Maurice Loyal Huggins (19 September 1897,

Berkeley County, West Virginia Berkeley County is located in the Shenandoah Valley in the Eastern Panhandle region of West Virginia in the United States. The county is part of the Hagerstown- Martinsburg, MD- WV Metropolitan Statistical Area. As of the 2020 census, the co ...

– 17 December 1981) was a scientist who independently conceived the idea of

hydrogen bond In chemistry, a hydrogen bond (or H-bond) is a primarily electrostatic force of attraction between a hydrogen (H) atom which is covalently bound to a more electronegative "donor" atom or group (Dn), and another electronegative atom bearing a ...

ing and who was an early advocate for their role in stabilizing

protein Proteins are large biomolecules and macromolecules that comprise one or more long chains of amino acid residues. Proteins perform a vast array of functions within organisms, including catalysing metabolic reactions, DNA replication, respo ...

secondary structure Protein secondary structure is the three dimensional conformational isomerism, form of ''local segments'' of proteins. The two most common Protein structure#Secondary structure, secondary structural elements are alpha helix, alpha helices and beta ...

. An important

polymer A polymer (; Greek '' poly-'', "many" + ''-mer'', "part") is a substance or material consisting of very large molecules called macromolecules, composed of many repeating subunits. Due to their broad spectrum of properties, both synthetic a ...

theory, Flory–Huggins theory, is also named after him.

Controversies over the hydrogen bond

Huggins believed that he had been the first to suggest the concept of the

, while he was a student under G. N. Lewis at the Chemical Laboratory of the University of California, Berkeley. According to his account, he wrote a thesis in 1919 in which the H-bond was introduced and applied to

tautomerism Tautomers () are structural isomers (constitutional isomers) of chemical compounds that readily interconvert. The chemical reaction interconverting the two is called tautomerization. This conversion commonly results from the relocation of a hyd ...

acetoacetic acid Acetoacetic acid (also acetoacetate and diacetic acid) is the organic compound with the formula CHCOCHCOOH. It is the simplest beta-keto acid, and like other members of this class, it is unstable. The methyl and ethyl esters, which are quite stab ...

. Unfortunately, no hard copy of the thesis remains. The first extant publication of the H-bond was that of

Wendell Latimer Wendell Mitchell Latimer (April 22, 1893 – July 6, 1955) was an American chemist notable for his description of oxidation states in his book "The Oxidation States of the Elements and Their Potentials in Aqueous Solution" (ASIN B000GRXLSA, ...

and Worth Rodebush in 1920, who cite Huggins' unpublished work in a footnote. (They were fellow scientists at the Chemical Laboratory.)

Structure of the peptide bond

In 1937, Huggins analyzed the β-sheet models of

William Astbury William Thomas Astbury Fellow of the Royal Society, FRS (25 February 1898 – 4 June 1961) was an English physicist and molecular biology, molecular biologist who made pioneering X-ray crystallography, X-ray diffraction studies of biomolecule, b ...

and realized that the hydrogen bonding could not work as described since the bond geometry of the amide nitrogen (then presumed to be tetrahedral) would deflect the hydrogen away from the carbonyl oxygen. He further suggested that

resonance Resonance describes the phenomenon of increased amplitude that occurs when the frequency of an applied periodic force (or a Fourier component of it) is equal or close to a natural frequency of the system on which it acts. When an oscillatin ...

might play a role in changing the geometry of the peptide bond to make the hydrogen bonds more linear. However, he did not state explicitly that the

peptide bond In organic chemistry, a peptide bond is an amide type of covalent chemical bond linking two consecutive alpha-amino acids from C1 (carbon number one) of one alpha-amino acid and N2 (nitrogen number two) of another, along a peptide or protein cha ...

was planar, as emphasized by Pauling in a nearly simultaneous paper.

Structure of the α-helix

Huggins also produced a model of the α-helix in 1943, roughly eight years ahead of the modern model of

Linus Pauling Linus Carl Pauling (; February 28, 1901August 19, 1994) was an American chemist, biochemist, chemical engineer, peace activist, author, and educator. He published more than 1,200 papers and books, of which about 850 dealt with scientific top ...

Robert Corey Robert Brainard Corey (August 19, 1897 – April 23, 1971) was an American biochemist, mostly known for his role in discovery of the α-helix and the β-sheet with Linus Pauling. Also working with Pauling was Herman Branson. Their discoveries we ...

and

Herman Branson Herman Russell Branson (August 14, 1914 – June 7, 1995) was an American physicist, chemist, best known for his research on the alpha helix protein structure, and was also the president of two colleges. He received a fellowship from the Rosenwal ...

Flory–Huggins theory

Personal history

Huggins was born in 1897 to Amos Williamson Huggins and Mary Abigail Hackley. He had at least two sisters, Dorothea Harriet Huggins (born 22 September 1894) and Mary Abigail Huggins (born 2 October 1904). Huggins earned his Ph.D. in 1922 under Charles Walter Porter (known as Walter Porter) in the Chemistry Laboratory of the University of California, Berkeley. In 1941 he was elected a Fellow of the

American Physical Society The American Physical Society (APS) is a not-for-profit membership organization of professionals in physics and related disciplines, comprising nearly fifty divisions, sections, and other units. Its mission is the advancement and diffusion of k ...

. He was employed as a chemist by Eastman Kodak Research Laboratories.

References

* Latimer WM and Rodebush WH. (1920) "Polarity and Ionization from the Standpoint of the Lewis Theory of Valence", ''J. Am. Chem. Soc.'', 42, 1419–1433. * Huggins ML. (1936) ''J. Org. Chem.'', 1, 407–456. * Pauling L and Niemann C. (1939) ''J. Am. Chem. Soc.'', 61, 1860–1867. * Huggins M. (1943) "The structure of fibrous proteins", ''Chem. Rev.'', 32, 195–218. * Huggins ML. (1971) ''Angew. Chem. Int. Ed.'', 10, 147–152. * Huggins ML. (1980) ''Chem. Tech.'', 10, 422. {{DEFAULTSORT:Huggins, Maurice Loyal American biochemists University of California, Berkeley alumni Fellows of the American Physical Society People from Berkeley County, West Virginia 1897 births 1981 deaths Members of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences