60 Fun Facts About Linus Pauling

In 1962 Pauling picketed which building by day, then went inside that evening for a dinner honouring Nobel laureates?

The White House: days after President Kennedy resumed bomb tests in the atmosphere, Pauling marched in protest outside, then went in to dine. Kennedy greeted him with a joke about it.

Who is the only person besides Pauling to have won Nobel Prizes in two different fields?

Marie Curie shared the physics prize in 1903 and won a second alone in 1911, in a different science. Frederick Sanger and John Bardeen also won twice, but each within a single field.

In which city was Pauling born in 1901?

Portland, on 28 February 1901. His parents' one-room apartment soon proved too small for a growing family, and they moved out of the city while he was still a toddler.

What kind of business did Pauling's father Herman open in the little town of Lake Oswego?

A drugstore: Herman Pauling was a druggist who struggled to make the trade pay and kept moving his family from town to town in search of custom. He died of a perforated ulcer in 1910, when his son was nine.

Which pair of scientists beat Pauling to the structure of DNA in 1953?

Watson and Crick got there with the model-building approach Pauling himself had pioneered. Tired of hearing him explain the loss, his wife finally asked why, if it mattered so much, he hadn't worked harder on it.

Which school gave Pauling a diploma only in 1962, 45 years after he left?

His high school had barred him from taking two American history courses in one term, so he left for college without graduating. It sent an honorary diploma in 1962, when he already held a Nobel Prize.

At 16 Pauling enrolled at which college, then an agricultural school?

Oregon State, then Oregon Agricultural College, hired him at 18 as a full-time instructor in quantitative analysis. It was a course he had only just finished taking himself.

Pauling met his future wife, Ava Helen Miller, while teaching a course for students of what?

Home economics: still an undergraduate himself, Pauling was teaching the freshman chemistry class in which Ava Helen Miller sat. They married the following year.

Pauling's 1922 bachelor's degree was in what subject?

Chemical engineering was, the teenage Pauling believed, the way to earn a living at chemistry. He did not know, he said later, that there were such people as professional chemists.

Pauling's Caltech PhD research used X-ray diffraction to determine the structure of what?

Crystals: after a string of failures with samples he had grown himself, his first success was the soft mineral molybdenite. Its structure became his first scientific paper, in 1923.

On his 1926 Guggenheim Fellowship Pauling studied under Sommerfeld, Bohr and whom in Zurich?

Erwin Schrodinger's wave mechanics drew him to Zurich, but the lasting gain came from two young Germans there. Heitler and London had just used those waves to explain how two hydrogen atoms hold together.

Which concept, with its numerical scale for the elements, did Pauling introduce in 1932?

Electronegativity ranks how greedily each element pulls on electrons, with fluorine at the top. Pauling predicted in the early 1930s that fluorine could make even inert xenon react, and three decades later other chemists proved him right.

Which idea about mixing s and p orbitals did Pauling lay out in the 1931 paper he considered his most important?

Hybridization explained why methane's four hydrogens sit identically around their carbon, at the corners of a tetrahedron. Pauling hit on the simplifying trick late one day and, by his own account, worked nearly all night on it.

Pauling's 1929 packing rules let him solve the structure of which mineral, known for splitting into thin layers?

Mica fell to the rules Pauling wrote in 1929 for how atoms pack in ionic compounds. They picked the likely arrangements out of an immense number of possible ones, and talc and other silicates soon followed.

Why did Pauling abruptly end his friendship with Robert Oppenheimer?

He propositioned Ava Helen, inviting her to join him on a tryst in Mexico. She refused and told her husband, and Pauling ended both the friendship and the research the two men had planned together.

Pauling wrote most of his famous 1939 textbook as a visiting lecturer at which upstate New York university?

Cornell made him its Baker Lecturer for 1937-38, a post whose talks its university press turned into books. In his months there he wrote the bulk of the book that grew out of those lectures.

Pauling's first Nobel Prize, in 1954, was for research into the nature of what?

The citation added 'its application to the elucidation of the structure of complex substances'.

Pauling described benzene as a blend of Kekule's two structures at once, not a flip between them, using which concept?

Resonance so offended Soviet ideologues that in 1951 their Academy of Sciences branded it pseudoscience, hostile to Marxism. Russian chemists were forbidden to use the theory in their work.

Ill in bed in 1948, Pauling worked out the alpha helix using what?

A folded sheet of paper: he sketched a chain of amino acids on it, then creased and rolled it until the atoms lined up in a spiral. Because it seemed to clash with the X-ray data, he kept it quiet until he was home.

Pauling's mistaken 1953 model of DNA took which shape?

A triple helix, whose phosphates could not act as an acid, though DNA is one. A Cambridge rival saw the slip at once and wrote that a student making the same mistake would be judged unfit to study chemistry at Caltech.

Which misread property of DNA did Pauling blame for his mistaken 1953 model?

