Sigma Xi, The Scientific Research Society

Linus Pauling: Reflections Author(s): Linus Pauling, George B. Kauffman and Laurie M. Kauffman Reviewed work(s): Source: American Scientist, Vol. 82, No. 6 (NOVEMBER-DECEMBER 1994), pp. 522-524 Published by: Sigma Xi, The Scientific Research Society Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/29775323 . Accessed: 18/03/2013 01:05
Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at . http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

.
JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.

Sigma Xi, The Scientific Research Society is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to American Scientist.

http://www.jstor.org

This content downloaded on Mon, 18 Mar 2013 01:05:38 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

Linus

Pauling:

Reflections

George B. Kauffman and Laurie M. Kauffman

ence and LinusCarl Pauling, the Medicine at Palo Alto, California,at thetime onlyperson tohave beenaward? of ed twounshared Nobel Prizes (Chemistry, his death.Despite frail health,he remainedactive virtu? 1954; Peace, known as a scientist, 1962),was internationally educator, ally to theend. humanitarianand activist. New Scientist listedhim as It had beena life of controversy: full Pauling spokeout one of "the twenty on the war and greatest scientists all time,on a par of dangersofnuclear-weaponstesting nuclear use withNewton,Darwin and Einstein." and advocated the of large doses ofvitamins to prevent and treatthecommoncold,cancerand other diseases. Pauling's use ofone science (physics)toexplainanoth? er (chemistry)revolutionized the latter. was One of last interviews given onApril 1 The author of Pauling's more thana thousand to at publications,hemade seminalcon? George B. Kaujfman, professor chemistry Califor? of to tributions a numberof Fresno, a student,IsaacMayo, and fields in addition to chemistry, nia StateUniversity, including quantum mechanics, x-ray crystallography, Laurie M. Kauffman, a retired schoolteacher, George nuclearphysicsand immunology. is con? Kaufman's wife and hisfrequent collaborator. He The inter? mineralogy, sideredthe molecular biologyand orthomolec viewers, founder of GeorgeKaujfman reports, enjoyedan encounter ularmedicine, a term coined. he with a man of "boundless, wide-ranging curiosity,self Born in Portland, Oregon, on February 28, 1901, humor, outspoken iconoclasm, confidence, fearlessness... died ofprostatecanceronAugust 19.He was di? and an abiding beliefin theapplicationofreason toscien? Pauling rector researchat theLinus Pauling Instituteof Sei and Here are excerpts. of tific human affairs."

CHOOSING A RESEARCH PROBLEM

I keep looking for some... problem where some? one has made an observation that doesn't fit into my picture of theuniverse. If itdoesn't fit in, then I find some way of fitting it in.

THE PRODUCTIVE SCIENTIST

A scientist can be productive in various ways. One ishaving the ability to plan and carry out ex? periments, but the other is having the ability to formulate new ideas, which can be about what experiments can be carried out... by making [the] proper calculations. Individual scientists who are successful in theirwork are successful fordifferent reasons.

or billion-dollar physics. Papers are published in with more than a hundred Physical Review Letters authors... but there is still a good number of peo? ple, theoretical physicists and chemists, who con? tinue to work in the old way of the individual try? to have an idea that will lead to the solution of ing some problem. And there are, of course, plenty of smart people around, probably more than there were in the early days because there are more physicists and more dhemists now, and a certain fraction of them can be described as unusually smart. They are apt to continue to make discover? ies the old way.

CONCEIVING A THEORY
In 1961 Pauling proposedwhat would be one of several controversialtheories, one suggesting thatanesthe? this siaworks throughthe formationofhydratecrystals that with electricalactivity in thebrain. The story interfere reveals the mind. workings ofa creativescientific About 19521 heard a lectureby the professor of anesthesiology Henry K[nowles] Beecher.... He said xenon was a good anesthesia. I pricked up my ears, and I thought, "How can xenon, which doesn't form any chemical compounds, serve as a general anesthetic? How do general anesthetics work, anyway?

