From Missed opportunities in crystallography by Zbigniew Dauter and Mariusz Jaskolski:
The only method to avoid mistakes and errors is to do nothing. We have no intention whatsoever to criticize the founders of crystallography for their omissions or errors. On the contrary, the faults of some of them usually help to emphasize the achievements of others and, as a net total, illustrate the immense intellectual activity of our predecessors, even if it is measured by the inevitable fraction of lapses.
What Lindo Patterson overlooked initially was soon realized by David Harker. <...> Lindo Patterson later admitted: ‘I must say that I was very annoyed at myself for missing the beautiful extension of the method made by Harker’. The great man did not hold any grudges and wrote in a letter to Harker: ‘Mr Harker, I’m so glad you pointed this out to me. If I could only have thought a little more, I’d have seen this myself before you did. I could have kicked myself’.
It sounds like a joke of history that Pauling illustrated the α-helix (which is of course right-handed) with left-handed chirality, arbitrarily assuming the wrong configuration of the Cα atoms. Apparently, he did not pay much attention to the problem of absolute configuration, which is odd in view of his deep concern with stereochemistry.
When Perutz read the paper of Pauling and Corey about the α-helix, he instantly understood, with fury, his mistakes but also realized that there should be another strong meridional reflection at 1.5 Å, to represent the chemical repeat (a single amino acid residue) along the helix axis. Observation of this reflection (at relatively high resolution) required a special diffraction experiment, and he feverishly made it. The photograph confirmed the model of Pauling and Perutz’s own belated revelation. When W. L. Bragg asked Perutz what sparked his experiment, he said: anger about his earlier omission. The reply of Bragg was, ‘I wish I had made you angry earlier!’
