Erik Visits an American Grave, Part 1,980

This is the grave of Linus Pauling.

Born in 1901 in Portland, Oregon, Pauling grew up without much. His father ran a drugstore and they moved around Oregon for those plans, first to Lake Oswego and then to Condon, which is a tiny town in eastern Oregon. But his father was also sick with severe stomach issues. He would die of a perforated ulcer in 1910. Pauling’s mother was concerned with little more than making sure she and her children had a house and food. Fair enough, But Linus had some unusual interests. He got interested in chemistry and was really good at it. His mother thought this was a total waste of time. She wanted him to get a job. He was ready to go to college at age 15 except for some history classes. He didn’t want to take those classes and so he dropped out, got work in a photography studio and a grocery store and other jobs, and worked until he was 17 and could enroll at Oregon State University, which his mother strongly opposed. He never did graduate from high school.

Well, it worked out. Being poor, he had to work his way through school, but his professors saw his obvious talent and they gave him work as a TA. In 1923, Pauling married Ava Miller, an avowed leftist. They met while at Oregon State. He was teaching a chemistry class for home economics majors. She was of his students. She was a pacifist and peace-loving figure and she moved her new husband to the left on a number of political issues. By this time, they were in Los Angeles, as Pauling had graduated in 1922 and had gone to Cal Tech, doing a dissertation on using X-ray diffraction to examine the structure of crystals. He received his PhD in 1925. He went to Europe, became interested in the new field of quantum mechanics, and studied with Niels Bohr, among other leading scientists of the era.

Pauling’s scientific contributions were enormous. Quantum chemistry would not have existed as a field in the same way without him. Neither would have molecular biology. He was very interested in the new studies of the atom and, working out of Cal Tech as a professor, he got to know people such as Robert Oppenheimer, though they broke personally after Oppenheimer made an open pass at Ava Pauling by urging her to leave Linus and go to Mexico with him. She immediately told her husband. He started publishing on chemical bonds in the late 30s and while a visiting professor at Cornell, wrote The Nature of the Chemical Bond, which became the primary textbook on the issue and made him a lot of money and also made him much better known. I obviously have no ability to discuss this material with any fluency at all.

Despite their falling out after Oppenheimer tried to break up his marriage, the head of the Manhattan Project offered Pauling a major position, but Pauling declined it. He did so some work during World War II for the military, including designing an oxygen meter for submarines that was adapted by the military. He did work on creating artificial substitutions for plasma in blood transfusions that I don’t think really went anywhere, and also did a lot of explosives works. Even though he didn’t work on the Manhattan Project, he was awarded a Presidential Order of Merit in 1948.

During World War II, the Paulings were among the few whites, and especially in a state such as California, to vocally criticize putting Japanese-Americans in concentration camps. They were called Jap lover and all sorts of things for this. They did what they. could for their neighbors and were active allies in rebuilding the Japanese community in the LA area. He became more directly politicized as well by his horror at the nuclear weapon. He actively opposed the American monopoly on the atom and wanted to warn the public of this horror of modern science. This eventually led the U.S. to deny him a passport in 1952, which led Oregon senator Wayne Morse to condemn the State Department from the Senate floor and led the government to back down.

For all of his scientific advancements, Pauling won the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1954. He was still a pretty young man. He knew he had a lot more to offer and he spent the rest of his life as a senior scientific figure with a strong moral streak. He started working a lot with Barry Commoner on opposing the nuclear state, long after most scientists had given up this fight. He began to publish anti-war tracts where he called for the banning of war as well as of the nuclear weapon.

Pauling became a leader of the anti-nuclear movement that developed during the 1960s. For a lot of his fellow scienitsts, this was anathema, but then there had always been fears of the use of nuclear weapons among the scientists actually creating them. That was suppressed for a long time due to people such as Edward Teller so embracing the Cold War and the sidelining of Oppenheimer for not being pro-American enough after doing so much to win World War II. But those concerns had never actually gone away. And for this, Pauling won a second Nobel Prize, this time for Peace, in 1962. He openly regretted that Ava had not been the co-winner, for he credited her with opening his eyes to the hell his fellow scientists had created. The Nobel statement read, “Linus Carl Pauling, who ever since 1946 has campaigned ceaselessly, not only against nuclear weapons tests, not only against the spread of these armaments, not only against their very use, but against all warfare as a means of solving international conflicts.” He remained deeply involved with peace movements in the Vietnam War as well.

Pauling also got involved in weird issues around vitamins. He was an early “doing my own research” guy and that could lead to crankery. This went back to being diagnosed with Bright’s Disease in 1941 and him believing he recovered from it by taking a lot of vitamins. He started arguing that you could treat lots of different conditions with massive amounts of Vitamin C, including cancer. The Mayo clinic actually ran some experiments and of course there was no connection between Vitamin C and treating cancer. Did that stop Pauling? It did not. Most of his scientific work in the last decades of his life was on Vitamin C.

Well, it was quackery but you don’t want to let this overwhelm the great deal of good work that he did in the world. Francis Crick, he of the DNA discovery, called Pauling “the father of molecular biology.” He also won the Lenin Peace Prize in 1972, the Soviet honor for bringing peace between the Soviet Union and the rest of the world. He managed to be awarded the National Medal of Science by Gerald Ford and the Lomonsov Gold Medal by Leonid Brezhnev.

Pauling died in 1993 of prostate cancer. All the Vitamin C he took did not help.

Linus Pauling is buried in Oswego Pioneer Cemetery, Lake Oswego, Oregon. I had meant to take a picture of Ava’s grave too but I took a picture of his sister instead.

If you would like this series to visit other winners of the Nobel Peace Prize, you can donate to cover the required expenses here. Nicholas Murray Butler is in Paterson, New Jersey and Emily Greene Balch is in Boston. Previous posts in this series are archived here and here.