Abstract
REPLY to Boon and to Harris: We are well aware that the so-called compensation law behaviour has been observed in the case of the electrical behaviour of semiconductors, and as we indicated, may not be wholly artefactual in some cases in physical organic chemistry. We were merely concerned to show that the experimental data on the denaturation of proteins and the thermal death of viruses and microorganisms cannot be used to adduce compensation law behaviour in these cases. The linearity of the plot of ΔH‡ against ΔS‡ arises wholly from the near constancy of the left hand side of the equation used in calculating ΔS‡ from values of ΔH‡ which vary between 10 and 200 kcalorie mol−1. It is unlikely that the uncertainty in the experimentally determined activation energies for protein denaturation is greater than half the range over which compensation law behaviour is observed so the analysis put forward by Harris does not seem to cover all cases where compensation law behaviour is artefactual.
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BANKS, B., DAMJANOVIC, V. & VERNON, C. Compensation Effect and Experimental Error (reply). Nature 243, 402 (1973). https://doi.org/10.1038/243402a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/243402a0
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