Questioning Authority, Becoming Authority: The Life of Linus Pauling

QUESTIONING AUTHORITY, BECOMING AUTHORITY: THE LIFE OF LINUS PAULING SIDNEY ALTMAN* Popular biography of outstanding scientists must achieve two goals: it must reveal the excitement and the process of discovery that moved the subject of the biography, and it must explain the importance of the actual science involved. Linus Pauling presents a special problem because he was an Olympian figure in his roles both as a scientist and as a political and social activist. He reached the pinnacle of achievement in each regard: he is the only person to have two unshared Nobel prizes, one for chemistry and one for peace. Accordingly, Thomas Hager faced a task that went far beyond the usual scientific biography. He has told his story with sympathy, objectivity, and completeness. He has not left out a sober discussion of the vety complex aspects of Pauling's character. The clarity and conviction of Pauling's views, which Hager conveys very well, also come alive in Barbara Marinacci's intelligently edited collection of excerpts from Pauling's speeches and writings. For maximum impact, the volume of excerpts should be read after the biography. In 1954, in an impromptu address to Swedish university students, Linus Pauling advocated a healthy disbeliefin the words of older authority figures and an uncompromising independence ofintellectual spirit. Ironically, this address took place just after the Nobel Prize ceremony during which Pauling was rightly anointed for his work in chemistry, assuring him of a very lofty stature in the public eye. He was able to use, perhaps even manipulate, this unchallengeable eminence and his charisma as a speaker, to embark with incredible forcefulness on his crusade against the policies of the government ofthe United States during the Cold War and later, on his crusade in favor of the use of vitamin C. He said a lot and very much out loud. Pauling's ability to articulate his ideas with supreme self-confidence and authority contributed to his success in science and as a moral gadfly. * Department of Biology, Kline Biology Tower, Yale University, P.O. Box 208103, New Haven , CT 06520.© 1996 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved. 0031-5982/96/4001-0973$01.00 Perspectives in Biology and Medicine, 40, 1 ¦ Autumn 1996 93 Linus Pauling's brilliance was recognized when he was very young. His father wrote a poignant letter to The Oregonian asking the editor for advice concerning books that his son should read: he included the information that his son had already read the Bible and Darwin's Origin ofSpecies. Linus was nine at the time. Unlike the intellects of many child prodigies, which eventually prove to be relatively sterile, Pauling's intellect combined with a genuine curiosity about the natural world and sufficient self-discipline to enable him to make monumental contributions to scientific knowledge and human welfare throughout most of the 93 years of his life. His standing as a world-class scientist was already assured when he was in early thirties: his intense engagement with what he perceived as a scientist's social responsibility began about a decade later. Pauling's incomparable versatility and talent as a scientist can be illustrated with a brief account of two of his major achievements, quantum mechanical calculations of the properties of molecules, and the discovery of the importance of weak forces in the structure and function of biological macromolecules. In the first instance, Pauling, as a veryyoung post-doctoral fellow in Arnold Sommerfeld's institute of physics in Munich, tried to explain some properties of hydrogen chloride with the new, great tools of theoretical physics that he was learning. This impulse to move beyond the properties of single atoms or the hydrogen molecule and their attendant electrons derived from his passionate interest in the nature ofminerals and of complex substances. He approached Wolfgang Pauli, one of the founders ofmodern quantum physics, about the possibility of attacking this problem with the techniques that he knew but which were already two years behind the latest advances in wave mechanics. He received, after a brief pause, a two-word answer: "Not interesting." Pauling was not deterred and went on to learn the newest version of quantum mechanics and then introduced approximations...