Linus Pauling at 84: Maverick in the Lab

In a worn leather chair in an ugly converted warehouse on the poorer side of town sits one of the last of a breed--Dr. Linus Pauling, the American maverick.

For 50 years, the two-time Nobel laureate with the pioneering spirit has made headlines with countless achievements and an array of controversial causes. Nearing his 85th birthday, the white-haired, balding scientist-peacemaker keeps a schedule of lecturing, writing, researching, traveling and crusading that would tire a man one-third his age.

“I have often astounded myself,” he said, more with awe than conceit. Pauling tells the story of a professor from the University of Chicago who was asked during sworn testimony who was the greatest physical chemist. The professor answered that Pauling was.

“So afterward someone asked about that, and he replied, ‘I was under oath and had to tell the truth’,” said Pauling, his eyes sparkling with satisfaction.

“Well, I would agree that perhaps there’s no one else who has such a broad knowledge of science and medicine, physics, chemistry and biology and so on. I get interested in all sorts of things.”

His Own Proof

Pauling’s speaking agenda includes talks on science, world peace, nutrition and disease and his favorite and most disputed topic, the benefits of huge doses of vitamin C, for which he offers himself as proof.

Rising from the leather chair, he stands tall. There are few signs of wear and tear on the husky six-foot frame that chopped wood and cut up sides of beef to earn his way through school.

His unrelenting refusal to admit defeat and his persistent crusades have, over the years, stirred up lingering hostilities of passionate proportions in some scientific and political circles--and a kind of folk-hero reverence elsewhere.

Decades after he was blacklisted for “subversive activities” that later earned him the Nobel Peace Prize, Pauling continues to draw antagonism and adulation.

Some ridicule the grand old man of science for his defense of Vitamin C as good medicine for everything from colds and herpes to cancer and heart disease.

Still, sales of Vitamin C continue to soar.

The scorn hurled against his latest cause has had no more effect on Pauling than the loss of his passport, withdrawal of research funds and other harassment had in dissuading him from his opposition to nuclear testing. Pauling is writing--in longhand, as he does all his works--a new book. Its tentative title: “Vitamin C for a Better Life.”

Dismissed Antagonists

Clad in an old gray suit, navy sweater, striped shirt, tie, worn brown shoes and the black beret that has become his trademark, Pauling dismissed his antagonists.

“It’s just the medical establishment, misbehaving,” he said with a frown, tapping his fingers on a cluttered desk in the middle of his windowless office packed with books, molecular models and mementoes. “I don’t enjoy controversy, but it irritates me when people reject conclusions that seem to me to be clearly true.”

His office is in the Linus Pauling Institute of Science and Medicine, across a highway from Stanford University on the peninsula south of San Francisco.

He sighed, then relaxed, his face brightening.

“Scientists, for the most part, I think, probably have responded the way some of them have written to me. They have said that I’ve been right so often in the past, that I’m probably right this time too.

His anecdotes, political commentaries, scientific explanations, personal revelations and prophetic discourse are sprinkled with sentimental remembrances of his late wife of 58 years.

With tenderness, Pauling removes from a photograph-packed wallet a yellowing black-and-white picture of a young woman with soft curls, friendly mouth and large, penetrating eyes. On the back is written 1926, when Ava Helen Pauling was 23.

“Someone wrote to me recently saying that I’ve been fortunate in having an intelligent housewife as my wife,” he said softly, his gaze fixed on her youthful image. “That just isn’t true. I have no doubts that she had a higher IQ, was really smarter than I.”

His voice trembles.

“I continued with my peace efforts even during the McCarthy period when I was being attacked. My passport was taken away. I continued because”--he paused, a flashing smile lighting up his face--”because I had to keep the respect of my wife.

“Whenever I did anything, she knew why I had done it, so I was stuck.”

Then, growing serious: “You know, they say conscience is a small, still voice that tells you somebody is watching. She was an extra conscience.”

He smoothed the white hair that fans out in a halo around his beret, lifted his bushy eyebrows and showed a more recent picture, taken two years before her death.

“She’s 75 in this one. It’s astonishing how young she looks, isn’t it?

“I’ve had a hard time for three years.”

Pauling--the only person ever to win two unshared Nobels--was born in Portland, Ore., in 1901--the first year the coveted prizes were awarded.

He dropped out of Portland High School in his senior year in a dispute with the principal over American history course requirements, enrolled at the age of 16 at Oregon State Agricultural College. He got his Ph.D. from Caltech in 1925 and conducted his postgraduate research in Munich, Zurich and Copenhagen.

He received the 1954 chemistry award for his investigation of the powers that bind substances together, which he assesses to be his greatest scientific contribution. It revolutionized modern chemistry.

Beat Out Kennedy, Khrushchev

His selection over such candidates as President John F. Kennedy and Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev for the 1962 Peace Prize was announced on the day the partial nuclear test ban agreement by the United States, Great Britain and the Soviet Union formally went into effect.

