Category: Science writings

ChemBioChem, 2004, 5, 1302. H. F. Ebel, C. Bliefert, W. E. Russey, The Art of Scientific Writing. From Student Reports to Professorial Publications in Chemistry…

A conference held in Munich, November 20-23, 1997.

Belaboring the obvious: Chemistry as sister science to linguistics

Pierre Laszlo
Ecole polytechnique, Palaiseau, France
and University of Liège, Belgium

Je suis suffisamment proche de la lisière de la forêt pour la scruter. Chacun des arbres est unique. Le pin que je regarde se différencie de son voisin. Cet arbre singulier porte en écharpe sa propre mortalité. Certaines de ses branches sont mortes, elles portent des aiguilles brunies et raréfiées. Mais un arbre n’est pas restreint à une statique. Ses réponses aux souffles d’air sont comme une danse, comme un péan aux pressions environnementales qui ont induit l’évolution de son espèce. Ce sont quelques-unes des réflexions qui vous viennent, à regarder un arbre.

“Cet oeil à la fois sagace et sans hâte qui pèse et qui rumine”, écrit Julien Gracq de Francis Ponge, dans un éloge Julien Gracq, OEuvres complètes, Bernhild Boie et Claude Dourguin, éds., vol.2, Gallimard-La Pléiade, Paris, 1995, pp. 1180-1183.: phrase à exciser, telle quelle, dans son sympathique fourbi hétéroclite, pour l’appliquer à l’ami Dubois. Jacques a mené une entreprise un peu comparable à celle de Francis Ponge, il est vrai. Là où Ponge, dans la mouvance de Jules Renard et de Paul Claudel (“Le porc”), a ouvert au poème en prose une friche, lui livrant les objets du quotidien, ces humbles fréquentations que sont le savon, l’automobile, la chèvre, le pré, Dubois s’est mis en tête d’étudier et de décrire, avec une sympathie comparable, avec une résonance ou une consonance, les formes replettes, bien nourries, du roman médical, du roman policier et de la littérature de gare. Pas seulement, certes. Proust aussi!

His Contributions to Chemistry and Molecular Biology.

Lecture by Pierre Laszlo (Ecole polytechnique and University of Liège) given at Southern University, Ashland, February 7 1998

Let me take you on a short walk. What’s this? We ascend first a spiral staircase. It winds upward in highly regular manner, each step in the climb makes us circle a little around the axis of the structure. Thus, we come to a landing. We have reached a rather flat, but nevertheless undulating floor. We can move across it quite easily, till we reach another of the spiraling structures. The architecture I am describing is that of a building, neither man-made nor inhabitable. The building I’m telling you about is also the build-up of a protein molecule and its scale is that of atomic dimensions.

The man who made the first sighting of such an architecture for proteins, in the late 1940s, with its a-helices (the spiral structures) and with its undulating floors (the b-sheets) was Linus Pauling. His vision was, for that time, truly prophetic. And it has endured, it has been borne out by whole libraries of evidence accumulated since.

The two questions I wish to examine in this lecture are:

1. How did Pauling come to his notion of protein architecture?

2. Were all the pronouncements by this visionary genius, those about vitamin C and cancer for instance, milestones in the advancement of science?

The edge of the forest is close enough for a good look. Each tree is unique. The pine I am examining differs from its neighbours. This individual tree flaunts its own mortality. Some of its branches are dead, their needles have become brown and sparse. But any tree is not only constrained into immobility. Its response to the whiffs of wind is a dance. It forms a paean to the environmental pressures that have molded the evolution of this particular species.