Mina Carson Interview, Part 2

Dr. Mina Carson. Photo taken by her daughter, Lyn.

[Part 2 of 2 of our exclusive interview with Dr. Mina Carson, author of Ava Helen Pauling: Partner, Activist, Visionary.]

Pauling Blog: How would you describe Ava Helen’s style of activism? I know that Linda Richards used the word “swirled” in reference to it.

Mina Carson: Yeah, I think that’s right. Ava Helen really loved to have a big important correspondence and she was quite honest – I mean she was a good correspondent, she was quite honest in her letters and that’s where you get a lot of her personality, her style. She didn’t suffer fools – what she took to be fools – gladly and she didn’t mince words. At the same time, she was difficult with her kids and she was difficult with some people because she was pretty forceful, but she also liked to flirt and she liked to be nice and she liked to be considerate. So many, many people liked her very much and a number of young women took her as a mentor and model and really worshiped her and I think that’s fascinating.

But her style, she did do committee work for a while – actually off and on for her whole adult life – but it wasn’t her favorite thing to do. I think she liked to give speeches, I mean she developed that – she deprecated her own ability but I think that was just “oh I’m not so good at that…if you think I have something of worth to offer then I’m happy to make a speech.” But that’s really what she liked to do. And she loved to travel with Linus and she loved to travel period. She loved to be made much of – I mean who doesn’t? But she loved to be made much of, so that style of being able to travel around the world and connect her Australian friends with her Canadian friends and with her South American friends, that was her all the way through.

And when she was disgusted with the red baiting she saw in some American chapters of WILPF and the Women’s International League and some of the European chapters as well, and when Women Strike for Peace came along in the early ’60s, she didn’t jump ship, she was loyal to WILPF, she didn’t jump ship. But she immediately joined WSP as a number of her WILPF colleagues did, and that really suited her because it was a no holds barred “let’s do this action here, let’s kind of shock them a little, let’s show them that women in hats can really live on the dangerous side.” And she loved that. So she was very much a maker of connections rather than a person behind the scenes who liked to work on committees and start a project that would go on for years. Yeah, I really think that’s right.

PB: How about her style of feminism? It seems to have evolved over time.

MC: It did. And at the same time she ended up in the camp of liberal feminism really about the time that Betty Friedan published The Feminine Mystique. And of course she had a very strong critique of Betty Friedan, which was interesting. She felt that Friedan put down homemakers and homemaking, and of course Ava Helen had so much ego tied up in that identity that she rejected it. But at the same time she was what we call “liberal feminist” and she, for the most part, believed that women should be offered the same, or earn the same opportunities as men. And that she really didn’t like to look out into the world and see young women not taking opportunities – you know, not finishing college as she had not and not creating opportunities for themselves to have independence, financial independence and professional independence. From time to time, she loved to go back into the history of women through the world – not very carefully, but in broad strokes.

It’s interesting to try to figure out if she was an essentialist, believing that women are essentially different from men. She kind of skirted that. She was more of a functionalist in that she believed that women had filled certain roles because their societies has pressured them into doing that because they did it well, not because they were born to certain fates as people. It’s hard to sort out. She’s not a deep thinker – she’s an eager thinker, she’s a smart person – but she’s not really a philosopher. It’s fun to go through her papers. It’s fun to follow the threads of argument. I do not put her down. She makes better speeches than I do. But what I’m saying is that it doesn’t repay, really probing her philosophy, because that wasn’t her thing. She was more of a political activist, political thinker, than a philosopher.

Ava Helen in the 1950s.

PB: The title of the book is Ava Helen Pauling: Activist, Partner, Visionary. We’ve touched on the activist and partner piece of it, but I wonder if you could talk a little bit more about the visionary piece.

MC: She really could see, as did Linus. And I think she saw without the deep scientific insight that he had. She saw immediately that if we continued down the road, for example of atmospheric testing, that we would destroy the next generation’s Earth and, in many cases, lives. She felt passionately about the public health risks and the ecological risks of atmospheric testing and the nuclear race in general. She was infuriated by our dedication of such a huge percentage of public funds to the military. I’ve made the point – and it’s not a very profound point – that she and Linus were not pacifists per se. They certainly were interventionists in World War II, but they did not see another conflict that they believed that the United States should enter over the rest of their lives. And they were internationalists and they believed that human energies and human resources would go a lot more usefully into maintaining peace and building education and so on.

She left part of her money in her will to Sempervirens, a California Redwoods Foundation, and was very much involved as she had the energy to be in her last few years as she was ill, but very much involved in saving the wilds. It was a natural trajectory for her interests to move toward ecology and environmentalism and so she really was, in that sense, a visionary. And I think that, again, she had many allies. And it’s not that she had really a number of original thoughts, it’s that she could see the interconnections of all these issues and it was clear to her and it made her very impatient and very angry. And of course, a number of us can certainly understand that passion.

PB: Where do you think she was happiest? Do you think it was the ranch?

MC: I wonder. She loved the ranch and she loved the times that she and Linus – she remarked at one point that “I can’t believe we haven’t seen a single soul in a week, two weeks, and that has not happened since we were married.” But she thrived on human contact, so I think that she saw the ranch as he did, as a kind of blessed relief from the relentless social and political round that they had. But I suspect that she was happiest in the middle of an adoring crowd. I just suspect that in some cases, at least, that the celebratory moments were the times when she was happiest.

But it could well have been too, as she got older – and this is really important – that her grandkids remember her, Cheryl Pauling for example, remembers her as a wonderful grandmother. And Linda’s and Barclay’s kids too, sensitive to their uniqueness, sensitive to their needs, their desires, their needs as children. It’s so interesting. And Stephanie makes the same comment about her kids with Linus Jr. So I think that she did like the large family gatherings. There was often friction, because she had raised a bunch of strong-willed kids. So it can be difficult. At the same time, she wasn’t one to wilt under difficulty and conflict. She didn’t have a thin skin. So I think she liked being in a lot of different places, but probably not home alone with young children when she was a young woman.

Thanksgiving with Linda Pauling Kamb and her family, 1968.

PB: What were some surprises for you as you went through this process?

MC: I was really surprised about how active and open their sex life was in the 1920s. I mean, I was really just flabbergasted and really enjoyed Linus’ letters to her and really was taken aback. And that led me to search the secondary literature on college students’ sexuality in the 1920s. And I found that there is not a whole lot of literature. I tried a whole bunch of search terms and I really need to follow that up because I think that’s fascinating – you’d think that there would be much more research on that. And I’ve a couple of scholarly friends that I want to follow up on after the fact just because it’s fascinating. So that was a big surprise.

I think that I wasn’t surprised but I was interested to see how Linus matured as a parent. When his kids hit their 20s, all of a sudden he was very involved as a parent. And I think it was fun to see – it’s not surprising when you think about who he was. He was pretty laissez faire when the kids were small, but at the same time he didn’t really know what to do with them and he was pretty uninvolved with their day to day raising. Whereas when they became young adults he could talk with them. He had things to write to them about and he had money that they wanted and he had ways to control their lives in that way. So that was also interesting to watch the trajectory of his parenting over time.

And again, I wasn’t surprised but I was really deeply touched by his devotion to her and by his massive – I mean, he was shocked when she died. He was shocked at his own response. And he writes about his response and that was really interesting, that he writes some pieces for his kids about how he is doing. And he did this off and on throughout his life as if he were his own research subject. And he shocked himself “Oh my gosh, I have emotions and these are what they seem to be!”

Linus and Ava Helen at Deer Flat Ranch, 1977.

PB: Is there something, a cache of materials or a specific document that you couldn’t find or that doesn’t exist that you really wish did exist or that you had found?

MC: Yes, several. I’m really sad that we do not have her love letters. I’m deeply sad about that because her personality kind of has to be reconstructed from the few letters that survived the mowing down of her correspondence by family members. And I so understand what they were doing, I so understand it, I just wish I had them. I wish we could have talked with Linda [Pauling Kamb]. She was so understandably tied up with Barclay’s recent death. And I was able to use the wonderful interviews that she did with Tom Hager, so I don’t feel like I was completely in the dark about her retrospective ideas about her family. To have those materials that Hager gathered was just really valuable. Yeah I wish I had more of her. We have so much of her personal correspondence as an adult and I just wish I had a little more.

…If I could go back in – I mean I’m very glad to have this project done and launched but if I could go back in, I did love casting it as a family history but I think in that sense I slighted some of the important points about women’s committee work that I could have made in the book. And I would be interested to see if reviewers find that a weak point. I think one of the strong points of the book is the history of the marriage and my attempt to connect that with some notion of 20th century marriages. But we’ll see about that too. But I think one weak point is not having done more with the importance of reinterpreting women’s committee work in the 20th century. So that’s a flaw.

PB: Well, the last question is what’s next up for you?

MC: I have no idea! I have like fourteen different interests. I really love the history of photography and I have a history of photography blog, so to beef that up is really, I have time for that now. And as I mentioned, I am really interested in what seems to be Lacanian in terms of this lack of research on college students lives in the 1920s and I’m really interested in that. I’m fascinated by the history of psychotherapy and haven’t yet written my grand book on that. So I think the short answer is I’m not sure. I need to decide really soon but I don’t know what I’m doing!

Ava Helen Pauling: Partner, Activist, Visionary is available for purchase from the Oregon State University Press.

Barry Commoner, 1917-2012

Barry Commoner, ca. 1960s.

On September 30, 2012, Barry Commoner, an important environmentalist and key collaborator with Linus Pauling on the famous United Nations bomb test petition, died in Manhattan.

Commoner, born on May 28, 1917 in Brooklyn, was interested in science from a young age, spending hours examining life through the lens of a microscope. He worked his way through college and earned his bachelor’s degree in Zoology from Columbia University in 1937. From there he took his Ph. D. in cellular biology from Harvard University in 1941.

