PAULING, LINUS CARL. 1901-1994.
PAULING'S OWN ATOMIC MODEL PIECES.
Collection of colored wooden spherical model pieces with wooden and metal bond pieces, 1950s.
Provenance: Professor Emeritus Richard E. Dickerson, Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry, UCLA; Distinguished Professor Emeritus James A. Lake, Molecular and Cellular Developmental Biology, UCLA (letter of provenance).
Dr. James A Lake from his letter of provenance: "In 2004, Dick Dickerson retired as the Director of the Molecular Biology Institute at UCLA and discarded some of the contents of his laboratory, which was on the same floor as Jim Lake's. Dickerson had been recruited from Cal Tech, where he had occupied Linus Pauling's laboratory. When he moved to UCLA, he took some of Pauling's scientific equipment, including atomic models to his second-floor laboratory at the MBI. The second floor included the structural biology faculty.
It is a tradition at the Molecular Biology Institute at UCLA that when someone retires, discards such as books and equipment are placed in the hallway and made available to Institute members. Jim rescued a large box filled with huge wooden atomic model pieces that were part of the Pauling lab at Cal Tech that were discarded by Dickerson.
In order to fit it into the discard box, someone broke the model apart. Jim thought that even though broken, the model was an important piece of molecular biology history and took it home, where it has sat in the box for seventeen years. One unique aspect of the model pieces is that it has two different bonds: wooden sticks and metal springs."
The model pieces date from the time Pauling was working on the alpha helix and the structure of DNA and are viewable in period photographs of his lab.
