LINUS PAULING1

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Linus Pauling was one of the leading scientists of his time. He was the

only person who won two undivided Nobel Prizes, Chemistry(1954) and

Peace(1962). Pauling1was born on February 28, 1901 in Portland, Oregon, the

son of a pharmacist, Herman Henry William Pauling, who, though born in

Missouri, was of German descent, and his wife, Lucy Isabelle Darling, born in

Oregon of English-Scottish ancestry.

Linuss interest in science began as a child, he collected insects and

minerals. When he was only nine years old, his father wrote to the Portland

newspaper to say that his son had read everything about history and natural

sciences that could be found for him, and he was now seeking advice as to what

to give the boy next. Only a few months after writing this letter, Herman Pauling

died of peritonitis. The family lost the drugstore he had owned, and Linuss

mother moved with him and his two sisters into a smaller house, where she took

in boarders. Money worries were a constant concern, and Linus held a variety of

jobs after school. He made few friends, but he kept devouring all the books he

could find.
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He liked to tell how he first became interested in chemistry. One

afternoon when he was a high school freshman a schoolmate took him home to

show off a brand new chemistry set. Linus watched in amazement as his friend

mixed colored powders in solutions that fizzed and smelled and then combined

something with some table sugar, added a drop of acid, and the sugar burst into

flame. It was not long before Linus was obtaining chemicals from an abandoned

iron and steel smelter and putting together his own chemistry set to try

experiments himself. As he wrote years later, I was simply entranced by

chemical phenomena, by the reactions in which substances, often with strikingly

different properties, appear; and I hoped to learn more and more about this

aspect of the world.

He took all the available science and mathematics courses, and when he

was refused permission to finish his requirements quickly so that he could enter

college early, he simply dropped out before the last term and went off to college

anyway. Many years later the high school was proud to award its most famous

alumnus his missing diploma.

Pauling entered Oregon Agricultural College in Corvallis (now Oregon

State University) when he was sixteen and worked his way through. His last and

best summer job was as state inspector of paved roads. While still an

undergraduate he was made an instructor of quantitative chemistry for a class of

women students of home economics. The brightest and most attractive of them

was Ava Helen Miller, and a romance quickly developed between the tall

young instructor and his vivacious student that led to a wedding when he was


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twenty-two. It was a happy marriage that was to produce four children and to last

for fifty-eight years until Ava Helen died in 1981.

With his bachelors degree in chemical engineering in hand, Pauling

began graduate work at the California Institute of Technology. In his first year

there, he published his first scientific paper on molecular structure of crystals,

publishing four more in his second year. In 1925 he was awarded the Ph.D.

(summa cum laude) in Chemistry, with minors in physics and mathematics. This

was followed by a prestigious Guggenheim grant to study in Europe. He spent

most of his eighteen months abroad studying quantum mechanics at the Institute

for Theoretical Physics in Munich with Arnold Sommerfield but he also worked

with Niels Bohr in Copenhagen and Erwin Schrdinger in Zurich. When he

returned in 1927, Caltech made him assistant professor, at twenty-six the

youngest member of the faculty.

Since his appointment to the staff of California Institute of Technology, he

was elected Research Associate in 1925; national research Fellow in chemistry,

1925-1926; Fellow of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, 1926-

1927; Assistant Professor in Chemistry, 1927-1929; Associate Professor, 1929-

1931; Professor, 1931, when he was the first recipient of the American Chemical

Society Award in Pure Chemistry- the langmuir Prize- and Chairman of the

Division of Chemistry and Chemical Engineering, and Director of Gates and

Crellin laboratories of Chemistry, 1936-1958.

Pauling is a member of numerous professional societies in the U.S.A. as

well as in many European countries, India, Japan and Chile. Awards, medals and


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honorary degrees were showered upon him in America and Europe, and in

addition he was elected Rationalist of the Year for 1960 and Humanist of the

Year for 1961.

Pauling's early work reflects his European training in atomic and molecular

structure. In 1931 he published a paper called The Nature of the Chemical

Bond, which became a classic. In this paper Pauling used quantum mechanics

to explain how atoms share electrons and how the electrons interact in a

covalent bond, the link that holds atoms together in a molecule. This paper was

followed by the book Introduction to Quantum Mechanics (with E. Bright Wilson,

1935), which Pauling co-authored.

Pauling was a pioneer in the application of quantum mechanical principles

to the structures of molecules. He examined the structures of molecules, and

related quantum mechanical theories to the angles and distances he found

between atoms in a molecule. One technique Pauling used to examine

molecules is called electron diffraction. He also observed how the molecules

reacted to chemical reactions or to regions of space affected by a magnet. The

behavior of the molecules helped Pauling find out more about their structure.

Pauling also investigated electronegativity of atoms (the ease with which

atoms attract extra electrons) and polarization in chemical bonds (the tendency

for electrons to stay on one side of the molecule). He assigned

electronegativities to atoms on a scale from 0 to 4.0. This helps predict how

substances will react with water. Some substances, such as hydrogen chloride,


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the common cold can be controlled almost entirely in the United States and some

other countries within a few years, through improvement of the nutrition of the

people by an adequate intake of ascorbic acid [vitamin C].2

During the Second World War, Pauling participated in scientific enterprises

deemed vital to the protection of the country. Early in the war he was a

consultant to the explosives division of the National Defense Research

Commission and from 1945 to 1946 a member of the Research Board for

National Security. For his contributions, which included work on rocket

propellants, on an oxygen deficiency indicator for pressurized space, such as

that in submarines and aircraft, and on a substitute for human serum in medical

treatment, he was awarded the Presidential Medal of Merit in 1948. He declined

an invitation to work on the atomic bomb project because he was too busy.

