PAULING, Linus Carl

(b. 28 February 1901 in Portland, Oregon; d. 19 August 1994 in Big Sur, California), chemist, physicist, and biologist who won the 1954 Nobel Prize in chemistry and a Nobel Peace Prize in 1962—the only person who has won two undivided Nobel Prizes; he revolutionized both inorganic chemistry and organic chemistry, identified how sickle-cell anemia works, and was an outspoken advocate for nuclear disarmament and appeasement of the Soviet Union.

Pauling was the first of three children born to a druggist, Herman W. Pauling, and a homemaker, Lucy Isabelle ("Belle") Darling Pauling, descendants of frontier settlers. Herman Pauling died in June 1910. Pauling attended Washington High School in Portland but left without graduating, already having enough high school credits for admission to Oregon Agricultural College (OAC), which he entered in September 1917. In 1919 his mother died. He met the greatest influence on his life and career, Ava Helen Miller, during his senior year at OAC. She was only a sophomore in 1922, when he left for graduate school at the California Institute of Technology (Cal Tech). They married on 17 June 1923.

Family life placed new demands on Pauling with the birth of Linus, Jr., in March 1925. After receiving his doctorate summa cum laude in 1925, Pauling received a Guggenheim Fellowship to study in Munich, Germany, where he worked on chemical bonding with top researchers. His numerous papers on the subject in the 1920s and 1930s opened new fields of research. However, his relationship with his wife became strained during the years he was in Germany (1925–1927) because she remained in California. It was a relief to both of them when he accepted an assistant professorship at Cal Tech in 1928, and they settled down to raise their three sons and one daughter. Pauling eventually became chairman of the division of chemistry and chemical engineering, a post he held from 1936 to 1958. In the mid-1930s his work began to shift from inorganic chemistry to biochemistry. In 1939 he published The Nature of the Chemical Bond (revised in 1967), which became the seminal, revolutionary work in the field.

It was during World War II that Pauling began to take a strong interest in politics. The physician who saved his life from nephritis was a Communist and suffered government reprisals, eventually losing his practice, and the government wanted to intern the Japanese-American gardener the Paulings employed. J. Robert Oppenheimer asked Pauling to join the Manhattan Project, which was charged with creating the first nuclear weapons; Pauling refused, but he became interested in nuclear weapons at this time. In the late 1940s his insights into sickle-cell anemia led to treatments for the disease while shedding new light on genetic diseases in general. In 1954 Pauling was awarded the Nobel Prize in chemistry for his work on chemical bonding, and there were those in the scientific community who thought he should receive the Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine for the application of his discoveries to sickle-cell anemia as well.

Meanwhile, matters at Cal Tech were not going well. During the 1930s and 1940s Pauling had joined with other atheists at the school to deny employment or promotions to any professor who had a spiritual life. In so doing, in the fierceness of his commitment, he crossed the line from bias to outright bigotry. Eventually he also worked to discriminate against anyone who was not politically left wing. Yet he did not agree with Cal Tech's late-1950s decision to add courses in the humanities, many of which were taught from a left-wing point of view, to the curriculum. He considered them a waste of time.

By the 1960s Pauling seemed exhausted, and he canceled some of his scientific projects. The only issue that seemed to galvanize him was the testing of nuclear weapons, and he became a leading advocate of nuclear disarmament, writing articles about the effects on people of radiation from nuclear tests. On 10 October 1962 he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for his work in communicating the dangers posed by radiation from testing nuclear weapons. People on both sides of the issue seemed to misunderstand why he merited the prize, with those on the left praising his political correctness and those on the right complaining that he was merely trying to appease the Soviets. In fact, his political views were controversial; it was his science that was important in that his work showing that radiation and residue from nuclear tests were harmful to humans and their environment helped lead to test ban treaties. A major test ban treaty was signed on the very day that Pauling received the Peace Prize; many observers were convinced of the relationship between the two events.

Pauling was heavily criticized for his radical politics in many magazines and newspapers around the world, although he received support from leftist publications. He advocated the unilateral disarmament of the United States and the United Kingdom, arguing that the Soviet Union would then disarm because it would no longer feel threatened. This point of view ignored the obvious aggression by the Soviet Union in Europe and China as well as fears in the United States and Western Europe that the Soviet Union posed a serious and continuing threat. By the mid-1960s Pauling had formed the habit of suing for libel any publication that suggested he might be a Communist or "fellow traveler" who favored the Soviet Union over his own country. (That a disarmed Western world would be easy pickings for a nuclear-armed Soviet Union was often pointed out by publications such as the National Review.) Nearly always, the publications he sued settled out of court.