After receiving his doctorate, Commoner taught for a few years at Queen’s College, to which he would return later in life. He served in the Naval Air Corps during World War II and moved on to teaching at Washington University in St. Louis shortly after war’s end. In 1966 he became the founding director of the Center for the Biology of Natural Systems, a research institute that continues to this day to investigate and remedy occupational and environmental threats to public health.

Commoner was not just an influential scientist, but a noteworthy grassroots activist as well. He has been called “the Paul Revere of Ecology” and the “father of the environmental movement” for promoting awareness of key environmental issues such as radioactive fallout from nuclear weapons testing, the consequences of nuclear energy, waste management and recycling, and the overall environmental impact of human existence.  He strongly believed in the importance of democracy and the need to empower informed choice through the free dissemination of scientific information. He advocated for scientific collaboration on key issues which affect the global population.

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Original sponsors of the United Nations Bomb Test Petition.

Commoner’s first major activity as an activist was thrust upon him following Linus Pauling’s famed anti-nuclear speech at Washington University on May 15, 1957. Directly after the lecture, Pauling, Commoner and a fellow professor, Edward Condon, met in Commoner’s office to draft the “Appeal by American Scientists to the Governments and Peoples of the World,” a petition demanding the cessation of nuclear bomb testing worldwide. The three scientists were inspired by mounting evidence of negative health consequences caused by radioactive fallout from nuclear tests conducted in Earth’s atmosphere. This petition was immediately signed by about 100 scientists at Washington University.

Within a week, Commoner had formulated a plan to collect the signatures of scientists nationwide by sending out Pauling’s finalized petition to contacts a multiple universities. By the end of June, 2,000 signatures had been obtained and Commoner and Pauling began to spread the petition all over the world. “We were all as pleased as you must have been to discover how many signatures had been obtained on the Appeal,” Commoner wrote to Pauling at the time. “We are all quite convinced that the Appeal expresses a very widely held view among scientists.”

He was right: by January 13, 1958 the petition had been signed by 9,235 people and by July 3, 1958 it had been signed by 11,038 people from 49 nations.

Linus Pauling sent copies of the massive petition to President Dwight Eisenhower and United Nations Secretary General Dag Hammarskjold, but initially received little support from either the federal government or the UN.  Congressional hearings on nuclear fallout held contemporary to the petition did not yield sufficient evidence to stop the United States’  testing program, leaving the community of activists to continue their fight.

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Time magazine cover, February 2, 1970.

Barry Commoner was a vocal proponent of the widespread dissemination of scientific information to the public. He believed that as many people as possible should be involved in the dialogue over moral decisions, such as the hazards of fallout and the political necessity of nuclear bomb testing. In a speech given at a symposium of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) Committee on the Social Impacts of Science, held in Indianapolis on December 29, 1957, Commoner advocated for continued research on nuclear testing and for open communication about this research.

What appears to trouble the public is not that political opponents have disagreed on the nuclear test issue, but that the opinions of scientists have been marshaled on both sides of the debate. This appears to violate science’s traditional devotion to objectively discernible truth…In this situation the available facts are often not sufficient conclusively to support or contradict a given explanatory idea, and therefore opposing ideas will for the time flourish together…The remedy is apparent if not easy: more research…What we call a scientific truth emerges from the scientists’ insistence on free publication of their own observations. This permits the rest of the scientific community to check the data and evaluate the interpretations so that eventually a commonly held body of facts and ideas come into being…The development of a scientific truth is a direct outcome of the degree of communication which normally exists in science…The public must be given enough information about the need for testing and the hazards of fallout to permit every citizen to decide for himself whether nuclear tests should go on or be stopped…scientists must take pains to disclaim any special moral wisdom on this matter [because]…a public informed on this issue is the only true source of moral wisdom that must determine our nation’s policy on the testing – and the ultimate use of – nuclear weapons.

In February 1958, Commoner began to organize The Citizen’s Committee for Atomic Information to educate the people of St. Louis about the realities of radioactive fallout. This committee, along with two St. Louis area dental schools, went on to conduct the Baby Tooth Survey, which investigated the concentrations of Strontium-90 found in the human body as a result of nuclear fallout.  This philosophy of promoting grassroots direct democracy would guide Commoner’s environmental efforts for the rest of his life.

Although the United Nations Bomb Test Petition did not affect immediate policy change, it did yield important lasting effects. In 1963, Linus Pauling won the Nobel Peace Prize for his nuclear test ban petition efforts. The prize came in the wake of the Partial Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, which prohibited above-ground nuclear explosions and was signed to by the governments of the U.S., U.K. and U.S.S.R. This treaty was influenced both by the bomb test petition and by the Baby Tooth Survey.

Barry Commoner spent the rest of his life advocating for social justice in many areas, including environmental pollution, war, and racial and sexual inequality – all of which he believed were interconnected issues. He wrote five books about the intersection of environmental causes and social politics and ran for U.S. President as the head of his own Citizen’s Party in 1980, receiving 234,000 votes. Commoner advocated a prevention-based approach to environmental sustainability that never fully caught on politically in the U.S., but which a growing number now believe may be a key to solving many of the economic and environmental problems that we face today.

Ava Helen Finds Her Voice

Ava Helen Pauling, 1950.

