Kabat, Heidelberger's first graduate student at Columbia University's College of Physicians and Surgeons and later his colleague there, went to the University of Upsala in Sweden in 1937 to use the university's newly-developed ultracentrifuge to type and determine the size of antibody globulins in horse and rabbit antipneumococcal sera, which had been prepared by Heidelberger. In this letter, written from Cambridge, England, prior to his return to the United States in the summer of 1938, Kabat contemplated the limits of ultracentrifugation in determining the molecular weights of the complex proteins of antibodies. He also discussed a meeting with the pioneer of X-ray structure analysis of proteins, John Desmond Bernal, who expressed an interest in subjecting antibody protein to his new techniques of X-ray crystallography.
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