Force of Nature - Part 1 of 2

by Thomas Hager, Jonathan Reese

This full-scale account of one of the greatest scientists of our time draws on private papers, interviews, & previously unpublished documents to reveal the Nobel Prize-winner's extraordinary & often controversial career. B&W illus.

Genres: Science, Biography, History, Nonfiction, Chemistry, Biology

Audio Cassette

First published October 30, 1995

About the author

How science and technology change our lives. I believe in facts.

Reviews

[Carl Gettleman]

It is odd that the only American in history to win two unshared Nobel Prizes is so unknown in his own country. Few people in history have led lives as remarkable as Linus Pauling. He is certainly one of the seminal geniuses of the twentieth century and the magnitude of his contribution to science is without parallel. Before Pauling, chemist studied in great detail how different chemicals reacted to one another. Pauling initiated the quest to understand molecular structure as the basis for understanding chemistry. It was an enormous and complex intellectual undertaking. At the same time he was a man of conscience, deeply involved in preventing thermonuclear war and seeking justice for victims of intolerance and oppression. It cost him during the McCarthy era and beyond. His confidence in his own abilities was legendary and he mentored many future scientists, though I don't think any of his successors were able to make discoveries and contributions as important as his.

[Jo Blakely · Rating 5 out of 5]

Never in a million years would I have thought a biography to be so thrilling. It is, by far, the best biography I have ever read of a man who has since become a hero of mine. An exciting life of discovery and research and circumstances, government, and status quo organizations that thwarted him. That said, he is the only person who has won 2 Nobel prizes in 2 different categories - Peace and Chemistry. He is the father of Quantum Chemistry and one of his prizes was for his work in Sickle Cell Anaemia. He was an activist against Nuclear Bomb Testing. A true humanitarian and inspiration. I highly recommend getting to know this man through this book.

[Lucas · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a monumental work. The only thing I found lacking was that I expected to read more about what were Pauling's reactions to the first protein x-ray structures in the 60s. Still, that does not change the fact that this is an outstanding portrait of a 20th century icon.

[Manolis Politis · Rating 5 out of 5]

Amazing book about an amazing scientist, a brilliant mind, a real force of nature. A star chemist, founder with his influence of the molecular biology. A really full life, a life well lived.

[Lloyd Downey · Rating 5 out of 5]