[Part 2 of 3; "The Atomic Awakening of Ava Helen Pauling," by Ingrid Ockert]

The Dawning of the Cold War

While Ava Helen was busy volunteering for radical women’s groups in the 1940s and 1950s, she became a participant in another revolutionary group: the Atomic Scientists’ Movement. The bombing of Japan at the end of World War II left American physicists with very mixed feelings. Initially many American physicists were simply relieved to no longer be at war. I.I. Rabi, a scientist who served as the director of the defensive radar developments at MIT and worked on the Manhattan Project, remarked that he was “frankly pleased, terrified, and to an even greater extent embarrassed when contemplating the results of [my] wartime efforts.” A survey of physicists in September 1945 revealed that 66.5% of physicists approved of the government’s decision to bomb Japan.

Gradually however, these feelings of relief turned into remorse and anxiety. After all, as historian Alice Kimball Smith noted in her study of the physicists, “Scientists are for the most part human and sensitive, and if rationality served them well, it spared very few of them, sooner or later, from feelings of direct responsibility.” Even scientists like Linus Pauling, who had nothing to do with the construction of the bomb, felt in some way accountable for the atrocities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. As historian Jessica Wang explains in her journal article. “Scientists and the Problem of the Public:”

The atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945 provided a grim counterpoint to the elation with which Manhattan Project scientists had celebrated the Trinty Test a month earlier. Even as the war ended, scientists began to imagine the terrifying possibilities of the next great war.

As American soldiers returned from the battlefront, physicists returned to their pre-war duties within research laboratories. It took months for many of these physicists to process the full implications of the Manhattan Project. Feelings of guilt, anxiety, and fear began to ferment within the minds of American physicists. “As more information began to accrue about the real-world effects of the bomb, including the new threat of widespread radiation poisoning,” historian Thomas Hager summarized in his Pauling biography Force of Nature, “a sense of guilt spread across the scientific community – especially that portion involved in designing and building new weapons.” As the radioactive fallout of Hiroshima settled across the Pacific Ocean, American scientists started to take sides in the new Cold War.

The Awakening of Atomic Activists

A small group of plucky, prominent physicists, including Eugene Rabinowitch, H.H. Goldsmith, Harold C. Urey, Leo Szilard and Katherine Way advocated for international nuclear disarmament. They organized the Federation of Atomic Scientists (FAS) in October 1945. The FAS united small pockets of concerned scientists, such as the Oak Ridge Engineers and Scientists and the Association of Los Alamos. The FAS intended to lead inquiries into the implications of atomic energy, shape national and international atomic policy, and raise national awareness of the potential dangers of nuclear energy. But members of FAS had an even larger ambition in mind. They sought to redefine scientists as “part of a larger public, within which [scientists] participated as equals, but offered their expertise for the purpose of information, consideration, and criticism.” Previously, scientists were isolated in laboratories and separated from the cultural implications of their technology. The FAS sought to forge a partnership between scientists and the general public. Scientists, they concluded, neither “could be or should be separated from the social and political ramifications of technological innovation.” And, by continuation, an informed public would be an empowered public that could wisely navigate through the emotional rhetoric that shaped atomic legislation.

The FAS facilitated the conciliation between scientists and the public through a strong public education campaign. The National Committee on Atomic Information, a subset of FAS that organized in November 1945, was the public face of the Atomic Scientists movement. The NCAI reached out to “labor movements, educational organizations, religious groups, and professional associations for cooperation and assistance in appealing to the public.” It connected local scientists at speaking engagements with youth groups, women’s clubs, and religious centers. The NCAI sponsored educational science fairs and distributed study kits, educational films, pamphlets, and moralistic plays. Atomic Information, the public mouthpiece for NCAI and FAS, was first printed in March 1945 and was sent out to 10 million addresses. It presented serious scientific articles alongside quirky cartoons and enthusiastic political commentary.

Charles Coryell and Linus Pauling, 1935.

The Paulings quickly became active participants of the Atomic Scientists Movement. Many of the scientists involved in the movement were good friends of the Paulings. Charles Coryell, one of the young men who founded FAS, was one of Linus’ former students. The Federation of Atomic Scientists recruited Linus as a high profile public speaker as it lobbied Congress for a civilian Atomic Energy Commission in the spring of 1946. That same spring, the director of the NCAI, Daniel Melcher, approached Albert Einstein with the idea of creating a fundraising society, chaired by scientific stars like Einstein, that would raise monetary support for the FAS directly from the American public. This society, the Emergency Committee of Atomic Scientists, became incorporated in October of 1946. Linus Pauling eagerly accepted their invitation to join and raised money for the FAS’ public education campaign. The FAS’ successful public outreach campaign cultivated a national interest in the implications of atomic energy. The demand for scientists who could speak on atomic matters steadily increased.