VS. "BIG SCIENCE" "SMALL SCIENCE"

I'm especially interested in research that involves one person solving a problem. Most research car? ried out in 1922-23, when my firstpapers were published, involved just one person or two peo? ple?a prof and a student or that sort of thing. Nowadays we have big physics?million-dollar...
522 American Scientist, Volume 82

This content downloaded on Mon, 18 Mar 2013 01:05:38 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

lay awake at night fora fewminutes before to sleep, and during thenext couple ofweeks going each night Iwould think, "How is itpossible for xenon tobe an anesthetic agent, and how do anes? thetic agents work?" Then I forgot to do it after a while, but I'd trained my unconscious mind tokeep thisquestion alive and to call [it] to my conscious? ness whenever a new idea turned up thatmight possibly be related to general anesthesia. So seven years went by. About 1959, I went down to the lab in Pasadena and put my feet up on thedesk and started reading my mail, and here at was a letter from University George Jeffrey [the of] Pittsburgh, an x-ray crystallographer, on his determination of the structure of a hydrate crystal. Immediately I sat up, tookmy feet off the desk, and said, "I understand anesthesia!" ...I spent a year reading up about anesthesia and checking the hydrate crystals that Dick [for] the [Richard E.] Marsh and I determined structure of chloroform hydrate, and then Iwrote my paper published in June of 1961.

.. .1

^ ^^^^^^^^^^^

Linus

Carl Pauling,

1901-1994

THE CHEMICAL BOND

Pauling considershismost significantachievement the realization thata molecule can be describedby an inter? mediate structure that is a resonance combination, or hybrid,ofother structures. In [my] 1931 paper I introduced the idea of hy? bridization of bond orbitals. Imentioned, not very clearly, in 1928 in a paper in the Proceedings National Academy of Sciences... that quan? of the tum mechanics, with the ideas of resonance among alternative structures, leads to explana? tion of the tetrahedral arrangement of single bonds around the carbon atom and several other points. I said that I'd publish details later. The problem was that quantum mechanics ap? plied tomolecules is pretty complicated, and the arguments that I had used that permitted me to me so complicat? write that 1928 paper seemed to ed that Iwasn't sure that people would believe wasn't until them... even though I would. So it 1931 that I had the bright idea of simpHfying the equation, and that led to quantum-mechanical very rapid progress. This idea of resonance and symmetric and anti? symmetric combinations of structures I just took over bodily into chemistry,and here I used simpler examples. [Itwas] essentially [Werner] Heisen berg's idea, although he didn't apply [it] to any? thingother than [the spectrum of] thehelium atom. I think, in a sense, I had the editor of the JACS Arthur American Chemical Society, [theJournalof the Becket Lamb] buffaloed.... [He] thought, "What referee shall I send thispaper to? Ithas tobe some? a good knowledge of chemistry... body who has but also has a thorough understanding of quantum mechanics, and I can't think of anybody of that sort," anybody who might be said to be my peer. He [thought], "Well, past experience has shown

that this author knows what he's writing about, so I'll justgo ahead and publish thepaper." The paper, submittedon January28,1931, was pub? more thansevenweeks later. lished March 21, slightly

THE SOVIET VIEW OF RESONANCE

on [During the 1950s] Iwas accused of being soft cornmunism. The Passport Division said that my anti-communist statements hadn't been strong enough. That was why they canceled my passport. In the Soviet Union the... chemists, 800 of them, had a big mass meeting, atwhich they said that my ideas about resonance were incompatible with dialectical materialism and thatno patriotic Soviet chemist should use these ideas. After fiveyears theyhad anothermass meeting and got out a revised report on theoretical organic chemistry inwhich they said, "It's all right to use these ideas thatLinus Pauling calls resonance theo? ry,but you shouldn't talk about resonance but in? stead use the term 'mesomerism,'" which [Christo? or Robinson had pher Kelk] Ingold, I think, [Robert] over developed. It took five years for them to get that littleaberration.

THE DNA DOUBLE HELIX

Because ofhis unwillingness toname thecollaboratorsin his "Ban theBomb" campaign,Pauling was refuseda passport to attend a symposium in England in 1952. had he attendedand seenRos? Many have speculated that he alind Franklins x-ray diffraction photographs, might double-helixstructure DNA. have discoveredthe of I I can't be surewhat might have happened.... knew Rosalind Franklin, and Imight well have seen her and gotten an idea that would have put
1994 November-December 523

This content downloaded on Mon, 18 Mar 2013 01:05:38 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

me on the right track.... I published [the idea] that the gene consists of twomutually complementary strands, each ofwhich can serve as a template for the other one.... BothWatson and Crick heard me talk about that. was My wife made a comment which I triink was such an important She said, "If that pertinent. problem, why didn't you work harder at it?"And I ttunkI can say, "If I had worked harder, Iwouldn't have needed to go to London to see Rosalind Franklin. Imight well have discovered the double helix. Iwasn't really paying much attention to the problem of the structureof nucleic acid."

the president of the institute,Lee DuBridge, said, "It's really remarkable that any person should get two Nobel Prizes, but there ismuch difference of work thatProfessor opinion about thevalue of the Pauling has been doing." That's the work for world peace, you know. Well, I thought, that's a little toomuch, so I decided to resign.

