“In Unitarianism I have found a religion without dogma: A growing, changing, open-minded willingness to learn and, above all, to work.“ – Ava Helen Pauling, “Why I am a Unitarian,” September 18, 1977. Though both Linus and Ava Helen Pauling were avowed atheists,  they did maintain a long and frien

Several new links have crept into our sidebar in recent months, and we thought we’d take a moment to talk about what you’ll find if you give them a click. The most obvious is the Linus Pauling Science Center construction webcam.  In late September 2009, we covered the ground breaking ceremony for $62.5 million

We are very excited to announce the release of our latest website, The Scientific War Work of Linus C. Pauling:  A Documentary History.  The fifth in our documentary history series, the project took us nearly thirteen months to complete. As with the previous four documentary histories, the war site is comprised of a Narra

“Is it not more realistic, more practical to use the gifts of nature, as discovered by science, for the good of all the people of the world, considering them as brothers, than for death and destruction? I believe that the discovery of atomic power will be recognized as necessitating world unity, and that the goal [...

The most recent addition to our digitized Events and Videos collection is something a little bit different. In 1998 the Buddhist peace organization Soka Gakkai International-USA launched a traveling exhibit chronicling the life and work of Linus Pauling.  Stocked with items on loan from the Pauling Papers, the display tour

In 1935, as a result of being prompted toward the biological sciences in order to keep his Rockefeller Foundation funding, Linus Pauling began his research on proteins. Hemoglobin, the oxygen-binding agent in blood, was his first target; but as he became more aware of the complex nature and diversity of proteins, he began c

“You know, hemoglobin is a wonderful substance. I like it. It’s a red substance that brings color into the cheeks of girls, and in the course of my hemoglobin investigation I look about a good bit to appreciate it.” – Linus Pauling, March 30, 1966 Seventy-five years ago, in 1935, Linus Pauling began publ

We send our congratulations to Dr. Ahmed H. Zewail, Caltech’s Linus Pauling Professor of Chemical Physics, who was recently named recipient of the 2011 Joseph Priestley Medal, the highest decoration granted by the American Chemical Society.  Dr. Zewail is, of course, no stranger to major honors, having received the 1

[Part 5 of 5] Shortly after his first appearance before the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee, Linus Pauling’s counsel succeeded in postponing the scheduled follow-up hearing from August to October, 1960. The extra time gave Pauling room to plan for his upcoming defense, and to resume plans he had made before bein

[Part 4 of 5] When his June hearing before the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee was resumed two and a half hours later, Linus Pauling agreed to submit a list of the individuals that he had sent petition requests to, but refused to submit a list of those who returned more than one signature. In making [...]

[Part 3 of 5] “It is well, therefore, to begin with the simple legal profile of what a Committee can and cannot do. All that it can do is to compel a witness to testify. If he talks, and talks honestly, that is the end of the matter. The Committee has no power to deal [...]

[Part 2 of 5] “I gladly confess that I recall Tom Dodd as a somehow larger and more appealing figure than his critics acknowledge or the record of the recent past shows. For twelve years I followed him, long enough to leave with me some fond memories and a share in his guilt. Had he [...]

[Ed Note: June 21, 2010 marks the fiftieth anniversary of Pauling's first appearance before the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee.  We are marking the occasion with a five-part series that tells the story of this important and traumatic experience.] [Part 1 of 5] In 1956 and 1957, Linus Pauling helped organize a petiti

[Part 2 of 2] “Suppose that we ask: is it necessary that a molecule such as CO have a definite valence-bond structure? The answer, which is part of the new idea, is no; instead the CO molecule may have (and does have) a structure which is neither C=O or C≡O, but is somewhere between them, [...]

[Part 1 of 2] “I think my work on the chemical bond probably has been most important in changing the activities of chemists all over the world – changing their ways of thinking and affecting the progress of the science.” Linus Pauling, 1977. In early 1932, Linus Pauling spent several months visiting the Un

“The discovery by Dr. Itano of the abnormal human hemoglobins has thrown much light on the problem of the nature of the hereditary hemolytic anemias, and has changed these diseases from the status of poorly understood and poorly characterized diseases into that of well understood and well characterized diseases.”