Out of his own feelings of moral responsibility, Linus began accepting invitations for speaking engagements. Linus was a well-respected lecturer on scientific topics; his classroom lectures were engaging and humorous. But Linus’ first talks on the dangers of nuclear warfare were dry; he struggled to connect to a general audience over political and social issues. Fortunately, Ava Helen quickly understood what was going wrong. “You’re not convincing,” she confided to him after one lecture. “You give the audience the impression that you are not sure about what you are saying.” Working with organizations like the Womens International League for Peace and Freedom, the American Civil Liberties Union and Union Now had also taught Ava how to connect with ordinary citizens over political issues. Ava drew upon these skills as she helped teach Linus to establish a rapport with his audience. As biographer Thomas Hager describes,

Ava accompanied Pauling to almost all of his talks, sat in the front row of the audience, and listened carefully to his delivery. She also kept an eye on the room, saw what worked and what did not, and afterward critiqued his performance.

The Paulings also read up on the politics of atomic energy until Linus felt that he could confidently “speak on his own authority.” Under Ava’s watchful eye, Linus transformed from a college professor into a public scientist.

Ava Helen Finds Her Voice

Ava Helen Pauling speaking at Women Strike for Peace rally, San Francisco, August 1961.

But Ava Helen wasn’t going to let Linus have all of the fun. After years of working behind the scenes, Ava Helen finally began to give public speeches in 1957. Initially, Ava Helen gave speeches centering on the Paulings’ international travels. By the early 1960s, Ava Helen was regularly speaking to women’s clubs and religious groups on topics concerning peace, science, and women’s rights. Although Ava Helen didn’t receive the same high billing as Linus, she easily reached an audience that the FAS was eager to connect to: women. American women had become fierce cold warriors after World War II. As wives and mothers, they were expected to protect their own families and communities. The moral responsibilities of women grew during the 1960s to extend outside the home. Women needed to defend their community against any environmental hazards, like nuclear fallout or toxic pesticides. A 1962 poster advertising the group Women for Peace capitalized on these concerns, noting that fallout caused cancer in children and took money away from important social programs. A basic understanding of science became an integral part of a woman’s post-college education.

While she was initially booked for public events as “Mrs. Linus Pauling,” Ava Helen quickly developed her own persona as a public speaker. She spoke almost exclusively to middle class and educated women; commonly appearing at a luncheon for faculty wives or a tea for WILPF members. Ava Helen demurely called herself an “educated layman.” But this was certainly an understatement; Ava Helen had kept pace with her husband for many years. She enjoyed attending scientific conferences with her husband and learning about new scientific studies. Yet the lecture programs written for Ava Helen’s speeches only noted her background in chemistry, stressing her experience in laboratories. At first, it seems odd that Ava Helen would choose to downplay her education and highlight her practical experience. But most of the women who comprised her audience wouldn’t have had a formal scientific education. Some of them might have worked in scientific laboratories during World War II. Many had read articles about the importance of women in laboratories from popular magazine articles. By focusing on her practical experience, Ava Helen carefully aligned herself with her audience.

Rachel Carson.

Interestingly, Ava Helen’s public persona was similar to the persona of Rachel Carson, another successful popular science educator in the 1960s. Ava Helen deeply admired Rachel Carson and called her “fearless and brilliant.” Both Carson and Pauling promoted a “socially engaged understanding of natural sciences.” In David Hecht’s examination of Rachel Carson’s public image, he identifies her as one of the leading non-scientific icons of the environmental movement. Ironically, Hecht notes that Carson increased her scientific credibility among readers by portraying herself as a scientific outsider. As discussed above, Ava Helen had fashioned her self image in a similar way. In fact, both Carson and Pauling framed themselves not as scientists, but as “quiet teacher types.” Depictions of Rachel Carson in popular periodicals labeled her as “shy, courageous, … dutiful, ethical, or quietly farsighted [and] functioned as nonscientific elements in credentialing her as an authority.” Articles about Ava Helen ascribed the same feminine characteristics onto her. Journalists were intrigued by Ava Helen’s “quiet, mischievous strength.” They took great care to stress Ava Helen’s petite physical appearance, her devotion to family, and her supposed affinity for domestic tasks. They also emphasized her strong ethical feelings and earnest desire to educate other women. By stressing the femininity of their subjects, these articles made both women seem familiar, approachable, and trustworthy. Their non-scientific appeal allowed both Carson and Pauling to “bridge the relationship between science and its publics…and [show that] nonexperts could play actual roles in making science, not simply directing its use.”

The Atomic Awakening of Ava Helen Pauling

Ava Helen Pauling, 1927.

[Ed Note: Over the next three weeks we will be publishing a paper, "The Atomic Awakening of Ava Helen Pauling," that was written by Ingrid Ockert.  Ingrid is an Oregon State University alum and a long-time student worker in the Special Collections & Archives Research Center.  In the Spring of 2012 her paper was one of three selected by the OSU Libraries for its annual Library Undergraduate Research Awards.  An accomplished student, Ingrid will begin doctoral studies in the history of science at Princeton University this coming Fall.]

