Linus Pauling:
A Life in Science and Politics
By Ben and Ted Goertzel
Basic Books, 300 pages, $27.50
Force of Nature:
The Life of Linus Pauling
By Thomas Hager
Simon & Schuster, 736 pages, $35
Linus Pauling in His Own Words:
Selections From His Writings, Speeches and Interviews
Edited by Barbara Marinacci
Touchstone Books, 320 pages, $15 paper
In 1910, the father of future Nobelist Linus Pauling wrote to the Portland Oregonian, requesting a reading list for his precocious 9-year-old son. “Please don’t suggest the Bible and Darwin’s `The Origin of Species,’ ” Pauling’s father wrote, “because he’s already read these books.”
By the time of his death in 1994, Linus Pauling had garnered an unprecedented two unshared Nobel Prizes, for chemistry (1954) and peace (1962). During his lengthy career, he traversed scientific boundaries and disciplines, particularly in his application of quantum theory to chemistry, biology and medicine. As a political activist, Pauling was similarly intrepid; during the 1950s and ’60s, he participated in rallies against McCarthyism, Stalinism, nuclear testing and the Vietnam War. Often his roles as scientist and protester intersected, as in 1962, when he picketed outside the White House to challenge President Kennedy’s resumption of nuclear testing and later that evening disappeared inside for a dinner honoring Nobel laureates.
Some two years after Pauling’s death, two biographies and one anthology of Pauling’s writings have been published, providing diverse and sometimes conflicting interpretations of the scientist’s unconventional life. The biographies, “Linus Pauling: A Life in Science and Politics,” by Ted and Ben Goertzel, and “Force of Nature,” by Thomas Hager, are both unauthorized, but all three authors received Pauling’s cooperation through personal interviews and editing of the initial portions of the manuscripts. The results contrast starkly; the Goertzel biography relies on scientific diagrams and terminology, while the Hager biography offers a broader, impressionistic portrait of the scientific and political environments in which Pauling operated.
The third book, “Linus Pauling in His Own Words: Selections From His Writings, Speeches and Interviews,” is billed as an anthology, but Pauling’s “own words” are largely eclipsed by the commentary of its editor, Barbara Marinacci, a longtime Pauling enthusiast. Nonetheless, the excerpts from Pauling’s lectures and writings reflect a compelling mixture of insouciance and altruism.
Of the three books, Hager’s “Force of Nature” most faithfully adheres to an approach that Pauling often claimed to have employed with success–the stochastic method, “to divine the truth by conjecture.” Hager illustrates Pauling’s motivations and methods by profiling his workplace, primarily Caltech in Pasadena, and his quirky professional “foils”–scientists such as J. Robert Oppenheimer, Albert Schweitzer, A.A. Noyes, James Watson and Francis Crick.
All three books concur on Pauling’s greatest scientific and social contributions, such as his discovery of the molecular cause of sickle cell anemia and his relentless protests against nuclear testing. Several issues, however, ignite controversy: Pauling’s participation in the quest for DNA, his 1960s and ’70s crusade for vitamin C and his related feud with collaborator Arthur Robinson.
In 1953, Pauling and colleague Robert Corey proposed an early, flawed model for the structure of DNA: the triple helix. Despite their confidence–they published the hypothesis in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences–the model’s faults soon became apparent.
“A few minutes’ reading,” says Hager, “showed that there was no room at the core for the positive ions needed to hold together the negatively charged phosphates.” The error was particularly puzzling, considering that 10 years earlier, Pauling had discovered the alpha helix.
The biographers diverge in interpreting Pauling’s uncharacteristic misstep. Marinacci blames political persecution–in 1952, the State Department refused to renew Pauling’s passport on political grounds and prevented him from attending a crucial conference in England. Had he attended the conference, Marinacci says, Pauling would have viewed Rosalind Franklin’s “revelatory” micrographs of DNA structure that clearly indicated two strands. These X-rays proved instrumental to Watson and Crick in their development of the double helix model. Pauling himself offers a pastiche of similar reasons for his failure but pointedly quotes his wife, who later asked him, “If that was such an important problem, why didn’t you work harder at it?”
