Visions of Linus Pauling PDF
Preview Visions of Linus Pauling
And while there were many reasons why Peter’s work proceeded slowly, among them were his knack for keeping things entertaining. Shortly after Watson and Crick’s discovery of DNA for example, he fabricated a letter of invitation from his father to Crick, requesting Crick’s presence at an upcoming conference on proteins at Caltech. “Professor Corey and I want you to speak as much as possible during the meeting,” the impostor Pauling said to Crick in the fake letter, even urging him to consider lecturing at Caltech as a visiting professor. Linus Pauling had appeared to sign the letter himself, his signature skillfully forged. The letter proved so convincing that Crick actually replied, accepting the invitation to speak at the conference. But before long, it became apparent that the entire communica- tion was, in fact, a practical joke, mostly because Lawrence Bragg, the director of the laboratory where Crick himself worked, was scheduled to speak at the conference in the same time slot that the fake letter had proposed for Crick. Were it not for this glitch the deception might have gone even farther, since upon seeing his son’s forgery, Linus himself was almost convinced that he had written the letter and simply forgot- ten about it. Ever a stickler for the details however, Pauling noticed a grammatical error in the document that he would never have made, and deduced the letter as having been authored by his mischievous son. For this transgression, Linus subtracted a five-pound fine from the $125.00 check that he sent to Peter each month. TTTThhhhiiiissss ppppaaaaggggeeee iiiinnnntttteeeennnnttttiiiioooonnnnaaaallllllllyyyy lllleeeefffftttt bbbbllllaaaannnnkkkk Other Titles by the Editor The Pauling Catalogue Published by World Scientific Publishing Co. Pte. Ltd. 5 Toh Tuck Link, Singapore 596224 USA office: 27 Warren Street, Suite 401-402, Hackensack, NJ 07601 UK office: 57 Shelton Street, Covent Garden, London WC2H 9HE Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Petersen, Chris (Christoffer), editor. Title: Visions of Linus Pauling / editor, Chris Petersen, Oregon State University, USA. Description: New Jersey : World Scientific, [2023] | Includes index. Identifiers: LCCN 2022019486 | ISBN 9789811260759 (hardcover) | ISBN 9789811260766 (ebook) | ISBN 9789811260773 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Pauling, Linus, 1901-1994. | Chemists--United States--Biography. | Biochemists--United States--Biography. Classification: LCC QD22.P35 V57 2023 | DDC 540.92 [B]--dc23/eng20220822 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022019486 British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Copyright © 2023 by World Scientific Publishing Co. Pte. Ltd. All rights reserved. This book, or parts thereof, may not be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without written permission from the publisher. For photocopying of material in this volume, please pay a copying fee through the Copyright Clearance Center, Inc., 222 Rosewood Drive, Danvers, MA 01923, USA. In this case permission to photocopy is not required from the publisher. For any available supplementary material, please visit https://www.worldscientific.com/worldscibooks/10.1142/12977#t=suppl Desk Editor: Shaun Tan Yi Jie Typeset by Stallion Press Email: [email protected] Printed in Singapore “9x6” b4781 Visions of Linus Pauling About the Editor Chris Petersen is Senior Faculty Research Assistant at the Special Collections and Archives Research Center (SCARC), Oregon State Uni- versity Libraries and Press, USA, where he has worked since 1996. He is also the founder, edi- tor, and publisher of The Pauling Blog, which has released original research on Linus Pauling nearly every week since its creation in 2008. In addition, he administers the SCARC oral his- tory program and has led more than 200 interview sessions comprising in excess of 300 hours of content. He previously co-edited The Pauling Catalogue, a six-volume set describing the Ava Helen and Linus Pauling Papers, which are housed at Oregon State University Libraries. vii Preface By Chris Petersen The Pauling “American Scientists” series postage stamp, as unveiled on the campus of Oregon State University, March 6, 2008. All of the chapters presented in this book were originally published as blog posts for a project that, as I’m fond of recounting, was created to celebrate the release of a postage stamp. In March 2008 the United States Postal Service issued a series of stamps honoring American sci- entists, one of whom was Linus Pauling. A day before the series was released nationwide, a special early-issue event was held in New York viii “9x6” b4781 Visions of Linus Pauling Preface ix City and also in Corvallis, Oregon, which is home to Pauling’s under- graduate alma mater and my workplace, Oregon State University (OSU). By then my department, the OSU Libraries Special Collections, had been home to the Ava Helen and Linus Pauling Papers for more than 20 years, a time period during which we had been closely involved with a great many activities related to Pauling and his legacy. In the years prior to the Postal Service event, the only real promotional tools available to us were word of mouth, university news releases, a very small spot on our website, and an RSS feed that was likely subscribed to by only a handful of people. Looking to try out something that might make a big- ger impact, we created a WordPress blog — titled The Pauling Blog — and devoted the first handful of posts to the stamp and the celebration. Before too long, the shape of the project began to change quite significantly. Excited by this new (to us) platform, we decided to move beyond promotional activities and instead devote time and resources to conducting original research that would explore particular aspects of Pauling’s life on a deeper level than one might find in a typical biogra- phy. From Spring 2008 on, we continued in this vein, consistently and diligently, up into the pandemic, and can now boast of a resource that contains more than 850,000 words and has been viewed more than 1.25 million times. As noted, the Pauling Blog came to pass within the context of a much larger Pauling-related program that was housed in Special Col- lections. Linus Pauling donated his papers to OSU in 1986, and did so despite numerous offers from much larger and more prestigious repos- itories. Ever the maverick, he instead chose the option that, at the time, had neither space nor staff enough to process or provide access to what was understood by all to be a very large collection. There are multiple theories about why Pauling ultimately made this decision, but for me the deciding factor was OSU’s commitment to devote substantial new resources to preserving his life’s work. To this end, a brand new department — Special Collections — was created and outfitted with three full-time employees who were supported by
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