[Part 1 of 3]

Introduction

In 1926, a young Ava Helen Pauling arrived in Munich, Germany, ready for academic adventure. Her husband, Linus Pauling had received a Guggenheim fellowship to study atomic structure and quantum theories at the University of Munich. While Linus learned quantum mechanics from scientific giants like Sommerfeld and Schroedinger, Ava Helen explored German intellectual life. As she recalled later, it was a time of “great excitement and intellectual growth.” Ava Helen visited art museums and natural history collections. She attended scientific lectures in physics and chemistry. She edited Linus’ physics papers and chatted with brilliant scientists. And as Linus learned how to be a scientist, Ava Helen struggled to comprehend her new role as the wife of a scientist.

Ava Helen in Germany, 1927.

Early on their relationship, Linus and Ava had been united by their passion for chemistry. They collaborated on lab experiments, scientific calculations, and chemical models. But, since the birth of their son, Linus Jr., in 1925, Ava Helen had become increasingly separated from her husband and the world of science. On an even larger scale, Ava Helen wondered about her own role in the future of humankind. Her personal journal from her year abroad in Germany reveals her search for a clear identity. Ava Helen’s journal is filled with chemical notations and elemental symbols. It also includes reviews of anthropology and sociology texts, books that Ava Helen read to understand the roles of women in other cultures. Ava Helen even mentions herself as a Professor among her addresses of other professors at the University of Munich. But ultimately, Ava Helen reached a startlingly pessimistic conclusion on her role in society. “If a woman thinks honestly and clearly,” Ava Helen writes in her journal, “she must soon reach the conclusion that, no matter what life work she chooses, it could be better done by a man.” Ava Helen decided to let go of her own interests in science and to focus her energies on furthering Linus’ career. Upon their return to Cal Tech in 1928, Ava Helen settled into her new role as the professor’s wife, hostess, and caretaker. She was not alone in her conclusions. Many of her contemporaries, American women interested in science in the early 20th century, also decided to bow out of scientific communities. The American women who did try to pursue scientific education and careers found themselves pigeonholed as research assistants and secretaries.

But following the end of World War II, many Americans began to reconsider their previously accepted social roles. Many began to search for new identities. For Ava Helen Pauling, the end of the war provided the catalyst for her change in identity. She, along with thousands of other women, began to advocate for a respected role within American society. By the 1960s, these American women organized political groups and formed the foundations of the modern feminist movement. The end of World War II also prompted members of another major community to realize that they wanted to change their public image. During the early 20th century, physicists had isolated themselves from the American public. Following WWII, these atomic scientists began to envision a new role for themselves as socially responsible, public educators. They began a crusade to educate and reconnect with average Americans. Standing at the crossroads of the feminist and the atomic scientist movements, Ava Helen Pauling joined both groups. At the dawn of the America’s Atomic Age, Ava Helen Pauling recast herself as a feminist activist and an advocate for scientific education.

The Stirrings of a Social Activist

By the 1950s, twenty years after her trip to Germany, Ava Helen was no longer an eager student, but a harried housewife and a mother of four children. Her husband Linus, as she would sadly explain in interviews, needed to devote himself to science. So it was up to Ava Helen to take care of common household tasks. Ava spent her time thinking about what she called “trivial things,” like cleaning dishes, taking their children to the dentist, and paying bills. The Pauling family calendar from 1946 reveals Ava Helen’s busy life: during that year, she spent most of her time taking care of the four children, preparing Linus for business trips, and hosting visiting professors. By the 1950s, Linus had become a respected professor and had received a Nobel for his work in Chemistry. But Linus was well aware of Ava’s sacrifice. He later credited his scientific achievements to his wife, remarking, “I am not smarter than other [scientists]…[but Ava] handled the problems and stresses associated with family, leaving me free to devote all my time to working on the problems I wanted to work on.” While Ava Helen was pleased with her husband’s success, she was frustrated with her own progress in life. The pressure of managing an entire household weighed heavily on her.

Ava Helen at a meeting of women in Japan, 1955.

By the mid-fifties, Ava Helen Pauling began to look for her own direction in life. “Beginning in the forties and fifties,” Ava Helen remembered later in an interview, “I was at an age when I felt that my life could have been different.” The Pauling children were nearly grown, so Ava Helen finally had time to focus on her own interests. She realized that she wanted to be involved in something larger, something socially important. Ava Helen had grown up in a politically active family that encouraged intense debate and social activism. Her mother had been an active member of Oregon’s suffragette movement. Ava Helen was inspired to pursue a similar political course. As Ava Helen later confided in an interview, “I wanted to set the world on fire!”

Ava Helen continued her family’s legacy and became involved in several progressive organizations focused on social change. During World War II, Ava Helen had become an active member of the ACLU and protested the discrimination of Japanese Americans. She also became a member of Union Now, an organization that advocated world government. Ava Helen also grew increasingly aware of women’s issues around this time. “I [felt that] I needed to learn more about women…” she recalled years later, “I became interested to see what other women were doing.” In 1956, Ava Helen also joined another major women’s organization, the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom. Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF) was an organization started by Jane Addams in 1915. By the 1950s, WILPF’s goals included: “the education of youth for peace, measures to remove the economic causes of war; and total and universal disarmament.” In the 1960s, Ava Helen would become a founding member of WILPF’s two offshoots: Women Strike for Peace (WSP) and Women Act for Disarmament (WAD).

