“So there’s the story”: The letter was written on May 13, 1943. It is part of “The Oswald T. Avery Collection,” on the web under Profiles in Science: National Library of Medicine, at http://profiles.nlm.nih.gov/ps/retrieve/ResourceMetadata/CCBDVF.

did not get the attention they deserved: The fact that the paper was published in 1944, during the war, may have also contributed to its relatively low impact.

“To my father, nucleic acids”: P. Pauling 1973.

an unusual paper by biochemist: Ronwin 1951.

“in formulating a hypothetical structure”: Pauling and Schomaker 1952a.