Many think he deserved a third Nobel, in medicine, for his role in the discovery of the sickle-cell variation in hemoglobin, the major protein of red blood cells.

Pauling might also have discovered the structure of DNA, the molecule of heredity, if a group of British scientists had not withheld some crucial X-rays.

“There are a lot of good scientists and not all can win the Nobel,” he said. “I think a lot who do feel they are pretty lucky. Of course, some of the discoveries are made rather by accident.”

Pauling’s truckloads of honors also include more than 40 national and international awards and medals, among them the Gandhi Peace Prize, the International Lenin Peace Prize, the National Medal of Science, the Presidential Medal for Merit and 29 honorary degrees.

Pauling’s professional life continues at full speed. Outside his scientific and political work, “I’m not very active, except in reading books. I just don’t do anything much unless I have to.”

He reads “detective stories, mostly light literature,” cuts firewood and cooks his own meals. As for television, “I usually try--and succeed about half the time--to look at the national news program. Then when I get sort of tired of working, reading, sometimes I spend an hour or two looking at something--mostly football.”

He once enjoyed ballet.

“We saw Ballet Russe in Los Angeles in the 1930s, and we went to the Bolshoi in Moscow several times. Beautiful,” he recalled, his pointed fingers doing little leaps on the table.

An afterthought: “I never cared for opera.”

He never cared for cooking, either, until the death of his Ava Pauling. She had turned her husband’s nutritional principles into healthy menus, including bread baked with stone-ground unbleached flour.

“I think I eat less than other people,” he said. “You know, there’s evidence animals with restricted diets have better health.” He fixes himself simple meals of meat, fish and vegetables.

Occasional Vodka on Rocks

He also partakes of an occasional vodka on the rocks, “a good tranquilizer, for older people especially.” As for smoking, years ago he described cigarettes as “a greater danger than radioactive fallout.”

He divides his time evenly among traveling, a small apartment on the Stanford campus near the institute and a remote, modest, ranch-style house with a spectacular view, south of Big Sur on the California coast.

In the center of the book- and art-packed living room in the chocolate colored, V-shaped farmhouse he bought in 1955 with his Nobel Prize money, a grand piano serves as a desk.

Stacks of handwritten pages for his latest book are spread across the cloth-draped piano. Notes segregated by subject are piled neatly on the floor.

Although he strives to be the best, he said he is “not a perfectionist the way one of my first graduate students was. He had great difficulty in getting any research that he carried out finished for publication because he wanted to have it so perfect.”

“I’m more an achiever in that I take great pleasure in getting something written and published, completed. I like getting things done.”

This attitude has drawn criticism from those who contend that Pauling doesn’t let facts get in the way of his theory.

When he won his first Nobel, Caltech students put on a show in his honor.

“ ‘The Road to Stockholm,’ it was called. One of the songs is about my discoveries and my publishing things. I remember the line: ‘And even some that are not so’.”

Scientific Method

Then, growing serious: “But my ideas have usually been right. I got a letter recently from a professor who said a student questioned the validity of the arguments about taking Vitamin C. The professor replied, ‘Well, you should take into consideration not only the arguments but the person making them’.”

He applies, he said, a scientific method to all of his endeavors--from ethics to chemistry.

“I have built up and continue to build up a great background of knowledge--largely factual, but also theoretical. When I hear something or read something that doesn’t fit into this picture I have of the world, I start wondering about it, worrying about it--trying to decide whether I need to change the picture or whether this new report is wrong.”

Pauling began his Vitamin C research about 20 years ago, when he first ran across data “that astonished me, about the value of large intakes of vitamins.

“I got so interested in Vitamin C that I sat down on the first of August in 1970 and wrote my book ‘Vitamin C and the Common Cold’ during the 31 days of August,” he recalled.

“Of course, I had been thinking about the subject for two years and had already written my paper on treating schizophrenia with vitamins.”

The book sold 300,000 copies.

No matter what the final verdict on Vitamin C, Pauling has a solid place in the annals of history and world peace.

The eminent British journal New Scientist in 1978 ranked him with Newton, Marie Curie and Einstein in a list of the 20 most important scientists of all time.

Nobel laureate I. I. Rabi, emeritus physics professor at Columbia University, attributes Pauling’s success, in part, to his “extraordinary instinct.”

“His contributions are hard to total up because they are so many, so diverse and so profound,” Stanford chemist Harden McConnell said. “Time has passed, and nobody remembers how it all got started. But so many things a modern chemist uses in his day-to-day work can be traced back to Linus Pauling.”

All these achievements could be profitable to him, Pauling said, “but I’m just not interested. I’m in as comfortable a position as I want to be.”

His most cherished prize is the Nobel Peace Prize.

