104 Facts About Linus Pauling

Linus Carl Pauling was an American chemist, biochemist, chemical engineer, peace activist, author, and educator.

Linus Pauling published more than 1,200 papers and books, of which about 850 dealt with scientific topics.

Linus Pauling is one of five people to have won more than one Nobel Prize.

Linus Pauling was one of the founders of the fields of quantum chemistry and molecular biology.

Linus Pauling worked on the structures of biological molecules, and showed the importance of the alpha helix and beta sheet in protein secondary structure.

Linus Pauling's approach combined methods and results from X-ray crystallography, molecular model building, and quantum chemistry.

Linus Pauling's discoveries inspired the work of James Watson, Francis Crick, Maurice Wilkins and Rosalind Franklin on the structure of DNA, which in turn made it possible for geneticists to crack the DNA code of all organisms.

Linus Pauling was married to the American human rights activist Ava Helen Pauling.

Linus Carl Pauling was born on February 28,1901, in Portland, Oregon, the firstborn child of Herman Henry William Pauling and Lucy Isabelle "Belle" Darling.

Linus Pauling was named "Linus Carl", in honor of Lucy's father, Linus, and Herman's father, Carl.

In 1902, after his sister Pauline was born, Linus Pauling's parents decided to move out of Portland to find more affordable and spacious living quarters than their one-room apartment.

Linus Pauling moved his family to Condon, Oregon, in 1905.

Linus Pauling died of a perforated ulcer on June 11,1910, leaving Lucy to care for Linus, Lucile and Pauline.

In high school, Linus Pauling conducted chemistry experiments by scavenging equipment and material from an abandoned steel plant.

Linus Pauling held a number of jobs to earn money for his future college expenses, including working part-time at a grocery store for US$8 per week.

Linus Pauling's mother arranged an interview with the owner of a number of manufacturing plants in Portland, Mr Schwietzerhoff, who hired him as an apprentice machinist at a salary of US$40 per month.

In September 1917, Linus Pauling was finally admitted by Oregon State University.

Linus Pauling immediately resigned from the machinist's job and informed his mother, who saw no point in a university education, of his plans.

Linus Pauling was active in campus life and founded the school's chapter of the Delta Upsilon fraternity.

Linus Pauling worked forty hours a week in the laboratory and classroom and earned US$100 a month, enabling him to continue his studies.

Linus Pauling decided to focus his research on how the physical and chemical properties of substances are related to the structure of the atoms of which they are composed, becoming one of the founders of the new science of quantum chemistry.

Engineering professor Samuel Graf selected Linus Pauling to be his teaching assistant in a mechanics and materials course.

In 1922, Linus Pauling graduated with a degree in chemical engineering.

Linus Pauling went on to graduate school at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, California, under the guidance of Roscoe Dickinson and Richard Tolman.

Linus Pauling published seven papers on the crystal structure of minerals while he was at Caltech.

In 1926, Linus Pauling was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship to travel to Europe, to study under German physicist Arnold Sommerfeld in Munich, Danish physicist Niels Bohr in Copenhagen and Austrian physicist Erwin Schrodinger in Zurich.

Linus Pauling became interested in how quantum mechanics might be applied in his chosen field of interest, the electronic structure of atoms and molecules.

In Zurich, Linus Pauling was exposed to one of the first quantum mechanical analyses of bonding in the hydrogen molecule, done by Walter Heitler and Fritz London.

Linus Pauling devoted the two years of his European trip to this work and decided to make it the focus of his future research.

Linus Pauling became one of the first scientists in the field of quantum chemistry and a pioneer in the application of quantum theory to the structure of molecules.

In 1927, Linus Pauling took a new position as an assistant professor at Caltech in theoretical chemistry.

Linus Pauling launched his faculty career with a very productive five years, continuing with his X-ray crystal studies and performing quantum mechanical calculations on atoms and molecules.

Linus Pauling published approximately fifty papers in those five years, and created the five rules now known as Pauling's rules.

At Caltech, Linus Pauling struck up a close friendship with theoretical physicist Robert Oppenheimer at the University of California, Berkeley, who spent part of his research and teaching schedule as a visitor at Caltech each year.

Linus Pauling was affiliated with Berkeley, serving as a Visiting Lecturer in Physics and Chemistry from 1929 to 1934.