VITAMIN C
I have a number of reports from people?scien? tists?that say, "Well, I don't know anything about vitamin C or other vitamins, but Linus Pauling has been right so often in thepast that I just accept
he says."

IDEAS AND EQUATIONS

John [H.] Van Vleck, who was a leading young theoretical physicist when I was also a leading me one day, "I young theoretical physicist, said to never have made a contribution to physics that I didn't get by fiddling with the equations," and I said, "I've never made a contribution that I didn't get by justhaving a new idea. Then Iwould fiddle with the equations tohelp support thenew idea." Van Vleck was essentially a mathematical physi? cist, you might say, and Iwas essentially a person of ideas. I don't think I'm primarily mathe? matical. ... I have a great curiosity about thenature of the world as a whole, and most ofmy ideas are qualitative rather than quantitative.

what

are a bitmore skeptical and Physicians, of course, in general, they don't have the outspoken, and, They don't know background of knowledge.... to say thathe has been successful so often enough in thepast thathe's probably right this time.Physi? cians don't try to form opinions of this sort any? medical authorities say way. They justdo what the medical profes? to do. Of all of the professions, the which the individual practitioners sion is theone in do the smallest amount of triinkingfor themselves.

THE FUTURE OF RESEARCH

I don't care to comment about the futureof anything.

SOURCESOF PRIDE
Sometimes I say I'm most proud ofmy 1931 pa? per,which changed the nature of chemistry in a a significant way. Sometimes, if I'm feeling like
humanitarian,

HIS POSITIVE OUTLOOK ON LIFE

Oh, I suppose it's perhaps partially genetic... ac? success? tually the result ofmy having been pretty ful inmy own career, and of course, my feeling we ought tobe smart enough, we human be? that are. ings, to solve our problems, whatever they
1979. Cancer and Vita? Ewan, and Linus Pauling. Cameron, Institute of Science min C. Palo Alto, CA: Linus Pauling and Medicine; edition, 1993. expanded

[made by] my work in the effort to get a bomb test treaty signed, stopping damage by fallout.

I say...

contributions

to well-being

Readings

AND CALTECH THE PEACE PRIZE

Nobel Peace Prize in 1962forhis cru? After receivingthe sade against nuclearwar and nuclear-weapons testing, Pauling resignedhis post at theCalifornia Instituteof with Caltech. endinga 40-yearassociation Technology, ingeneral,were probably pleased My colleagues, [about the prize], but the trusteeswere unhappy with my effortsto control theCold War, to avert the war. Iwas working for world possibility of nuclear of the right and I think that many people peace, on wing group felt that applying military pressure we could the Soviet Union was thebest thing that do, even if itcost us billions of dollars and similarly
cost the Soviet Union a

chemical bond. Pro? Pauling, Linus. 1928. The shared-electron National Academy of Sciences U.SA. 14:359-362. ceedings of the nature of the chemical bond. Ap? Pauling, Linus. 1931. The from the quantum mechanics plication of results obtained to the and from a theory of paramagnetic susceptibility structure of molecules. Journal of theAmerican Chemical

Society 53:1367-1400. Bond and the Pauling, Linus. 1939. The Nature of theChemical Mod? and Crystals: An Introduction to Molecules Structure of ern Structural Chemistry. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press; 2nd edition, 1940; 3rd edition, 1960; abridged as Modern Struc? The Chemical Bond: A Brief Introduction to tural Chemistry, 1967. 1956. Modern Structural Chemistry (1954 No? Pauling, Linus. bel Chemistry Prize Lecture, Stockholm, Sweden, De? cember 11,1954), reprinted in Science 123:255-258. War! New York: Dodd, Mead Pauling, Linus. 1958. No More & Co.; 25th anniversary edition, 1983. Pauling, Linus. 1961. A molecular thesia. Science 134:15-21. theory of general

Nobel Peace Prize. prise, I received the Iwas atmy home here in Salmon Creek, and I got back to Pasadena a couple of days later,and I was shown a copy of The Los Angeles Timeswhere
524 American Scientist, Volume 82

large

amount....

To my

sur?

anes?

Cold. San Pauling, Linus. 1970. Vitamin C and theCommon Francisco: W. H. Freeman & Co.

This content downloaded on Mon, 18 Mar 2013 01:05:38 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions