Linus Pauling

His father kept a drugstore and died of a perforated ulcer on June 11, 1910, leaving a widow with three children and no reason, as she saw it, to send any of them to college. Pauling scavenged glassware from an abandoned steel plant, ran a basement laboratory with a friend that tried to sell butterfat testing to dairies and failed, and left Washington High School in June 1916 without a diploma because the principal would not let him take two American history courses at once. He worked as an apprentice machinist for 40 dollars a month. At Oregon Agricultural College he taught quantitative analysis, a course he had finished the term before, 40 hours a week to stay enrolled.

He took a Caltech doctorate in 1925 and a Guggenheim to Europe in 1926, where quantum mechanics was being built, and came back able to explain what a chemical bond actually is. Orbital hybridization, resonance, an electronegativity scale, and in 1939 The Nature of the Chemical Bond, which chemists treated as scripture. In 1949 he showed that sickle cell anemia is caused by a defective hemoglobin molecule, the first disease ever traced to a specific molecule. In 1951 he proposed the alpha helix and the beta sheet and got the shape of proteins right. The Nobel Prize in Chemistry came in 1954. He also devised a triple helix for DNA in 1953 that was wrong in several basic ways.

The State Department took his passport in February 1952, when he was invited to a scientific meeting in London, on suspicion of Communist sympathies. His assistant Robert Corey went instead and saw at least some of Rosalind Franklin's X-ray images. Pauling never did, and the legend that the passport cost him DNA grew out of that. The Senate Internal Security Subcommittee summoned him in 1960. In 1958 Caltech's trustees told him to give up the division chairmanship he had held since 1936, and when the Nobel Committee gave him the 1962 Peace Prize on October 10, 1963, Life ran the headline A Weird Insult From Norway. He took the prize money and resigned from Caltech, where he had worked for 38 years.

In 1941, at 40, Pauling was diagnosed with Bright's disease and controlled it on a low-protein, salt-free diet and supplements. Twenty-five years later he decided vitamin C could prevent colds and then treat cancer, and he spent his last quarter-century saying so. Mayo Clinic trials found high doses no better than placebo, and the medical establishment settled on the word quackery. He died of prostate cancer at Big Sur on August 19, 1994. His ashes were not buried in Oregon until 2005. The alpha helix, the electronegativity scale and the hybrid orbital are still in the opening chapters. The rest is what certainty did to a very great scientist.

Linus Pauling's life against the full span of the corpus.

• The Nature of the Chemical Bond book
  Called the most influential chemistry book of the century 1939
• Sickle Cell Anemia, a Molecular Disease article
  The first human disease understood at the molecular level 1949
• The alpha helix and the beta sheet discovery
  The two basic elements of protein secondary structure 1951
• No More War! book
  The case against nuclear testing, argued in public 1958
• Petition to the United Nations against nuclear testing other
  Signed by 11,021 scientists from 50 countries 1958
• Vitamin C and the Common Cold book
  The start of the argument that cost him his standing in medicine 1970

• June 11, 1910 aged 9 His father dies of a perforated ulcer Pauling was nine. His mother saw no point in a university education.
• June 1916 aged 15 Leaves Washington High School without a diploma The school sent him one 45 years later, after the second Nobel.
• June 17, 1923 aged 22 Marries Ava Helen Miller He had met her in a chemistry class he was teaching.
• 1925 aged ~24 Takes a Caltech PhD summa cum laude
• 1939 aged ~38 Publishes The Nature of the Chemical Bond
• February 14, 1952 aged 50 The State Department refuses him a passport The denial letter came from Ruth Shipley of the Passport Division.
• 1954 aged ~53 Awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry
• October 10, 1963 aged 62 Awarded the 1962 Peace Prize on the day the test ban took effect No prize had been given for 1962 until then.
• August 19, 1994 aged 93 Dies of prostate cancer at his home at Big Sur

• James Watson 1928–2025
  Co-discoverer of the DNA double helix structure, earning a Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. beaten to the double helix by
• John F. Kennedy 1917–1963
  35th President whose brief tenure included the Cuban Missile Crisis and the launch of the Apollo program. signed the treaty his petition pushed
• J. Robert Oppenheimer 1904–1967
  Theoretical physicist who led the Manhattan Project and became known as the father of the atomic bomb. fellow target of the loyalty era
• Albert Einstein 1879–1955
  German-American theoretical physicist whose theory of relativity revolutionized modern physics. shared the campaign against the bomb
• Joseph McCarthy 1908–1957
  Senator whose unsupported accusations and investigations gave “McCarthyism” its name and damaged civil liberties. the campaign that took his passport