I can’t quite remember what set me off looking for the biography of Pauling but it was something to do with the story of the competition for finding the structure of DNA. (Where he was pipped at the post...but only just). Maybe I was re-reading “The Double Helix”, by James Watson. Anyway, clearly Pauling was an outstanding chemist and thinker...and I’ve found this biography fascinating ....especially for the treatment Pauling copped for his anti nuclear activites.
Munich
It was in Munich where Pauling really seemed to get launched with a new way of thinking about chemical bonding which opened up whole new worlds for him.
At a certain point, an electron would jump to the new atom, and an electron exchange would begin taking place billions of times every second. In a sense, the electrons would be unable to tell which nucleus was their own. It was this interchange, Heitler and London believed, that provided the energy to draw the two atoms together. Their calculations indicated that the electron density tended to concentrate in the area between the nuclei, thus lessening the electrostatic repulsion between the two positively charged cores. At a certain point, that positive-positive repulsion would balance the energy of the electron exchange, setting up a chemical bond with a definite length.
But by the time he set sail on the first of September to return to America, he was committed to applying Heitler and London's resonance interpretation of chemical bonding to all types of questions about chemical structure. It would form the basis of much of his work for the next decade.
The Bond
Pauling was unique in combining both deep mathematical and physical knowledge with the training and worldview of a chemist. Quantum mechanics had opened up a new vista here, promising a vast new field of chemical applications, especially in relation to the question of the chemical bond.
Observers would later call this Pauling's "chemical intuition." The phrase is not quite right, though; it smacks too much of the emotional, the irrational. Pauling's ability was entirely rational, based on thousands of hours of careful reading, mentally pruning, sorting, and filing tens of thousands of chemical facts.
Pauling, however, knew that most hypothetical structures would be unlikely for one reason or another on chemical grounds. The atoms would prefer to fit in a more limited number of ways. Before starting, he could eliminate most of the unreasonable ideas and get down to a small number of most likely candidates.
Mustering everything he knew about chemistry and physics, and adding to it his new interest in model building, Pauling was able to leap to a solution where others were left mired in a swamp of confusing x-ray data.
When he returned to Pasadena in the fall of 1930, Pauling immediately put a new graduate student, Lawrence Brockway, to work building an electron-diffraction machine. It took two years to get it running properly, but it eventually became a workhorse of Pauling's laboratory and one of the most important scientific tools at Caltech. Over the next twenty-five years, Pauling, and his students and co-workers, would use it to work out the structures of some 225 molecules.
And here was a basic insight: The greater the overlap of orbitals from two atoms, the more exchange energy was created and the stronger the bond.
He kept working for hours. Using the same basic approach, he found he could add more electrons to his calculations and derive the features of more complex molecules. The ability to hybridize the physicists' subshells into new orbitals opened the door to explaining the structure of a number of molecules, such as the bonding pattern found in certain cobalt and platinum compounds. One by one, under Pauling's pen, the physicists' new mechanics was proving out the chemists' ideas. "I was so excited and happy, I think I stayed up all night, making, writing out, solving the equations, which were so simple that I could solve them in a few minutes," he remembered.
Over the next two months he worked hard polishing and expanding his findings into what would become one of the most important papers in the history of chemistry. In it he presented six rules for the shared electron bond. The first three, restatements of Lewis's, Heitler's, London's, and his own earlier work, noted that the electron-pair bond was formed through the interaction of an unpaired electron on each of two atoms; that the spins of the electrons had to be opposed; and that once paired, the two electrons could not take part in additional bonds. His last three rules were new. One stated that the electron exchange terms for the bond involved only one wave function from each atom; another, that available electrons in the lowest energy levels would form the strongest bonds. Pauling's final rule asserted that of two orbitals in an atom, the one that could overlap the most with an orbital from another atom would form the strongest bond and that the bond would tend to lie in the direction of that concentrated orbital. This allowed the prediction and calculation of bond angles and molecular structures.
Appropriately for his audience of mathematics-shy chemists, Pauling did not present lengthy mathematical proofs of his rules, for, as he wrote in the paper, "even the formal justification of the electron-pair bond in the simplest cases . . . requires a formidable array of symbols and equations."
Resonance
Einstein may simply have been brushing off another newshound, but Pauling's interpretation of the chemical bond was complicated when carried out with any mathematical rigor—certainly too complicated for most chemists. Chemists were not prepared, historically, mathematically, or philosophically, for what Pauling offered them.
What was important was getting into the lab and getting your hands dirty. The laboratory chemists' disdain of theoreticians like Pauling, who looked too much to physics for their inspiration,
From the physics side, researchers like Slater and London continued to refine the mathematics of blended wave functions, working out the structure of simple molecules from physical first principles. Their impact on chemistry was muted, however, because they had not mastered the huge masses of empirical facts important to chemists, did not share the same worldview, and did not know which questions were important. They were not, in short, chemists.
As the years went by, Mulliken and a small band of followers would continue to improve their molecular-orbital approach, refining the equations and using it to successfully attack a number of problems. Twenty years later, a new generation of chemists would come to prefer it over Pauling's approach. But in the 1930s, Mulliken's ideas would be lost in a blizzard of razzle-dazzle coming from Pasadena.
Using this system, it was now possible to answer old questions such as whether hydrochloric acid, HCl, was ionic or covalent—it was both, Pauling discovered, in the ratio 20: 80.
Fluorine, for example—the most electron-hungry of all elements—was at the far end of the scale. Lithium was toward the other. The bond in the compound they formed, lithium fluoride, was almost 100 percent ionic. Iodine was somewhere toward the middle of Pauling's scale, and the lithium iodide bond therefore had more covalent character. By comparing a number of such pairs, he was able to map a relative property he called electronegativity and assign values to various elements. These values in turn could be used to predict bond type and strength in many molecules, including those for which no experimental data were available. Between lectures at MIT, he wrote up his ideas in a paper that would become another in the "Nature of the Chemical Bond".
Pauling's electronegativity scale was one of his least theoretically well founded ideas and one of his most influential. It was a number of steps removed from any rigorous grounding in quantum mechanics but was easily grasped by chemists......."About 1933 or 1934 I gave up on the idea of myself making very complicated quantum-mechanical calculations about molecular structure," he said. "I made a lot of simple quantum-mechanical calculations and drew conclusions, and realized that if you could ever make really accurate quantum-mechanical calculations you wouldn't learn anything from them because they would just agree with the experiment."
Slowly, his new vision of chemistry began to be accepted by other chemists. The reasons were manifold: the open and accepting atmosphere for new ideas at Caltech, his ability to speak the language of chemists, his eagerness to travel widely to spread his ideas, his unique ability to blend structural studies and quantum theory, and his courage in publishing theoretical insights without a rigorous grounding in hard mathematics.
The Science of Man
Protein chemistry was a large and somewhat disjointed field, and Pauling started teaching himself about it through his usual exhaustive process, digesting a vast review of the scientific literature while keeping an eye out for entry points, places where his knowledge of chemistry could offer an insight.
The Fabric and the Chain
The Grand Plan
Schroedinger's book [“What is life?”] exerted a powerful influence upon young postwar physicists, many of whom became attracted to biology because of it and devoted themselves to the search for the new laws of physics waiting to be discovered in the cytoplasm of living cells. Pauling thought the book was hogwash. No one had ever demonstrated the existence of anything like "negative entropy," and the gene was most likely a protein chain,
Then, Pauling said, "it was obvious—to me at any rate—what the answer was to why an enzyme is able to speed up a chemical reaction by as much as 10 million times. It had to do this by lowering the energy of activation—the energy of forming the activated complex. It could do this by forming strong bonds with the activated complex, but only weak bonds with the reactants or products." In Pauling's view the enzyme's binding site was a close enough fit to a target molecule to loosely grab hold of it but fit it tightly only when the target was eased into a bent or strained position. The enzyme acted somewhat like a set of molecular pliers,
This prescient vision of a possible duplex nature of the gene was articulated four years before the discovery of the double helix structure of DNA.
England
With one of the new electron microscopes you could make out the shape of the Empire State Building—although nothing of its interior structure—and cars would show up as little dots. You could measure the sizes of the cars with semipermeable membranes or ultracentrifuges. But then would come a gap. The next step would
[Bragg] never understood biology very well and thought that proteins were in any case much to large and complex to attack with X -rays. But Perutz was a tireless and optimistic worker with enough promising results to interest Bragg in proteins as an x-ray-analysis challenge, a sort of supermineral puzzle. By the time Pauling arrived in England, Bragg had secured enough funding to sustain Perutz, a young co-worker, John Kendrew, and two research assistants, and their results
Attack of the Primitives
Pauling, like all scientists, was a product of the Enlightenment. Like many Enlightenment philosophers, he had replaced God with Reason, and he believed in the steady upward progress of society based on the application of rational thought and the scientific method. Knowledge was the key. Pauling's morality grew out of what he knew to be true; he knew that he was a rational person, and he believed that other rational persons would, with sufficient knowledge, come to conclusions similar to his own. His beliefs mirrored those of many other leftists and liberals during the period from the Depression to the early 1960s. A number of scientists flirted with communism and stayed with left-wing politics because these were systems based on reason and rationality. Researchers like Bernal and the Joliot-Curies in France turned to the Left because they found there a scientific approach to human affairs. The socialist idea of greatest good for the greatest number made statistical sense. The Soviet Union might not be perfect in this analysis, but at least it had taken a brave and necessary step on the path of human advancement by applying reason to human affairs, by elevating scientists to the top of the social hierarchy and making rational five-year plans. Capitalism, by comparison, elevated industrialists and rewarded greed.
That he was now at the far left end of the probability curve therefore did not matter. He was still a valid data point. In America, he had the right to express any opinions he liked. This was, as far as Pauling was concerned, a scientific fact. That kept him going. And there was another reason he continued to speak out. "Most other scientists had stopped. I could understand that. I could understand why some thought it was just too much of a sacrifice. They knew they could lose their jobs. They might not be able to continue their scientific work. I felt the same way," he said of the McCarthy period, "but I kept on in order to retain the respect of my wife."
The Secret of Life
Every protein researcher in the world immediately recognized the magnitude of Pauling's work. [Publication of seven papers on protein structures....including one for collagen as three helixes twisted around each other to form a single cable]. The proposed structures were complete and extraordinarily detailed; in a field where nothing like this had ever appeared, suddenly everything had appeared: It was as though a single composer had debuted seven symphonies on the same day.
Originally, the military had overseen loyalty reviews and hearings, but now, faced with a new influx of civilian cases, the system had been revamped to provide more nonmilitary input. Behind the window dressing, however, the loyalty program still amounted to a shadow legal system. Nonmilitary scientists applying for work on classified government contracts would have their security files reviewed by the area commanding general. Questionable activities or associations would send the subjects' files to a regional personnel security board. The board had the power to revoke clearance—discharging the subject from any classified project—without ever seeing the person or presenting evidence.
The only recourse for blacklisted scientists was to appeal to the Industrial Employment Review Board (IERB), where for the first time they were offered the chance to present their cases in person, with counsel. IERB hearings were a bit like Kafka rewriting Alice in Wonderland—hearings structured like trials, held outside the legal system, after a verdict had already been passed, with military men judging the political activities of civilians—yet at least they offered the chance for face-to-face questioning and cross-examination and lawyers. After the IERB passed judgment, there was nowhere else to go. The decision of the panel was final.
The loyalty program did not turn up any atomic spies, but it had the practical effect of silencing dissent.
The Prize
After a few days in Bangkok, the Paulings flew to Japan. Pauling was known there not only for his scientific work but for his work against the bomb. He was mobbed. In Tokyo and Kyoto his lectures were so popular that hundreds of people had to be turned away—in two cases leading to damage as people tried to force their way in.
Fallout
Pauling realized that the AEC's interpretation of the data sounded innocuous because it focused on individuals rather than groups.
It was an effective public relations campaign that succeeded in equating anti-nuclear activists like Pauling with anti-Americanism and pro-communism. But the strategy helped to derail the presidential candidacy of Adlai Stevenson, who advocated a test ban asTeller's "clean bomb" idea in the summer of 1957 "seemed to serve effectively as propaganda to stop, for awhile, the growing concern about the horrors of nuclear weapons and nuclear war.".....It was Teller who pushed for the development of the hydrogen bomb when others advised caution; Teller whose testimony helped strip Oppenheimer of his security clearance; Teller whose close advisory relationship with Lewis Strauss and Eisenhower made him the nation's most powerful scientist in deciding the direction of the U.S. bomb program; passionate, obsessive, tenacious Teller, with his hints of omnipotent knowledge gleaned from highly classified files, who came up with the "clean bomb" idea.
When it was over, Pauling felt as though he had debated the devil. Teller had deflected real issues and used public relations tricks to make everything sound fine and fool the American people into a false sense of complacency.
The Subcommittee
Six months earlier, promoting the idea of a test ban would have been considered evidence of Communist subversion. Now it was official government policy.....But the worst that the FBI could conclude after its twelve years of investigation was that "for years Pauling has been an intense publicity seeker. . . . He is a highly individualistic, egotistical personality.".....[This is an appailing chapter in US history....supposedly the land of the free and where free speech is a right].
The three nuclear powers had tested sixty-three bombs in 1958—one-third of the total number tested since World War II—all in the space of ten months.....Political pressure grew to strip the AEC of its health-related responsibilities, which Pauling recommended be given to the U.S. Public Health Service.
Peace
"The fight for peace," he told the crowd, "cannot be carried on independently of the fight for freedom."....By the time the testing frenzy ended in late November, the Soviet Union had tested fifty bombs—roughly one nuclear blast every two days. Pauling estimated that the resulting radiation would create 160,000 birth defects and that the increase in carbon 14 alone would cause 4 million aborted pregnancies, stillbirths, and birth defects over the next several score generations.
Nomads
You know, I didn't enjoy giving these lectures. ... I was doing something that I didn't care to do very much, except for reasons of morality and conviction. I sort of got pushed into this. ... So when I received word in 1963 that I had been given the Nobel Prize, I felt that that showed that the sacrifice that I had made was worthwhile."
He noted to himself: "I suggest a program of (1) Analyzing the world problem; (2) Deciding on some basic questions or possible axioms; (3) Discussing them, and approving or rejecting them (those approved would constitute a system of eth

[Darko Doko · Rating 5 out of 5]

Well this is the way books should be written and then there would be many more readers. I just love Hager s writing style. Enjoyable interesting and full of facts so that I read his whole book of 750 pages in couple of days

[Mark Stidham · Rating 5 out of 5]

A must read for anyone interested in Linus Pauling. It is skillful in presenting science in an accessible way while also portraying a unique and important personality.

[Akumar · Rating 3 out of 5]

One word which comes to your mind as you are finishing this book is "dogged". To the world, Linus Pauling was many things: a brilliant scientist, a crackpot quack, utopian idealist, pinko communist, don quixote, you get the idea. Whatever hat (or beret) he wore, one common trait ran through: doggedness. No matter how much hopeless his stance may be, he was an eternal optimist.
I can not say the same thing about the book sadly. This was my second Thomas Hager book I picked up this year after the alchemy of air which i liked so much I gifted copies of it to friends and family. This book was insipid in comparison. Maybe it was the absence of a context like great wars or hegemonistic dictators, or the subject itself was so predictable. Whatever it was, the book was little informative, less entertaining, and lesser said about its quality of writing, the better.
The subject itself draws your attention: only person in history to have won two unshared Nobels. And when you dig deeper into both the awards you come out with a smidge of a feeling that maybe he could have not got either of them and equally likely he could have got one more in biology.
Anyways, happy reading to all of you!

[Kayla Peacock · Rating 5 out of 5]

Incredible, fascinating biography.

[Bhargav · Rating 5 out of 5]

A remarkable, page-turning biography about the life, work, relationships, and politics of a remarkable man.

[Erik M. Flodin]

Wonderful biography providing insight to a genius that has been overlooked by history.