How my interest in proteins developed

My first memory about proteins goes back to the spring of 1918, during the First World War, when I was a student in a class on camp cookery given by the Home Economics Department of Oregon Agricultural College as a contribution to the war effort. Students in the class were, like me, receiving some military training in the Reserve Officers Training Corps. I remember making a loaf of bread and also learning something about the macronutrients, proteins, carbohydrates, and fats, but nothing about vitamins-it was too soon after the discovery of vitamins for them to get mentioned in the course. I continued my studies, except for one year, 1919-1920, during which I was a full-time instructor, teaching quantitative analysis. I received my degree of Bachelor of Science in chemical engineering in June 1922, and in September 1922 began my graduate work at the California Institute of Technology. I soon started research on the determination of the structure of crystals by the X-ray diffraction method, supervised by Roscoe Gilkey Dickinson, who was the first recipient of a Ph.D. from the California Institute of Technology (1 920). He was then a National Research Council Fellow, but he later became a member of the staff (Professor of physical chemistry). My interest at that time was in minerals, in-