Force of Nature- The Life of Linus Pauling Read online

  FORCE OF NATURE

  The Life of Linus Pauling

  ALSO BY THOMAS HAGER

  Aging Well (with Lauren Kessler)

  Linus Pauling, Scientist and Peacemaker (with Clifford Mead)

  The Demon Under the Microscope

  The Alchemy of Air

  FORCE OF NATURE

  THE LIFE OF LINUS PAULING

  Copyright 2011 by Thomas Hager

  All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form. Please contact the author for permissions at www.thomashager.net.

  ISBN 0-9767649-2-X

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  Prefaces

  The West

  The Boardinghouse

  The Boy Professor

  Caltech

  Munich

  The Bond

  Resonance

  The Science of Man

  King, Pope, Wizard

  The Fabric and the Chain

  The Hawk

  The Grand Plan

  Political Science

  England

  Attack of the Primitives

  The Secret of Life

  The Triple Helix

  The Prize

  Fallout

  The Subcommittee

  Peace

  Nomads

  Vitamin C

  Resurrection

  Preface to the First Edition

  I met Linus Pauling for the first time in 1984, during a meeting of the American Chemical Society in Seattle, which I was attending as a correspondent for the Journal of the American Medical Association. I arrived early at a session in which he was to present his latest work on megadoses of vitamin C. Every journalist there knew that Pauling was controversial, gave good quotes, and made for good copy, but most also shared the opinion that his day had passed. He had stirred up a great deal of news with his advocacy of vitamin C, but the vitamin C story had received more than adequate coverage during the thirteen years since Pauling first announced its health-giving abilities. I was the only one in the pressroom who planned to attend.

  More than hearing what he had to say, however, I was interested in seeing the man himself, the legendary genius who had variously been described as the century's most important chemist, the greatest living American scientist, and a crackpot.

  I was early and the only one in the seminar room when Pauling strode in, tall, erect, his long white hair forming a wispy corona around a black beret. He gave the room a quick glance, walked over to me, introduced himself, and to my amazement gave me a five-minute personal minilecture on the chemical binding properties of tin. Quantum chemistry was not my specialty—I was there because of what I knew about medical science and molecular biology—but the degree to which I understood what he was saying mattered less than the impression he made. He seemed to be thinking aloud as he talked, coming up with variations on his ideas, cutting through some theoretical knots as he spoke. I was overwhelmed that the two-time Nobel Prize-winner would choose to spend his time discussing science with me. I was flattered by his attention and charmed by his friendly, enthusiastic manner. I learned later that this reaction was common among Pauling's many admirers.

  I saved the piece of yellow notepaper he used to illustrate his ideas and I determined to find out more about him. I knew that he had been born and raised in Oregon, my home state, and I talked the editor of the Sunday magazine at the Oregonian newspaper in Portland into sending me to Pauling's ranch at Big Sur for two days to prepare a profile of his early years. After that piece was published, I tracked his career and kept in touch. Eventually our discussions led to his cooperation in the preparation of this book.

  Pauling's life was extraordinarily long, varied, tumultuous, and important for the history of twentieth-century science. During his career, Pauling, among many other achievements, described the nature of the chemical bond; pinpointed vital factors determining the structure of proteins; intuited the cause of sickle-cell anemia; engaged in this century's most famous scientific race, for the structure of DNA; won a Presidential Medal of Merit for his World War II research; advanced the fields of x-ray crystallography, electron diffraction, quantum mechanics, biochemistry, molecular psychiatry, nuclear physics, anesthesia, immunology, and nutrition; and wrote more than 500 articles and eleven books. Not to mention those two Nobel Prizes, for chemistry and for peace (Pauling remains the only person to have won two unshared Nobel Prizes).

  He was recognized as a phenomenon of science at a young age—at thirty-one he became the youngest person elected to the National Academy of Sciences and at thirty-six was given control of the nation's leading department of chemistry—and continued to make seminal contributions for sixty years.

  His ideas about the forces that bind atoms to other atoms and the structure of the molecules they form, expressed in groundbreaking textbooks and legendary lectures, reshaped twentieth-century chemistry. Molecular structure became a leitmotif for Pauling, a unifying concept that he used successfully to investigate and tie together physics, chemistry, biology, and medicine. He was fearless in leaping over disciplinary boundaries, and by doing so helped create new fields of research: chemical physics, orthomolecular medicine, and most important, molecular biology.

  But his scientific work is only half the story. Pauling, influenced greatly by his wife, Ava Helen, used his scientific renown as a springboard to jump into political activism. Along with Albert Einstein and Leo Szilard, Pauling was a member of the Emergency Committee of Atomic Scientists, a small but important group that after World War II worked to limit the spread of atomic weapons. Pauling's increasingly outspoken views on nuclear policy led to political persecution that included a 24-year investigation by the FBI, an inquiry into revoking his government security clearance, the revocation of his passport, the loss of government grants, vilification in the press, and intimidation and threats of a contempt citation by the U.S. Senate. He fought back with articles, speeches, and legal actions, including well-publicized suits against the Hearst organization, William F. Buckley's National Review, and the Department of Defense.

  By the early 1960s, Pauling had earned a reputation for being audacious, intuitive, stubborn, charming, irreverent, self-promoting, self-reliant, self-involved to the point of arrogance—and correct about almost everything. But within a few years, he fell from grace. Weeks after winning the Peace Prize, under pressure from an administration he had alienated with his political activities, he acrimoniously broke his association with the California Institute of Technology, his intellectual home for four decades. At an age when most people think of retiring, Pauling began the life of an academic nomad, wandering from school to school before finally starting his own institute to study nutrition and medicine. He became famous again in the early 1970s for advocating large doses of vitamin C as a palliative for everything from the common cold to cancer—claims that incurred the wrath of the medical establishment—and his former colleagues watched uncomfortably as Pauling spent his energy and money fighting what seemed to many a ridiculous battle for a cheap nutritional supplement. Pauling's scientific image changed from brilliant individualist to monomaniacal crank.

  In the late 1980s and early 1990s, however, new evidence emerged to form a more complete picture of the effects of vitamin C. That picture, although still fuzzy, appears in many cases to support what Pauling had been saying for decades.

  - - -

  Biography is, in the end, interpretation. I started writing this book as a journalist, gathering information from as wide a range of sources as possible, attempting to present the facts in a neutral and "objective" manner. I soon found that this was impossible. On one level, there w
as simply too much material. Pauling's life was too long and too full to pack into a single volume without extensive condensation and selection, and every selection required a personal decision about value.

  There were also too many strongly felt opinions about Pauling, and too many paradoxes and conundrums in his life—a genius whose mother was committed to a mental ward; a pacifist who patented an armor-piercing shell; a lover of humanity who practically ignored his own children—to approach neutrally. Finally, I believe that science has often been misrepresented in the past, especially by scientists, as a quest for knowledge uncolored by personality or the surrounding social milieu. But Pauling's life illustrates the importance of funding concerns, public relations, politics, and personality in the way scientific ideas are discovered and advanced. Placing his work in this context again requires careful interpretation.

  I began this project as a Pauling enthusiast, and remain one, although my enthusiasm is now qualified. Pauling was a charming extrovert and an extraordinary intellect, a good storyteller and a man with a disarming way of treating all people as his equal (until proved otherwise). Below the surface charm, however, was a fiercely competitive and emotionally constricted man, a more complex character than his public persona. I have tried to present him in his complexity in this biography.

  - - -

  To create this portrait of Pauling, I have relied, wherever possible, on primary sources, especially scores of interviews with Pauling, his family members, colleagues, rivals, students, and critics; Pauling's personal correspondence, manuscripts, lab books, and scientific publications; archival materials, including letters, scientific works, manuscripts, and oral histories concerning Pauling kept by his contemporaries; public government documents, including congressional and military files recently made available through the National Archives; court and county records; and more than 3,000 pages of formerly classified material newly released from the FBI, the U. S. Department of State, and the U.S. armed forces. These have been supplemented by hundreds of newspaper, magazine, and journal articles written about Pauling, his wife, his scientific work, and his political activities, as well as scores of scientific and political histories of the period. Significant sources are listed in the bibliography.

  This is not an authorized biography; Pauling did not insist on editorial control in exchange for access. Although he opened his memory and his files to me, he asked only for the right to correct provable errors of fact (I am happy to say that in reviewing the first third of the manuscript before his death, he found few). Once we began working together, his cooperation was complete. I interviewed him at length a dozen times and often exchanged phone calls. He gave me permission to review and quote from the huge store of personal and professional documents in the archives at Oregon State University; encouraged colleagues, friends, and family members to talk with me; opened his files at the Linus Pauling Institute; cooperated in Freedom of Information Act requests; and shared with me private papers kept at his ranch at Big Sur.

  I owe many debts to those who assisted me in the preparation of this book. The cooperation and candor of Linus Pauling; his sisters, Pauline and Lucile; daughter, Linda Pauling Kamb; and sons Crellin Pauling and Linus Pauling, Jr., were vital in the preparation of this book. Among the many people I interviewed or with whom I corresponded, I give special thanks to John Edsall, William Lipscomb, Art Robinson, Alex Rich, Matthew Meselson, Francis Crick, Martin Karplus, Dick Marsh, Herman Mark, Richard Morgan, Elvin Rabat, Lee DuBridge, Arietta Townsend Sturdivant, John Roberts, Norman Davidson, Joseph Koepfli, Marjorie Senechal, Verner Schomaker, David Shoemaker, Ray Owen, Matthias Rath, Arnold Beckman, Zelek Herman, Joshua Lederberg, Richard Noyes, and Gerard and Eleanor Piel, who provided me a wonderful afternoon in New York City. Paul Engelking, Helmut Plant, and Wolfgang Leppmann at the University of Oregon assisted me in translating letters written in German. Harriet Zuckerman kindly allowed me to use the interview with Pauling she conducted as part of her preparation for Scientific Elite. I thank also the scores of people who responded to my requests for information in the New York Times Book Review and Engineering and Science, the magazine of Caltech.