When the atomic bomb was exploded over Hiroshima in August 1945 with

momentous devastating effect, it turned Pauling in a new direction. As one who

had long worked on the structure of molecules, both normal and abnormal, on

their behavior in the human body, and on their transmission through heredity, he

took an immediate and intense interest in the potentially malignant effects of

nuclear fallout on human molecular structures, as well as in the forces of blast

and fire released by an exploding bomb. Pauling as a member of Einsteins

Emergency Committee of Atomic Scientists, which was active from 1946 to 1950,

as a supporter of many peace organizations, and as an individual, has waged a

constant campaign against war and its now nuclear nature. He calculated

estimates on the probable frequency of congenital deformity in future generations
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resulting from carbon 14 and radioactive fission products released by nuclear

testing, and publicized them. Pauling protested the production of the hydrogen

bomb; advocated the prevention of the spread of nuclear weapons; promoted the

banning of tests of nuclear weapons as a first step toward multilateral

disarmament.

In the Cold War mood of the time, a supporter of a policy of peace was all

too readily suspected of being pro-Communist. He was accused of being pro-

Soviet or Communist, allegations he categorically denied. For a few years prior to

1954, he had restrictions placed by Department of State on his eligibility to obtain

a passport. The Department limited Pauling to foreign travel even when he was

invited tobe featured speaker.

In April 1957, Albert Schweitzer issued his Declaration of Conscience from

Oslo, describing the human damage done by radioactive fallout and asking for

the cessation of nuclear tests. On 15 May, Pauling echoed this appeal in a

speech at Washington University in Saint Louis, and the response was so

enthusiastic that that very evening, Pauling encouraged by several colleagues,

wrote the Scientists Bomb-Test Appeal, calling for a test-ban treaty and sent it

out to the scientific community. Within two weeks two thousand American

scientists had signed the appeal, and Pauling began to solicit signatures from

other countries. Eventually over eleven thousand scientists from forty-nine

countries signed the document protesting further nuclear testing.


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In 1958, on January 15, he presented to the UN the celebrated petition. In

that same year he published No More War!an exposition of the scientific facts of

nuclear weapons in clear and simple language and an appeal for the prevention

of their use in war. (It was reprinted twenty-five years later, with little need to

revise its basic explanation and message.) In 1959 at a conference on nuclear

weapons in Hiroshima, Pauling wrote the resolution calling for a ban on their

testing and development.

When the Soviet Union announced a resumption of nuclear testing in

August, 1961, after the nuclear powers had voluntarily withheld testing for three

years, Pauling redoubled his efforts to convince the Russian, American, and

British leaders of the necessity of a test ban treaty.

The Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, outlawing all but underground nuclear

testing, was signed in July, 1963, and went into effect on October 10, 1963, the

same day on which the Norwegian Nobel Committee announced that the Peace

Prize reserved in the year 1962 was to be awarded to Linus Pauling.

In his laureates address, Science and Peace, Pauling referred to Alfred

Nobels prediction that once wars destructive power became too terrible, wars

would cease. Now that the new bombs had an explosive energy ten to fifty million

times that of Nobels nitroglycerine, war has been made impossible forever.

Science and peace were closely related, Pauling declared. Scientific advance

now provides the possibility of eliminating poverty and starvation, of decreasing

significantly the suffering caused by disease, of using the resources of the world


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effectively for the benefit of humanity. Yet, in the words of Einstein, which he

quoted, There is no defense in science against the weapon which can destroy

civilization. Pauling presented scientific estimates of the genetic damage caused

by fallout from atmospheric testing and calculated some of the devastating

effects of a nuclear war. He hoped that the recent test-ban treaty would be only a

first step in a general program of disarmament, not only of nuclear bombs, but of

biological and chemical weapons as well.

With the prize money of about fifty thousand dollars, Pauling was now able

to resign from Caltech, where the Board of Trustees, uncomfortable with his

peacemaking, had already had him removed from the chairmanship of the

Division of Chemistry and where he still felt limited in his work for peace. He

spent several years at the Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions at

Santa Barbara and then returned to academe, first at the University of California

in San Diego and then at Stanford University. In 1973 he founded the Linus

Pauling Institute of Science and Medicine in Palo Alto, where

he centered his activities.

In an interview in his office in Palo Alto, Pauling told how he divided his

time into three parts. One third was in thinking about pure science, which he

loved to do most of all; the other two-thirds, out of his sense of social obligation,

were devoted to peace efforts and his more recent concern with nutrition and

human health. Again in controversy, this time with much of the

medical profession, Pauling was now advocating vitamin C in treatment of ills

from the common cold to cancer. His last book was entitled How to Live Longer


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and Feel Better (1986). Into his nineties his insatiable curiosity about the

universe was still a driving force for Pauling, who has been ranked with Isaac

Newton, Charles Darwin, and Albert Einstein, among the greatest scientists of all

time. Paulings scientific drive, however, had become matched by his

determination to place his extraordinary gifts and scientific knowledge at the

service of humanity. He remained active and creative both in scientific pursuits

and in working for peace and human health until the very end, which came on

August 19,1994. He was then ninety-three, and his critics could hardly maintain

that his prescription for living longer had not worked for him because he died of

prostate cancer. The Linus Pauling Institute, now at Oregon State University,

continues with his researches.

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LINUS PAULING1