Linus Pauling Trivia
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60 free Linus Pauling trivia questions with answers — science & nature quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
This Linus Pauling trivia quiz covers the only person ever to win two unshared Nobel Prizes, one for chemistry and one for peace. The easy questions handle the Nobels, the chemical bond, the alpha helix, Portland and vitamin C. From there it moves through the life: the drugstore father, the boy who left high school without a diploma, the home-economics class where he met his wife, the year with Sommerfeld, Bohr and Schrodinger, and the falling-out with Oppenheimer. The harder end covers electronegativity and hybridization, resonance in benzene, 3.7 residues per turn, the triple helix he got wrong, the passport the State Department withheld, sickle cell anaemia as a molecular disease, the oxygen meter that ended up in incubators, the petition handed to Hammarskjold, the debate with Teller, the libel suit he lost, orthomolecular medicine and the Mayo Clinic trials that sank vitamin C. Every answer was checked against Pauling's encyclopaedia entry before publishing and the supporting sentence is stored with each question. Our chemistry and famous scientists quizzes are the natural next stop.
30 of 60 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01In 1962 Pauling picketed which building by day, then went inside that evening for a dinner honouring Nobel laureates?
The White House
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.
Q 02Who is the only person besides Pauling to have won Nobel Prizes in two different fields?
Marie Curie
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.
Q 03In which city was Pauling born in 1901?
Portland
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.
Q 04What kind of business did Pauling's father Herman open in the little town of Lake Oswego?
A drugstore
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.
Q 05Which pair of scientists beat Pauling to the structure of DNA in 1953?
Watson and Crick
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.
Q 06Which school gave Pauling a diploma only in 1962, 45 years after he left?
His high school
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.
Q 07At 16 Pauling enrolled at which college, then an agricultural school?
Oregon State
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.
Q 08Pauling met his future wife, Ava Helen Miller, while teaching a course for students of what?
Home economics
Home economics: still an undergraduate himself, Pauling was teaching the freshman chemistry class in which Ava Helen Miller sat. They married the following year.
Q 09Pauling's 1922 bachelor's degree was in what subject?
Chemical engineering
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.
Q 10Pauling's Caltech PhD research used X-ray diffraction to determine the structure of what?
Crystals
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.
Q 11On his 1926 Guggenheim Fellowship Pauling studied under Sommerfeld, Bohr and whom in Zurich?
Erwin Schrodinger
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.
Q 12Which concept, with its numerical scale for the elements, did Pauling introduce in 1932?
Electronegativity
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.
Q 13Which idea about mixing s and p orbitals did Pauling lay out in the 1931 paper he considered his most important?
Q 21Which misread property of DNA did Pauling blame for his mistaken 1953 model?
Density
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.
Q 22Why did the State Department withhold Pauling's passport in 1952?
Suspected Communist sympathies
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.
Q 23In London in 1952, which scientist showed Pauling's colleague Robert Corey her superb X-ray photographs of DNA?
Rosalind Franklin
Hybridization
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.
Q 14Pauling's 1929 packing rules let him solve the structure of which mineral, known for splitting into thin layers?
Mica
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.
Q 15Why did Pauling abruptly end his friendship with Robert Oppenheimer?
He propositioned Ava Helen
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.
Q 16Pauling wrote most of his famous 1939 textbook as a visiting lecturer at which upstate New York university?
Cornell
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.
Q 17Pauling's first Nobel Prize, in 1954, was for research into the nature of what?
The chemical bond
The citation added 'its application to the elucidation of the structure of complex substances'.
Q 18Pauling described benzene as a blend of Kekule's two structures at once, not a flip between them, using which concept?
Resonance
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.
Q 19Ill in bed in 1948, Pauling worked out the alpha helix using what?
Sheet of paper
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.
Q 20Pauling's mistaken 1953 model of DNA took which shape?
Triple helix
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.
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.
Q 24Pauling's 1949 paper showed sickle cell anaemia was caused by an abnormal what?
Haemoglobin
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.
Q 25Pauling and Emile Zuckerkandl proposed which idea about mutations accumulating at a steady rate?
The molecular clock
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.
Q 26Pauling's 1965 'close-packed spheron model', used to explain fission, was a theory of what?
The atomic nucleus
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.
Q 27Which wartime post did Pauling turn down to stay in Pasadena?
Atomic bomb division chief
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.
Q 28Pauling's wartime oxygen meter, designed for submarines and aircraft, was later adapted by Beckman for what?
Incubators for premature babies
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.
Q 29Pauling's wartime group developed 'oxypolygelatin' as a substitute for what?
Human blood plasma
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.
Q 30What did Pauling refuse a Senate subcommittee in 1960, risking jail?
Names of his helpers
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.