Fanning the Flames of Future Feminists

Women’s organizations like WILPF, WSP, and WAD served important functions for women’s rights in the years before the 1960s. As Susan M. Hartmann explains in her book From Margin to Mainstream, these groups “not only motivated and trained women for public office, they also operated as pressure groups. In the post-suffrage era, substantial numbers of women organized to shape public opinion, mobilize voters behind female defined issues, and exert direct pressure on legislatures and administrators.” The women who worked within women’s organizations in the 1940s and 1950s gained the skills necessary to become the feminist leaders of the 1960s.

Ava Helen at the WILPF national meeting, Washington D.C., June 1960.

Indeed, while working for WILPF, Ava Helen fully immersed herself in the feminist movement. She believed that world peace would be achieved by the total equality of men and women. Ava Helen had read some early works of feminism published in the 1940s, like Mary Inman’s In Women’s Defense. When Betty Friedan published The Feminine Mystique in 1963, Ava Helen bought the book on the first printing run. She instantly connected to Friedan’s theme and publicly hailed the book as “excellent and provocative.” Like Friedan, Ava Helen believed that a woman did a disservice “to herself and to society and to her children by electing to remain in the home and devot[ing] her full energies to her home.” By working with organizations like WILPF, WSP, and WAD, Ava Helen felt that she was finally serving a larger role in her society.

Ava Helen honed her skills as a public speaker and activist while she organized WILPF events. In 1959, she had been elected the vice president of the American Chapter of WILPF. Ava Helen eagerly organized national conferences. She even helped coordinate the 1964 International Women’s Strike for Peace Rally at the Hague. In 1961, she and Linus worked together to organize a major conference between scientists, writers, and peace activists in Oslo, Norway. Ava Helen emerged from the shadow of her famous husband, as an important public figure.

Linda Richards, Resident Scholar

Linda Richards.

Linda Richards, doctoral candidate in the history of science at Oregon State University, is the first individual to have completed a term as an OSU Libraries Resident Scholar in 2012.  Steeped in the tradition of the activist-scholar, Richards has been discussing nuclear history, environmental justice and non-violent conflict resolution for over twenty-five years.  During her residency, Richards continued her investigations into these themes using the Ava Helen and Linus Pauling Papers, the History of Atomic Energy Collection and the Bart and Sally Hacker Papers.

Titled “Starfish, Fallout Suits, and Human Rights,” Richards’ Resident Scholar presentation started from the premise that “how nuclear history is told matters.”  In exploring this idea, Richards introduced her audience to a number of events important to the history of nuclear energy that were likely unknown to most in attendance.

One such incident is the United Nuclear Corporation’s Church Rock uranium mine contamination, the largest release of radioactive material in U.S. history, which occurred in New Mexico on the Navajo Reservation in July 1979.  The disaster badly contaminated the reservation’s scarce water supply with radioactive pollutants flowing some seventy miles down the Puerco River.  The event took place just a few months after the Three Mile Island accident, but is far less well known to the general public.  As Richards noted

What I have found so far in my research confirms, as Gabrielle Hecht suggested, that radiation health safety is more a reflection of the value of what is being irradiated than how dangerous a substance is….I have [also] found nuclear history is most often told as a technocratic saga of nation states pursuing nuclear weapons superiority and energy independence. This narrative is incomplete because it not only separates the glitz of modern reactors from the rocks and dirt of uranium mines hiding what is polluting and harmful about nuclear technology, but it is missing the dimension of lived human experience, particularly of indigenous peoples’ physical and cultural interaction with nuclear technology.

In her discussion of Linus Pauling’s activism in opposition to atmospheric nuclear testing (including his involvement in the Fallout Suits) Richards likewise introduced a number of historical events that do not typically make their way into the shorthand version of nuclear history.

For example, in May 1958 James Van Allen announced his finding that the Earth is surrounded by belts of high-energy particles that are held in place by magnetic fields – the so-called “Van Allen Belts.”  That very same day, Van Allen signed an agreement to work with the military to test nuclear weapons high in space for purposes of studying the disruption of the belts and of military communication during the event of a nuclear war.  Historian James Fleming was later quoted, “this is the first occasion I’ve ever discovered where someone discovered something and immediately decided to blow it up.”

The most intensely disruptive and longest lasting of these tests was the 1.4-megaton Starfish Prime explosion, which occurred on July 9, 1962. The artificial extension of the Van Allen belts created by the test could be seen across the Pacific Ocean, from Hawaii to New Zealand, lighting up the night sky. The test damaged six satellites that all failed within six months. The explosion also created an electromagnetic pulse that blew out transformers on Hawaii and disrupted the electricity grid.

Richards also recounted, in alarming detail, the extent to which nuclear testing in the 1960s became increasingly extreme.  The largest nuclear device ever detonated was the Soviet’s Tzar Bomba, a 50-megaton bomb tested some eight months before Starfish Prime.  A graphic presented by Richards illustrated the magnitude of this detonation in stark terms.