  Biographers depend on the goodwill and assistance of the keepers of records, and I owe a debt to many. Clifford Mead, head of special collections at Oregon State University's Kerr Library, and his entire staff went far beyond the expected with their unfailing courtesy and invaluable assistance with the extensive Ava Helen and Linus Pauling collection. This remarkable trove of scientific and personal papers will become even more accessible thanks to the pioneering work of Ramesh Krishnamurthy in bringing the papers on-line.

  I owe a special debt, too, to Dorothy Munro, Pauling's indispensable right hand at the Linus Pauling Institute, who both guided me through the institute's sometimes confusing filing system and ensured that my days in Palo Alto were pleasant and productive. Emily Oakhill, archivist at the Rockefeller Archive Center, was particularly good at finding relevant files within that astounding collection. Rod Ross at the National Archives succeeded in locating a store of files that cast light on the internal workings of the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee. Jane Dietrich at Caltech offered friendly and useful help. My thanks also go to archivists and librarians at the University of Oregon, Harvard, MIT, Columbia, Smith College, the University of Chicago, the American Philosophical Society, the National Academy of Sciences, the American Institute of Physics, the Library of Congress, the Beckman Center for the History of Science, the Oregon Historical Society, the City of Pasadena, and Caltech.

  This project was guided and informed by the viewpoints of several historians of science, among whom I particularly want to thank Daniel Kevles, whose book The Physicists showed me that the history of American science was also the history of politics and economics; Horace Judson, who proved in The Eighth Day of Creation that something as potentially dry as molecular biology can make fascinating reading; Robert Paradowski, whose doctoral dissertation, The Structural Chemistry of Linus Pauling, was essential in my understanding of Pauling's early chemical successes; and Robert Kargon and Lily Kay for their excellent work on the early and middle sections, respectively, of the history of Caltech.

  I thank Bob Bender, my editor at Simon & Schuster, for his support of and patience with an author whose two-year project turned into a five-year marathon, and my agent Nat Sobel for placing the book with an editor as good as Bob.

  Finally and mostly, I thank my wife, Lauren Kessler, who not only encouraged me to keep after Pauling until he agreed to cooperate in this project, but also acted as a sounding board for ideas, provided a sympathetic ear for complaints, and superbly edited most of the text, all while writing an award-winning book of her own.

  Thomas Hager

  Eugene, Oregon

  June 1995

  Preface to the Ebook Edition

  Readers can thank the advent of electronic books for this new edition of Force of Nature. This book was (and is) a labor of love. It took me five long years to research and write. It marked my debut as a solo author. Its publication represented an important step forward both for my professional career and for my development as a writer. When it finally reached print in 1995, it was respectfully, sometimes enthusiastically, endorsed by critics, a very important factor in building my self-confidence, and enabling me financially and psychically to consider book writing as a career.

  Commercially, however, the book was a bust. My publisher, Simon & Schuster, so accommodating during all those years of writing, was less patient building the book’s market. Hardcover sales were slow, and the sheer size of the book, at more than 700 old-style print pages, made it economically impractical to put out a paperback. Publishing decisions often, at least in the old days, came down to things as mundane as the price of paper and ink. Within months of its publication, Force of Nature, like most hardcover titles, appeared and disappeared, off the shelves and out of print.

  Until now.

  Luckily for me, S&S made its decision to
stop producing the book back in the electronic Dark Ages before ebook rights meant anything. Force of Nature went out of print, literally and in the legal sense, which is something that rarely happens now. Today, publishers can legally keep titles “in print” in perpetuity by digitizing them, creating a sort of shadow existence for books that offers a sense of permanence in the marketplace, but all too often relegates titles to a living death, an endless, low-selling e-limbo that yields very little income for most writers. But, thanks to the fact that ebooks did not yet exist, my agent Nat Sobel and I were able to recover the rights to Force of Nature. For years I did nothing with those rights, concentrating instead on raising a family, running a university press, and writing several more books. Recently, however, after years of hearing people ask why the book was not available, I decided to bring Force of Nature back to life by releasing it digitally. The result is before you. I took on the task of preparing and publishing an ebook version as a sort of home project, under the name of my small personal publishing company, the Monroe Press. Putting Force of Nature into an ebook format not only offered the chance to reach new readers, but also gave me the opportunity to add some new material, smooth some clunky prose, and correct a few niggling errors in the original text that have bothered me for years. The vast majority of the book remains intact. My only regret is losing the original footnotes and their links to an extensive Bibliography. Those interested in sources will have to seek out a hardcover copy. Perhaps print offers some advantages after all.