On 17 July 1962 the conservative National Review suggested Pauling was a "collaborator," and Pauling threatened to sue. The editor of the National Review was William F. Buckley, Jr., who relished the prospect of a fight and refused to settle Pauling's claim. The resulting court battle damaged Pauling's reputation because the National Review showed that Pauling had broken American law by corresponding with Ho Chi Minh while the United States was at war with North Vietnam. The lawsuit resulted in a landmark ruling that changed how journalists were allowed to write about famous people. On 19 April 1964 Judge Samuel J. Silverman ruled that all public figures, not only politicians, had to prove actual "malice" to win a libel suit; "defamation" was insufficient. This ruling has allowed American journalists to write with almost unfettered freedom about anyone who is in the public eye—even lying—as long as "malice" cannot be proven. On 30 June 1964, tired and demoralized, Pauling resigned from Cal Tech because of the faculty's resentment concerning both his politics and his continuing habit of taking credit for work done by others. For the next few years he worked on a new edition of The Nature of the Chemical Bond.

Pauling served as professor of chemistry at the University of California, San Diego, from 1967 to 1969. He found working at San Diego congenial, but in 1969 Stanford University offered him more money, more spacious and up-to-date laboratories, and more research assistants as well as the opportunity to live at his beloved home in Big Sur. He accepted the Stanford position, and during the next five years tried to apply his knowledge of chemistry, physics, and genetics to unlock treatments for diseases. Somewhere in the intricacies of chemical bonding and the double helix, he believed, were answers not only for sickle-cell anemia but also for viral infections such as colds and for some cancers, especially those linked to viruses. He thought he had found an answer in vitamin C, which seemed to re-inforce the structure of DNA, thus having the potential to fend off mutations that seemed to be at the heart of cancer.

In 1970 the most widely influential of Pauling's books, Vitamin C and the Common Cold, was published. In it Pauling argued that taking vitamin C as a dietary supplement could protect people from colds and other viral diseases. Later he argued that megadoses of vitamin C could cure some kinds of cancer. A majority of specialists in viruses and cancer disagreed. For a lifetime of achievement in science, however, Pauling received the National Medal of Science from President Gerald Ford on 18 September 1975.

Pauling and the researcher Arthur Robinson founded the Pauling Institute in the 1970s to further pure research. Robinson was marvelous at raising money, but he aroused Pauling's deeply held prejudices when he publicly declared he was a capitalist and in his writings suggested that vitamin C taken in large quantities could be carcinogenic. Pauling was outraged at Robinson's political views and took it as a personal insult that Robinson's laboratory work should seem to disagree with his theories. He and his partner dissolved their relationship, and Pauling erased him from his life.

On 7 December 1981 Pauling's wife died of stomach cancer. Pauling continued writing scientific papers until his death from prostate cancer on 19 August 1994. He was cremated and his ashes were scattered.

Pauling's was an exceptionally productive life. Neither his mean-spiritedness, his tendency to take credit for other people's work, nor his politics detract from his greatness as a scientist. His work in several scientific fields is an example of how a true scientist applies his mind and skill to problems. Out of his dogged and brilliant work emerged new scientific disciplines as well as solutions to fundamental chemical, physical, and biological questions that laid the groundwork for expanding research and knowledge. He may have been his era's greatest chemist; he may be the greatest of all biochemists; and his work on sickle-cell anemia and on the effects of nutrition on diseases opened new avenues for understanding and treating illness.

The Ava Helen and Linus Pauling papers are housed in Special Collections, The Valley Library, Oregon State University, in Corvallis. Probably the most objective account of Pauling's life is Anthony Serafini's Linus Pauling: A Man and His Science (1989), which not only describes Pauling's strengths and weaknesses but offers good, clear explanations of his scientific work. An interesting, although short, account of Pauling's science is Francis Crick's "LP + C + 2NP Is Not Equal to DNA" in the New York Times Magazine (1 Jan. 1995): 18. An obituary is in the New York Times (21 Aug. 1994).

Kirk H. Beetz