 1951a,ó). At that time almost every conference on proteins would present one sequence after another of globular proteins. Then, in 1953 J. Watson and F. H. C. Crick won the race against Pauling* to discover the structure of DNA (Watson and Crick, 1953; see also Watson’s popular book, The Double Helix). J. C. Kendrew and M. F. Perutz were studying the x-ray diffraction of sperm whale myoglobin and hemoglobin, which would not be completed until the early 1960s (Kendrew et al., 1960, 1961; Perutz et al., 1960; Cullis et al., 1962).
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Abbreviations
- ORD:
-
optical rotator dispersion
- CD:
-
circular dichroism
- BSA:
-
bovine serum albumin
- PBG:
-
poly (γ-benzyl-α,L-glutamate)
- PGA:
-
poly (α,L-glutamic acid)
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Yang, J.T. (1996). Remembrance of Things Past. In: Fasman, G.D. (eds) Circular Dichroism and the Conformational Analysis of Biomolecules. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4757-2508-7_1
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