Maurice Loyal Huggins (September 19, 1897, Berkeley County, West Virginia – December 17, 1981) was a scientist who independently conceived the idea of hydrogen bonding and who was an early advocate for their role in stabilizing protein secondary structure.
Huggins believed that he had been the first to suggest the concept of the hydrogen bond, 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 in acetoacetic acid.
The first extant publication of the H-bond was that of Wendell Latimer and Worth Rodebush in 1920, who cite Huggins' unpublished work in a footnote.
However, he did not state explicitly that the peptide bond was planar, as emphasized by Pauling in a nearly simultaneous paper.