“With the chemistry prize, I was just enjoying myself, learning about the nature of the world, carrying out experiments and making calculations about molecules--having a good time and making a living as a professor.

“The Peace Prize came for work I was doing as a sacrifice--lecturing and writing, hundreds and hundreds of lectures about radioactive fallout and about nuclear weapons and the need for world peace. I was taking time away from things I really liked to do because of a sense of duty.”

The sacrifices began in 1945.

Accused by the late Sen. Joseph McCarthy of espousing communism in an era when such allegations could destroy a career, Pauling was refused a passport for two years--until he needed one to pick up his first Nobel prize.

The Eisenhower Administration also denied him a $300,000-a-year medical research grant. A House committee accused him of “placing his scientific attainments at the service of a host of organizations which have in common their complete subservience to the Communist Party.”

Pressure From Caltech Trustees

He faced pressure from trustees at Caltech and ran afoul of a Senate committee in the Cold War years of the 1950s, when he was accused of being a communist sympathizer.

He denied ever being a communist.

“I criticized both the capitalist system and the communist system,” he said. “I hope in the course of time we will develop a better system. I haven’t considered myself as a socialist but probably that wouldn’t be a bad description.” He noted that since he has won the Nobel Peace Prize and the Soviet Union’s Lenin Peace Prize, “that shows that I’m not biased.”

The very year he won the Peace Prize, Pauling made headlines when he and his wife picketed the White House before a dinner for Nobel scientists given by President and Mrs. Kennedy, demanding an end to nuclear testing. He did not attend the dinner.

He once tried to stop nuclear testing by bringing suit against the Atomic Energy Commission and the Department of Defense.

Linus Carl was the first of three children and the only son of Herman Pauling, a German druggist, and Lucy Isabelle Darling, whose ancestors arrived from Scotland in 1740.

Pauling recollects how his pharmacist father traveled around Oregon in a horse-pulled buggy, selling to drugstores.

Of his mother, “the only thing that I remember with respect to intellectual interests was that when I was around 8, she went to the local high school to study German.”

Pauling was smart but shy.

His bewildered father once wrote a letter to the Portland Oregonian newspaper, asking for a book list for a boy with “extraordinary interest and ability in reading.”

‘Really Liked School’

“I really liked school and thought something was wrong if I wasn’t at the top of any class I was in,” Pauling said, but he had few friends and was so timid that “in grammar school I had to make excuses so I wouldn’t have to represent the school in a spelling contest.”

When he was 9, his father and maternal grandfather, “a very smart man named Linus Darling,” both died, leaving the young boy, his mother and two small sisters in financial ruin.

“My mother scraped along, renting rooms in our rather large house.”

Linus helped out by working in a grocery store and machine shop, cutting wood and delivering special delivery letters for the U.S. Post Office.

Six months before high school graduation, he dropped out.

“I didn’t get my diploma because it was required to take two terms of American history to graduate, and they would not let me take two terms at the same time,” he says. “The principal would not change his mind.”

Even without a diploma, Pauling enrolled at Oregon State Agricultural College, where he majored in chemical engineering.

Nearly 40 years after his class graduated from Portland High School, and two years after he won his first Nobel, Pauling was granted an honorary high school diploma.

“In college, I developed self-confidence and that was because of my scholastic success,” he says. “I was beginning to be outspoken about my ideas about chemistry.”

During college, he undertook a collage of temporary careers: riveter’s assistant in a shipyard, milkman and road paving engineer.

Through graduate school, he worked as a part-time assistant in engineering and chemistry, then became assistant professor and--in less than half the minimum time--full professor of chemistry at Caltech, where he taught for 42 years, 10 of them as chairman of the department.

Pauling gave several institutions a try before joining in 1969, at 68, the faculty at Stanford. He is now emeritus professor.

In 1973, he started his own institute at a prestigious location bordering Stanford, but a fund shortage in 1981 forced a move across the highway to a less-expensive location.

Pauling is satisfied with his life. As a rule, he refuses to answer hypothetical questions, but when asked how would he live his life over, he replied:

“I don’t have any complaints about the life I’ve lived. I’ve enjoyed it and would want to do it all again.”

His biggest disappointment has been that “things have moved more slowly in regard to progress toward peace and cutting down on our waste of wealth on militarism than I expected 25 years ago.”

He does not consider himself a true pacifist, however.

“We cannot take away from suffering people, oppressed by a dictatorship--such as that of Somoza in Nicaragua--the possibility of their having to use arms to overthrow the dictatorship.

“But I believe in fighting back only when it’s sensible. For the United States and the Soviet Union to get into war would just be insanity.”

Pauling would like to live another 20 or 30 years to see what the world has to offer. As for death, “I put off serious thinking about it until some later time.

“I’m always being asked if I won’t write my autobiography. But I have so many other things to do. Hashing over old stuff doesn’t interest me as much as making discoveries.”