There’s a new movie out about the scientist J. Robert Oppenheimer. Although he doesn’t appear in the film, which is full of eminent scientists of the time, one of Oppenheimer’s close friends (for a while) was Linus Pauling, who was born February 28, 1901. Pauling has a ton of accomplishments and accolades, and possibly the most impressive is that he’s the only person in history to have won two individual Nobel prizes, and there’s only one other (Marie Curie) whose Nobels were in two different fields. There are just five people, including Pauling and Curie, who have won more than one Nobel.
Pauling was born in Portland, Oregon in the US, but he was just 2 when his family moved several times, as his father looked for better jobs and more spacious living spaces. Pauling had a boyhood friend, Lloyd Jeffress, who had received a chemistry set as a gift, and Pauling loved it. He said 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 credited the chemistry set with sparking his interest in chemistry. It must have been a pretty good set, because his friend Lloyd grew up to be a scientist too.
Pauling didn’t graduate from high school because he hadn’t taken two required courses, but he had enough credits to enroll in college. After he received his Nobel prizes, four decades later, the high school finally awarded him an honorary diploma. In college Pauling took a heavy course load and also worked as a teaching and lab assistant, which earned him enough money to stay in school. He didn’t receive any financial support from his family, as his mother thought the whole idea of a university education was pointless.
Pauling was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1926, and studied for two years in Europe under leading physicists Niels Bohr and Erwin Schrödinger. In those days, the US was far behind Europe in virtually all scientific fields. He returned to the US to become an assistant professor at Caltech. That was where he met Oppenheimer, and the two were close friends for several years. That ended when Oppenheimer tried to start a romantic relationship with Pauling’s wife. The two never spoke after that, except when Oppenheimer invited him to take charge of the chemistry division of the Manhattan Project. Pauling turned him down.
The end result of the Manhattan Project, the atomic bomb, led to Pauling’s second Nobel, which was the Peace Prize. He was awarded the prize in 1963, although it was called the 1962 prize. The timing was important; Pauling had published several convincing articles promoting a ban on nuclear tests, and had organized a petition that was signed by over 11,000 scientists. He received the prize on the same day that the US and the USSR signed the first nuclear Test Ban Treaty.
In his later years, Pauling advocated using megadoses of Vitamin C as both a preventative and curative therapy for various illnesses — including one that he himself suffered from, Bright’s disease. That’s a kidney disease (actually it’s now known that it’s a set of symptoms; not a singular disease) that’s often accompanied by high blood pressure and heart disease. In Pauling’s case, treating it with vitamin supplements really did work. His advocacy of vitamins more generally, though, was not widely accepted. It’s still around though, and called Pauling Therapy.
Pauling and his wife Ava had four children, all of whom grew up to be scientists in various fields. He’s known as the “father of molecular biology,” and helped found quantum chemistry. If you visit Oregon State University, you can see the Linus Pauling Science Center, which houses most of their labs and science classrooms. In 2008 Pauling was depicted on a US postage stamp, and today is Linus Pauling Day in the state of Oregon. All sorts of other things (and people) are named after him — most interestingly, a rock band in Houston, Texas (The Linus Pauling Quartet), an asteroid (4674 Pauling), and the developer of Linux, Linus Torvalds.