I recall…Linus Pauling on a Sunday morning reading all of the ‘funny papers’ published in the Los Angeles area.  I suspect that he follows all of the comic strips published in America. -W. H. Latimer, 1951 [In his later years] my father would go to bed after watching the news, about 6:30 or 7:00, [and] [.

[Part 4 of 4] The cordial disagreements over the shape of the second edition of Introduction to Quantum Mechanics began in August 1955 when Martin Karplus sent to Linus Pauling his first revision of the book. Many of the revisions that Karplus was making did not fall in line with those that Pauling and E. [...]

[Part 3 of 4] During its first eighteen years in print, Linus Pauling and E. Bright Wilson, Jr.’s Introduction to Quantum Mechanics sold over 17,000 copies.  Heartened by the success of the first edition, Pauling wrote to his co-author in November 1953, It seems to me that the book has been successful enough to justi

[Part 2 of 4] In 1926, while still in Europe completing his Guggenheim fellowship, Pauling attended history’s first full-term lecture on the new concept of wave mechanics as applied to quantum theory. This course, taught by Arnold Johannes Willhelm Sommerfeld, a renowned German theoretical physicist and a pioneer of q

[Ed. Note: Spring 2010 marks the seventy-fifth anniversary of the publication of Linus Pauling and E. Bright Wilson, Jr.'s landmark textbook, Introduction to Quantum Mechanics.  This is post 1 of 4 detailing the authoring and impact of Pauling and Wilson's book.] “…the replacement of the old quantum theory by the q

[Part 2 of 2] Amidst the huge number of Linus Pauling’s publications, speeches, personal books, and letters held in the Pauling collection, you will also find a section dedicated to Ava Helen Pauling. Although much smaller in size than her husband’s treasure trove, the series still contains a sizable number of i

[Part 1 of 2] On May 12, 1910, Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin – a renowned X-ray crystallographer and long-time friend of both Linus and Ava Helen Pauling – was born in Cairo, Egypt. In honor of the hundredth anniversary of her birth, today’s and Thursday’s posts will be devoted to the discussion of not only Hodgk

“Uncover a red doing his stuff on a college faculty and a hue and cry is raised over ‘academic freedom,’ as though these people had a God-given right to infect our children with their made-in-Moscow virus….We should understand that this ’cause of peace’ as peddled by the reds is the destr

Sidney Weinbaum, born and raised in Western Russia, came to the U.S. in 1922 after studying at the Charkoff Institute of Technology. He earned a Bachelor of Science degree at Caltech in 1924 before working for several years in the chemical industry. Weinbaum was a talented mathematician and, as chance would have it, met Lin

Documentary filmmaker Jane Nisselson, an OSU Special Collections “Resident Scholar emeritus” whom we featured earlier this month, has posted a four-minute video clip that is worth checking out.  The clip is a compilation of a fraction of the high-definition video that Nisselson and her crew shot of fourteen mol

Life magazine has recently published a series of never-before-seen photographs that document Albert Einstein’s environs on the day that he died.  Taken by photographer Ralph Morse, the images and captions presented on the Life website are interesting for any number of reasons. (See, for instance, this canny meditatio

Dr. Roger Kornberg received the 2010 Linus Pauling Legacy Award this past Tuesday and lectured before a capacity crowd at the Oregon Historical Society’s Miller Pavilion.  Here are a few images from an entertaining and illuminating evening. Fully transcribed video of Dr. Kornberg’s lecture will be made availabl

“The Molecular Basis of Eukaryotic Transcription,” a lecture by 2006 Nobel Chemistry laureate Dr. Roger Kornberg, will be presented at 8:00 PM tonight at the Oregon Historical Society’s Miller Pavilion.  The event, which is sponsored by Oregon State University Libraries, is free and open to the public. Fo

We recently completed and uploaded two more years of the ever-expanding Linus Pauling Day-by-Day project.  With the addition of 1961 and 1962, more than three decades of Linus and Ava Helen Pauling’s lives are now chronicled in exquisite detail.  The mammoth site currently includes summaries of over 92,000 documents