Mother Earth News - Mother Earth News 1978

Two years ago, the editors of the distinguished British journal New Scientist ranked two-time-Nobel-Prize-winner Linus Pauling as one of the top twenty scientists of all time. Few students of the history of science would question the wisdom of this assessment. For much of what is known today about the physical nature of chemical bonds the structure and function of hemoglobin the three-dimensional conformation of DNA (the genetic substance) the biological hazards associated with the atmospheric testing of nuclear weapons and the health-promoting effects of large doses of vitamin C can be attributed to Linus Paulings pioneer work in these areas. As one scientist summed it up, The forty years of Pauling contributions to chemistry and medicine make up perhaps the single most profound and enlightening body of research an American-perhaps anyone-ever put together.

Linus Paulings love affair with science probably began in 1910, at the age of nine, when - after Linus had read every book in the house - his perplexed father (a Portland, Oregon druggist) wrote to the editor of the local newspaper, asking if the editor could suggest a book list for a boy with extraordinary interest and ability in reading. By the time the young Pauling had entered the Oregon Agricultural College (now the Oregon State University in Corvallis), his interest in-and aptitude for - science had begun to blossom in full force: As an undergraduate, Pauling helped support himself by teaching chemistry at the college. (It was - in fact - in a college chemistry course that he was teaching that Linus Pauling first met Ava Helen Miller, now his wife.)

After obtaining his bachelors degree in 1922, Pauling worked toward - and, in 1925, received - his doctorate at the California Institute of Technology, then - for 18 months - studied in Munich, Zurich, and Copenhagen as a Guggenheim Fellow. In 1927, Dr. Pauling returned to Cal Tech as an Assistant Professor of Theoretical Chemistry. He remained on the Cal Tech faculty until 1964.

Between 1964 and 1973, Dr. Pauling held teaching posts at the Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions in Santa Barbara (California), the University of California at San Diego, and Stanford University. At the present time, Linus Pauling is Research Professor and Chairman of the Board of Trustees of The Linus Pauling Institute of Science and Medicine in Menlo Park, California.

Dr. Pauling has written several books (including The Nature of the Chemical Bond; The Architecture of Molecules; No More War!; Vitamin C, the Common Cold, and the Flu; and two college chemistry texts) and more than 400 articles, technical reports, and monographs. His achievements in science and medicine have brought him 29 honorary doctorates, honorary membership in the scientific societies of a dozen countries, and countless awards including the 1954 Nobel Prize for Chemistry, and the 1962 Nobel Prize for Peace. (No other individual-living or dead-has ever received two unshared Nobel Prizes.)

In recent years, Linus Pauling has become well-known - some would say notorious - for his outspoken views on nutrition, vitamin C, and the medical establishment. MOTHER editor Kas Thomas had a chance to sample some of thoseviews last October when he spoke with the two-time Nobel laureate at the Pauling ranch near Big Sur, California. What follows is an edited transcript of that conversation.

PLOWBOY: Dr. Pauling, most people - it seems - think of your name in connection with nutrition and medicine. Isnt it true, though, that youve had no formal training in these fields?

PAULING: Yes, thats true. Ive never had a course in biology. No course in biochemistry, either.

PLOWBOY: You think of yourself as a physical chemist is that right?

PAULING: Yes. I was trained in chemistry, physics, and mathematics. My Ph.D. was with a major in chemistry and minors in physics and math. And my first two books -The Structure of Line Spectra and Introduction to Quantum Mechanics - were essentially physics, rather than chemistry.

PLOWBOY: When - and how - did you first become interested in problems of a biological nature?

PAULING: For many years - well, from 1922, when I began my graduate work, until about 1932 or 33 - I worked largely with inorganic substances mostly rather simple substances that had ten, twenty, or thirty atoms in each molecule. But thenabout 1934 - I began to wonder about the large molecules in living organisms protein molecules with thousands of atoms in them.

The first work in this area that I published was a study I had made of the combining power of hemoglobin for oxygen. As you know, the red cells in our blood pick up oxygen because they contain molecules of the protein hemoglobin. It turns out that the hemoglobin-oxygen equilibrium curve has a strange shape, and I worked out a theory to explain that.

Next, I decided to study the interactions of hemoglobin molecules with magnetic fields, which I did. C.D. Coryell - one of my students - and I had made a surprising discovery: namely, that arterial blood is repelled by a magnet, while venous blood is attracted. Coryell and I published several papers on this in the 1930s.

In 1936, I was invited to come to New York to lecture at the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research about this work on hemoglobin. At that time, Karl Landsteiner - the man who discovered the major blood groups, A, B, AB, and O, and who subsequently received the Nobel Prize for this discovery-was a member of the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research, and he attended my lecture. Afterwards, he asked me if I would come to his laboratory and talk with him about immunology an area in which he had been doing a lot of work.

I did talk to him, and I tried to understand the problems he was worrying about. In fact, I was so fascinated by these problems that I began to work on them myself after I returned to California. By 1940, I had a very active group of people working with me at Cal Tech on problems of immunology that is, problems involving antibodies, antigens, antitoxins, allergies, things of that sort.

So that was one way in which I got into biological and medical fields.

PLOWBOY: Didnt you - at one time - do some pioneer work on sickle-cell anemia?

PAULING: Well in 1945, I had the idea that sickle-cell anemia - contrary to what other people thought - was not a disease of the red cells, but a disease of the hemoglobin molecule itself which - we now know - it is. In 1949, my students and I published a paper on that subject - Sickle Cell Anemia, a Molecular Disease - In Science. That paper led to a tremendous amount of work, involving hundreds of people, on the problem of abnormal hemoglobins.

PLOWBOY: How did you happen to go from this to problems of nutrition?

PAULING: One of the co-authors of the sickle-cell anemia paper - one of the students in my lab at Cal Tech - was a young medical doctor by the name of Harvey Itano. Dr. Itano, who was an officer of the U.S. Public Health Service, came to my lab in 1946. He took his Ph.D. with me and - afterwards - continued on in my lab as a postdoctoral fellow, supported by the Public Health Service.