The Life and Work of Linus Pauling
By Jason Sibert
Although he died 26 years ago, the accomplishments of Linus Pauling will not be forgotten.
He was one of four individuals to be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in more than one field, as the scientist won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1954 and the Nobel Peace Prize in 1962. Pauling was one of the founders of molecular biology and quantum chemistry. His contributions to the theory of the chemical bond include the concept of orbital hybridization and the first accurate scale of electro negatives of the elements. Pauling also worked on the structures of biological molecules and showed the importance of the alpha helix and beta sheet in protein secondary structure. Pauling’s approach combined methods and results from X-ray crystallography, molecular model building, and quantum chemistry. His 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.
Pauling was born in Portland, Oregon in 1901. He spent his early life in Oregon and graduated from Oregon State University in 1922. He later earned his PhD from the California Institute of Technology in 1925 in physical chemistry and mathematical physics. A year later Pauling was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship, and he travelled to Europe and studied under physicists Arnold Sommerfeld, Niels Bohr, and Erwin Schrodinger. Soon after his European studies, Pauling took a position at Caltech teaching theoretical physics.
The scientist went to work on the Manhattan Project in World War II under Robert Oppenheimer. After World War II, Pauling, under the influence of his wife Ava’s pacifism, became a peace activist. In 1946, he joined the Emergency Committee of Atomic Scientists, chaired by Albert Einstein, to warn the public of the dangers of nuclear weapons. In 1955, Pauling signed the Russell-Einstein Manifesto and the Mainau Declaration. Russell-Einstein, named for Einstein and Bertrand Russell, called for world leaders to seek a peaceful solution to international conflict. Mainau was an appeal against the use of nuclear weapons.
Continuing with peace work, Pauling later worked with St. Louis area scientist Barry Commoner in circulating a petition amongst scientists to stop nuclear testing. In 1958, Pauling presented United Nations General Secretary Dag Hammarskjold with a petition of over 11,000 scientists calling for an end to nuclear weapons testing. Later that year, the scientist published his manifesto “No More War” which called for an end not only to nuclear war but for an end to war itself. He also promoted a World Peace Research Organization, to be a part of the U.N., to study the problem of preserving the peace.
Pauling supported the world of the St. Louis Citizen’s Committee for Nuclear Information, headed by Commoner and other scientists, which organized a study of the buildup of Stronium-90 in the teeth of babies across the nation. St. Louis Citizen’s Committee for Nuclear Information supported a treaty between the United States and Soviet Russia to ban above ground nuclear weapons testing. The idea became a reality when President John Kennedy signed the Partial Test Ban Treaty. Pauling later became a part of the movement to end the Vietnam War. He and his wife Eva started the International League of Humanists in 1974. His various activities for the cause of peace earned him the Nobel Peace Prize in 1962.
Pauling died of prostate cancer on August 19, 1994. He was 94 years old.
Jason Sibert is the executive director of the Peace Economy Project in St Louis.