In “Force of Nature,” Hager attributes Pauling’s “historic mistake” in large part to “hurry and hubris”:
“. . .(T)hree unrelated factors combined to set Pauling wrong. The first was his focus on proteins to the exclusion of almost everything else. The second was inadequate data. The X-ray photos he was using were of a mixture of two forms of DNA and were almost worthless. The third was pride. He simply did not feel that he needed to pursue DNA full tilt.”
The Goertzels extend the latter idea, suggesting that Pauling’s “tremendous self-confidence” may have contributed to his hasty publication of a poorly researched model. Yet the Goertzels also acknowledge the importance of Pauling’s previous work and theories, which enabled Watson and Crick “to elucidate the precise nature of the hydrogen bonds between the adenine-thymine and guanine-cytosine base pairs in the core of the helix that contain the specific information that makes up the genetic code.”
While the Goertzels allow that Pauling was quick to acknowledge Watson and Crick’s achievement, they also allege that Pauling was not eager to accord the pair the eminence that their discovery merited: Pauling subsequently refused to nominate Watson and Crick for the Nobel Prize, saying it was “premature” to give them an award.
More than 20 years and two Nobels after his calamitous attempt at a DNA model, Pauling entered into a highly public debate over the curative powers of vitamin C. During the ’60s, Pauling had become increasingly disenchanted with traditional medicine and its lack of focus on nutrition. In 1966, he received a letter from Irwin Stone, biochemist and vitamin C enthusiast, promising that if Pauling followed a regimen of 3,000 milligrams of vitamin C per day, he would live at least 25 years longer. Pauling immediately carried out experiments on himself and his wife, steadily increasing their intake to 18,000 milligrams, three hundred times the recommended daily allowance.
“I began to feel livelier and healthier,” he says in “In His Own Words.” “In particular, the severe colds I had suffered from several times a year all of my life no longer occurred.”
By the late ’60s, Pauling lectured publicly about the powers of ascorbic acid and its potential to cure a range of ailments, from the common cold to cancer and mental illness. He even proposed a new medical discipline, orthomolecular medicine, which the Goertzels define as the “use of large doses of vitamins and other natural substances to regulate the body’s molecular structure.”
Despite the public popularity of Pauling’s crusade–his 1970 book “Vitamin C, the Common Cold, and the Flu” became a best seller–the medical profession expressed skepticism. Hager quotes The Journal of the American Medical Association, which said of Pauling’s book, “Here are found, not the guarded statements of a philosopher or scientist seeking truths, but the clear, incisive sentences of an advertiser with something to sell.”
Critics attacked Pauling’s lack of hard evidence, much less a theory of how vitamin C exerted its powers. In the eyes of most physicians, Hager says, Pauling looked like a “nutritional quack, a vitamin pusher who was essentially prescribing without a license.”
Pauling further endangered his credibility as a scientist in 1978, when he fired from the Pauling Institute of Science and Medicine former colleague Arthur Robinson after Robinson released test results that questioned vitamin C’s powers. Robinson, co-founder of the institute, publicized the early results of research with hairless mice that indicated megadoses of vitamin C might stimulate the growth of cancer. Pauling, who had urged Robinson to replicate and study the results, responded by dismissing Robinson, who promptly sued Pauling, the Linus Pauling Institute and its trustees for $25.5 million.
“What happened next was the beginning of a private feud made public,” says Marinacci, “which lasted the rest of Pauling’s lifetime, for a quarter century. (It still goes on posthumously, when Pauling is no longer able to talk back to his harsh, perennial adversary–and to others like him who objected to Pauling’s strong beliefs and work in numerous areas concerning science and society.)”
In contrast, the Goertzels condemn Pauling’s behavior toward Robinson and accuse Pauling of an “apparent betrayal of a young scientist who had been his closest collaborator and disciple.” The Goertzels also hypothesize that Robinson never thought of his work as fundamentally contradicting Pauling’s theories but simply as elaborating on them and suggesting additional avenues of research.
The lawsuit was settled out of court in 1983, by awarding Robinson a fee between $500,000 and $600,000. Ironically, Pauling later would repeat Robinson’s research and show that the findings were, as Pauling had suspected, merely a statistical fluctuation. Pauling would continue to promote vitamin C until his death by cancer in 1994. He died at the age of 93, having lived three years longer than the 25 Irwin Stone had guaranteed him if he increased his daily intake of vitamin C.