When Linus Pauling was at work, Oppenheimer came to their home and blurted out an invitation to Ava Helen to join him on a tryst in Mexico.

Linus Pauling flatly refused, and reported the incident to Pauling.

In 1936, Linus Pauling was promoted to Chairman of the Division of Chemistry and Chemical Engineering at Caltech, and to the position of Director of the Gates and Crellin laboratories of Chemistry.

Linus Pauling spent a year in 1948 at the University of Oxford as George Eastman Visiting Professor and Fellow of Balliol.

Linus Pauling's book has been considered "chemistry's most influential book of this century and its effective bible".

Linus Pauling showed that these were merely extremes, and that for most actual cases of bonding, the quantum-mechanical wave function for a polar molecule AB is a combination of wave functions for covalent and ionic molecules.

The third of the topics that Linus Pauling attacked under the overall heading of "the nature of the chemical bond" was the accounting of the structure of aromatic hydrocarbons, particularly the prototype, benzene.

Linus Pauling had treated it as a rapid interconversion between two structures, each with alternating single and double bonds, but with the double bonds of one structure in the locations where the single bonds were in the other.

Linus Pauling showed that a proper description based on quantum mechanics was an intermediate structure which was a blend of each.

In 1929, Linus Pauling published five rules which help to predict and explain crystal structures of ionic compounds.

Linus Pauling interacted with such great biologists as Thomas Hunt Morgan, Theodosius Dobzhanski, Calvin Bridges and Alfred Sturtevant.

Linus Pauling demonstrated that the hemoglobin molecule changes structure when it gains or loses an oxygen molecule.

Linus Pauling returned to his earlier use of X-ray diffraction analysis.

The best X-ray pictures of proteins in the 1930s had been made by the British crystallographer William Astbury, but when Linus Pauling tried, in 1937, to account for Astbury's observations quantum mechanically, he could not.

Linus Pauling had formulated a model for the structure of hemoglobin in which atoms were arranged in a helical pattern, and applied this idea to proteins in general.

Linus Pauling then proposed that deoxyribonucleic acid was a triple helix; his model contained several basic mistakes, including a proposal of neutral phosphate groups, an idea that conflicted with the acidity of DNA.

Sir Lawrence Bragg had been disappointed that Linus Pauling had won the race to find the alpha helix structure of proteins.

When it was learned at the Cavendish Laboratory that Linus Pauling was working on molecular models of the structure of DNA, James Watson and Francis Crick were allowed to make a molecular model of DNA.

Linus Pauling later cited several reasons to explain how he had been misled about the structure of DNA, among them misleading density data and the lack of high quality X-ray diffraction photographs.

Linus Pauling described this situation as "the biggest disappointment in his life".

Linus Pauling did not see them before devising his mistaken DNA structure, although his assistant Robert Corey did see at least some of them, while taking Linus Pauling's place at a summer 1952 protein conference in England.

Linus Pauling had been prevented from attending because his passport was withheld by the State Department on suspicion that he had Communist sympathies.

Not only did Corey see the images at the time, but Linus Pauling himself regained his passport within a few weeks and toured English laboratories well before writing his DNA paper.

Linus Pauling had ample opportunity to visit Franklin's lab and see her work, but chose not to.

Linus Pauling studied enzyme reactions and was among the first to point out that enzymes bring about reactions by stabilizing the transition state of the reaction, a view which is central to understanding their mechanism of action.

Linus Pauling was among the first scientists to postulate that the binding of antibodies to antigens would be due to a complementarity between their structures.

For nearly three decades, until his death in 1994, Linus Pauling published numerous papers on his spheron cluster model.

Linus Pauling attempted to derive the shell structure of nuclei from pure geometrical considerations related to Platonic solids rather than starting from an independent particle model as in the usual shell model.

Linus Pauling was a principal investigator on 14 OSRD contracts.

In 1942, Linus Pauling successfully submitted a proposal on "The Chemical Treatment of Protein Solutions in the Attempt to Find a Substitute for Human Serum for Transfusions".

In November 1945, Linus Pauling spoke to the Independent Citizens Committee of the Arts, Sciences and Professions on atomic weapons; shortly after, wife Ava and he accepted membership.

Linus Pauling supported the Mainau Declaration of July 15,1955, signed by 52 Nobel Prize laureates.

In May 1957, working with Washington University in St Louis professor Barry Commoner, Linus Pauling began to circulate a petition among scientists to stop nuclear testing.

In February 1958, Linus Pauling participated in a publicly televised debate with the atomic physicist Edward Teller about the actual probability of fallout causing mutations.

Linus Pauling proposed that a World Peace Research Organization be set up as part of the United Nations to "attack the problem of preserving the peace".

Linus Pauling supported the work of the St Louis Citizen's Committee for Nuclear Information.

Many of Linus Pauling's critics, including scientists who appreciated the contributions that he had made in chemistry, disagreed with his political positions and saw him as a naive spokesman for Soviet communism.

Linus Pauling was a frequent target of the National Review magazine.

In 1965, Pauling sued the magazine, its publisher William Rusher, and its editor William F Buckley, Jr for $1 million.

Linus Pauling lost both his libel suits and the 1968 appeal.

Linus Pauling spent the next three years at the Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions.

Linus Pauling made speeches, signed protest letters and communicated personally with the North Vietnamese leader, Ho Chi Minh, and gave the lengthy written response to President Johnson.

Linus Pauling was awarded the International Lenin Peace Prize by the USSR in 1970.

Linus Pauling continued his peace activism in the following years.

Linus Carl Pauling was an honorary president and member of the International Academy of Science, Munich, until the end of his life.

In 1941, at age 40, Linus Pauling was diagnosed with Bright's disease, a renal disease.

In 1965, Linus Pauling read Niacin Therapy in Psychiatry by Abram Hoffer and theorized vitamins might have important biochemical effects unrelated to their prevention of associated deficiency diseases.

Linus Pauling's ideas formed the basis of orthomolecular medicine, which is not generally practiced by conventional medical professionals and has been strongly criticized.

Linus Pauling directed research on vitamin C, but continued his theoretical work in chemistry and physics until his death.

Proponents of Linus Pauling Therapy believe that heart disease can be treated and even cured using only lysine and Vitamin C and without drugs or heart operations.

Linus Pauling was first introduced to the concept of high-dose vitamin C by biochemist Irwin Stone in 1966.

Linus Pauling began a long clinical collaboration with the British cancer surgeon Ewan Cameron in 1971 on the use of intravenous and oral vitamin C as cancer therapy for terminal patients.

Cameron and Linus Pauling wrote many technical papers and a popular book, Cancer and Vitamin C, that discussed their observations.

Linus Pauling made vitamin C popular with the public and eventually published two studies of a group of 100 allegedly terminal patients that claimed vitamin C increased survival by as much as four times compared to untreated patients.

Linus Pauling later collaborated with the Canadian physician Abram Hoffer on a micronutrient regime, including high-dose vitamin C, as adjunctive cancer therapy.

Linus Pauling was raised as a member of the Lutheran Church, but later joined the Unitarian Universalist Church.

Two years before his death, in a published dialogue with Buddhist philosopher Daisaku Ikeda, Linus Pauling publicly declared his atheism.

Linus Pauling got lost and tried to climb the rocky cliff, but reached a large overhanging rock about 300 feet above the ocean.

Linus Pauling decided it was safest to stay there, and meanwhile he was reported missing.

Linus Pauling spent a sleepless night on the cliff before being found after almost 24 hours.

Linus Pauling died of prostate cancer on August 19,1994, at 19:20 at home in Big Sur, California.

Linus Pauling's discoveries led to decisive contributions in a diverse array of areas including around 350 publications in the fields of quantum mechanics, inorganic chemistry, organic chemistry, protein structure, molecular biology, and medicine.

Linus Pauling's discovery of the alpha helix and beta sheet is a fundamental foundation for the study of protein structure.

On March 6,2008, the United States Postal Service released a 41 cent stamp honoring Linus Pauling designed by artist Victor Stabin.

California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger and First Lady Maria Shriver announced on May 28,2008, that Linus Pauling would be inducted into the California Hall of Fame, located at The California Museum for History, Women and the Arts.

Linus Pauling's son was asked to accept the honor in his place.

The Valley Library Special Collections at Oregon State University contain the Ava Helen and Linus Pauling Papers, including digitized versions of Pauling's forty-six research notebooks.

In 2010, Pacific Northwest National Laboratory named its distinguished postdoctoral program in his honor, as the Linus Pauling Distinguished Postdoctoral Fellowship Program.

Linus Pauling received numerous awards and honors during his career, including the following:.