Density misled him: his sums came out wrong, and the model built on them went astray. The only X-ray photographs he had were too poor to show the mistake.

Why did the State Department withhold Pauling's passport in 1952?

Suspected Communist sympathies, though the letter said only that his trip was not in the country's best interests. After a public outcry he had a limited passport by July and toured England's labs anyway.

In London in 1952, which scientist showed Pauling's colleague Robert Corey her superb X-ray photographs of DNA?

Rosalind Franklin showed Corey her pictures at King's College, but the tip went nowhere. When Pauling reached England himself that summer, he never bothered to visit her lab.

Pauling's 1949 paper showed sickle cell anaemia was caused by an abnormal what?

Haemoglobin was his guess the moment a Harvard doctor described the disease to a wartime committee in 1945. It took three years of lab work to prove that patients carried an altered form of it.

Pauling and Emile Zuckerkandl proposed which idea about mutations accumulating at a steady rate?

The molecular clock treats a protein as a document of evolutionary history. Count the differences between two species' versions of it and you can estimate how long ago their ancestors parted ways.

Pauling's 1965 'close-packed spheron model', used to explain fission, was a theory of what?

The atomic nucleus, he proposed, is built from small clusters of protons and neutrons, which he named spherons. It was a chemist's raid on physics, and he kept publishing papers on it until his death nearly thirty years later.

Which wartime post did Pauling turn down to stay in Pasadena?

Atomic bomb division chief was the offer: Oppenheimer wanted him to run chemistry at Los Alamos and promised litres of rare tritium to study. Pauling, still unwell, would not move his family to the New Mexico desert.

Pauling's wartime oxygen meter, designed for submarines and aircraft, was later adapted by Beckman for what?

Incubators for premature babies could at last be held at a safe oxygen level. The meter works because oxygen, unlike the other gases in air, is drawn to a magnet, and that pull twists a tiny glass dumbbell hung between the poles.

Pauling's wartime group developed 'oxypolygelatin' as a substitute for what?

Human blood plasma was the target, and the raw material was ordinary gelatin, chemically reworked so that it could be transfused. After three years of work the government's medical committee lost interest, and the project quietly died.

What did Pauling refuse a Senate subcommittee in 1960, risking jail?

The names of his helpers, the people who had gathered signatures for his anti-testing petition, were the one thing he withheld. He said they would face reprisals, and the senators let him go without citing him.

To which Swedish UN Secretary-General did Pauling and his wife present their 1958 anti-testing petition?

Dag Hammarskjold received an appeal that had begun eight months earlier as a speech to students in Missouri. Their response moved Pauling to draft it, and scientists in some fifty countries went on to sign.

Which champion of bomb testing debated Pauling about fallout on live television in 1958?

Edward Teller faced him live on San Francisco's educational station KQED in February 1958. Afterwards a frustrated Pauling refused to debate him again.

What was the title of Pauling's 1958 book calling for an end to nuclear testing?

No More War! went further than its author's campaign: he argued that war itself had to be abandoned, and proposed a research body inside the United Nations to work out how.

The 'Baby Tooth Survey', co-founded by Pauling's petition ally Barry Commoner, measured which radioactive isotope in children's teeth?

Strontium-90 mimics calcium, so fallout on pasture passed through cows' milk into growing teeth. Children born in 1963 carried about fifty times more of it than those born in 1950.

Pauling's second Nobel Prize was announced on the day which agreement came into force, 10 October 1963?

The Partial Test Ban Treaty took force while the Paulings were at their Big Sur ranch with friends. The cabin had no telephone, so a forest ranger knocked with a message to ring their daughter, who broke the news.

Life magazine's 1963 headline called Pauling's Nobel Peace Prize 'A Weird Insult from' where?

Norway's prize committee got a frosty reception nearer home too. Caltech's president offered only lukewarm praise, and within weeks Pauling announced he was leaving the institute after 41 years.

Which magazine did Pauling sue for $1 million in 1963 after it called him a 'fellow traveler'?

National Review won because, while the suit dragged on, the Supreme Court ruled that public figures must prove a libel was a knowing or reckless falsehood. Pauling never brought another libel case.

In 1969 Pauling left UC San Diego for a professorship at which private California university?

Stanford was his last university post. In 1973 he and two colleagues set up their own research institute nearby, and it was soon renamed after him.

Which honour did the Soviet Union award Pauling in 1970?

The Lenin Peace Prize came from a government he had lobbied too. When Soviet tests resumed in 1961 he cabled Khrushchev begging him to stop, and got a long letter of refusal.

What visible mark did Pauling suggest for carriers of defective genes?

A forehead tattoo, he wrote, would warn young carriers of the same faulty gene not to fall in love with each other. He also urged compulsory genetic testing before marriage.

At 40 Pauling was diagnosed with which kidney condition, treated with a low-protein diet?

Bright's disease was then widely seen as a death sentence. His specialist's remedy was to rest the kidneys: protein makes urea, which they must clear, so Ava Helen cooked him meals almost free of protein and salt.

Which term did Pauling coin in the 1960s for therapy that adjusts the body's natural substances?

Orthomolecular, he explained, means the right molecules in the right amounts, 'ortho' being Greek for right. He applied it first to psychiatry, arguing that vitamins might treat schizophrenia.

Pauling argued humans need extra vitamin C because, unlike most mammals, we cannot do what?

We cannot make it, because we lack an enzyme most mammals have, so food must supply it all. He took up the vitamin in 1966, after the biochemist Irwin Stone heard him speak and wrote urging large doses on him.

What was the title of Pauling's 1970 bestseller on ascorbic acid?

Vitamin C and the Common Cold set off a nationwide run on the vitamin. Sales doubled, tripled and quadrupled, and shops could not keep up with demand.

Pauling's vitamin C partner, the surgeon Ewan Cameron, treated dying patients at a hospital in which country?

Scotland's Vale of Leven hospital is where Cameron was treating the terminally ill when he first wrote to Pauling in 1971. Their partnership lasted twenty years, until the surgeon's death.

Trials at which institution concluded that high-dose vitamin C was no better than placebo against cancer?

The Mayo Clinic reported controlled trials in 1979 and again in 1985, and found no benefit either time. Pauling accused its doctors of fraud, charging that they had never truly repeated the original work.

In his nineties Pauling blamed too little vitamin C for which major killer?

Heart disease, he and his colleague Matthias Rath argued in 1991, starts with too little vitamin C. Their remedy was large doses of it plus the amino acid lysine, and Pauling published case reports of angina eased.

Trapped overnight on a Big Sur cliff in 1960, how did Pauling stay awake?

Lecturing the waves on chemistry, and counting as high as he could in every language he knew, got him through the night. Back at work, he walked silently past his staff's welcome party, shut his office door and broke down.

Pauling died at his home in Big Sur in 1994 of what?

Prostate cancer was diagnosed in December 1991, when he was 90. The great champion of vitamin C took megadoses of it alongside surgery and hormone therapy, and lived for nearly three more years.

Late in life the atheist Pauling published a book-length dialogue with which Japanese Buddhist leader?

Daisaku Ikeda led Soka Gakkai, one of Japan's largest new religious movements. What drew the two together was not faith but the bomb: both men had campaigned for years against nuclear weapons.

The schoolboy Pauling chose chemistry after a friend showed him what?

His bedroom lab belonged to Lloyd Jeffress, whose experiments there left the young Pauling hooked. Jeffress was later best man at his wedding, and Pauling gave his second son the middle name Jeffress.

A co-discoverer of DNA's structure called Pauling 'the father of' which field?

Molecular biology was the tribute paid at Caltech's party for Pauling's 85th birthday. Part of his claim dates from 1949, when he traced sickle-cell anaemia to a single faulty molecule and called it a molecular disease.

What in Condon, the small town of Pauling's boyhood, carries his name?

The airport: Condon State Airport is also known as Pauling Field. He had his first schooling there and left as a boy, yet the town still claims him.

Roscoe Dickinson, who supervised Pauling's doctoral research at Caltech, held which distinction at the young institute?

Its first PhD graduate, in 1920, was barely two years past his own doctorate when Pauling arrived. When Pauling's first months of work led nowhere, Dickinson chose a new specimen himself and guided him through it to a published result.

In 1948 Pauling spent two terms as George Eastman Visiting Professor at which British university?

Oxford made him its Eastman Professor and a Fellow of Balliol College for two terms. On the liner over, he wrote a pledge on the back of a cardboard lecture sign: to mention world peace in every talk he gave from then on.

On July 9, 1955, Pauling was one of eleven signatories of which anti-nuclear document?

The Russell-Einstein Manifesto, which Einstein signed shortly before he died, called on scientists to meet and assess the nuclear peril. That call produced the Pugwash conferences, which Pauling went on to attend.

After leaving Caltech in 1963, Pauling joined which think tank?

The Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions, in Santa Barbara, was not equipped for science, and its fellows mostly talked. Pauling returned to a university in 1967 so that he could supervise experiments again.

Pauling left the University of California at San Diego in 1969 partly over tensions with whom?

The Reagan-era board of regents sat atop a university that only ever gave Pauling one-year appointments. Unhappy with its political climate, and with no permanent post in sight, he accepted another offer after barely two years.

Pauling was raised Lutheran but later joined which church?

Unitarian Universalist: though no believer, Pauling joined the Los Angeles Unitarian church with his wife through their friend Stephen Fritchman, its minister and a peace activist. He valued it as a force for good, not as a faith.

Barclay Kamb, who married Pauling's daughter Linda, had earlier been what?

Her father's student: though a geologist, Kamb wrote his doctoral thesis under the chemist Pauling, who counted him among Caltech's most brilliant students. He went on to work out what makes glaciers and Antarctic ice streams move.