The impact of the release of radioactive toxins into the environment was a source of great concern to Linus Pauling and is still being studied today.  By some estimates, radioactive fallout will cause around 430,000 fatal cancers by the end of this century.

And it is this human element that, Richards argues, must be included in contemporary historical writing on the nuclear age.  “My dissertation,” she concluded “is premised on the belief that including a human rights dimension into the nuclear narrative destabilizes the disempowerment of an inaccessible technocratic narrative while raising the questions that need to be asked of history.”

For more on the Resident Scholar Program, now entering its fifth year, please see the program homepage and our continuing series of posts on this blog.

Return to Oz

Ava Helen Pauling with a group of women at a restaurant overlooking Sydney Harbor. Australia trip, May 1973.

[Part 2 of 2]

In early 1964, China conducted its first nuclear test, an event that catalyzed the second Australian Congress for International Cooperation and Disarmament, which took place in Sydney from October 25-30, 1964.  Organizer and Australian peace leader Professor Sydney Wright extended an invitation to the Paulings to attend this gathering which they gladly accepted, hoping to arrive early to sight-see around Australia’s less populated northern and western regions.

As in 1959, the second conference was shrouded in controversy. This time the Australian federal government refused to grant visas to the two delegates that were from Iron Curtain countries, Russian Orthodox Church Archbishop Alexei and Mayor of Leningrad Mr. Isaev. While it was no secret that Pauling already did not hold the Australian government in high regard, the barring of the Soviets from the conference caused his opinion to go “right down because of this action,” saying “there is no excuse for this backwards attitude.” By this point in Australia, certain smaller-scale social events had become political in nature too: the Lord Mayor of Melbourne, for one, outright refused to hold a civic reception for overseas guests of the congress.

At the meeting itself, the Paulings gave two key lectures. Ava Helen delivered a seminar about international cooperation at the citizen level and Linus spoke of the threat of nuclear and biological war, with much of his talk centering on the heightened risk of cancer resulting from nuclear testing. Around the time of the congress, France had forthcoming nuclear tests planned for locations in the Pacific Ocean. According to Pauling’s estimates, the radiation emanating from these proposed tests would deleteriously affect 500,000 unborn children. This was a hot topic for discussion and inspired the congress to organize a large rally. Ultimately, an official count of 4,000 people (Pauling estimated 6,500) marched through the streets of Sydney, representing diverse groups including trade unionists, educators, writers, academics, and churchmen. Noticeably absent were representatives of Australia’s political parties.

After the conference in Sydney, the Paulings headed north to the Queensland territory for a stay in Brisbane. They had actually already made a stop in the city two weeks prior, when Linus lectured on the molecular theory of anesthesia. This second visit was a busy one, filled with rallies, lectures, dinners, and receptions. On their first day, a local television station filmed “An Evening with Professor Pauling” special, a round table discussion with Pauling chaired by the Dean of Brisbane. Later that afternoon, the couple attended a Lord Mayoral reception, delivered addresses at a public rally and attended a supper party. The next day had them meeting with executive members of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom and the local Trades and Labor Council, and ended with Dr. Pauling lecturing at the University of Queensland. Before departing Brisbane, the couple picnicked in a rainforest.

From there, the duo traveled to the other end of the country to visit Adelaide, in the southern region. In Adelaide, Pauling met with the South Australian Peace Committee and caught up with others involved in the Pugwash Conferences. Meanwhile, Ava Helen spoke at town halls and addressed a Women’s Luncheon.

Also a part of their itinerary were stops in Melbourne, Perth, Sydney and Canberra. At the University of Melbourne Linus was awarded an honorary degree, which he accepted with his “Science in the Modern World” stump speech. It was a hectic time for Pauling as he’d given three lectures in Perth the day before and was bound for Sydney to deliver another lecture later that night. In Canberra he was recipient of a Key to the City. He also gave a highly technical lecture on nitrogen-oxygen bond lengths and the diffusion of ions through oxides.  All par for the course for a man of many interests.

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The Paulings returned to the region a final time in the spring of 1973 on a trip organized by the Royal Australian Chemical Institute. The Institute had previously invited Linus to visit in the early 1960s but Pauling was unable to accept the invitation. The 1973 tour had two main purposes: to help inaugurate a new chemistry foundation and to give a series of lectures about recent advances in orthomolecular medicine. As with before, this trip saw the Paulings visiting a number of universities, namely in Sydney, Canberra, Melbourne, and Hobart.

Pauling posing with sixty-seven glasses of orange juice, which would provide the equivalent of his daily vitamin C intake at that time. The Age (Australia), May 18, 1973.

The couple arrived at a townhouse in Sydney at the end of April where they spent the following two weeks. On their first day they kicked off their visit with newspaper, radio, and TV interviews. Over the course of their stay, Pauling delivered several lectures on orthomolecular medicine and met with the Sydney Group for Social Responsibility in Science.

After a busy few weeks in Sydney, the Paulings arrived in the capital city of Canberra. While there, Pauling, who at that point in his career was heavily promoting the use of vitamin C, met with the Mister of Health. Then in Melbourne, Ava Helen lectured at a luncheon held by the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom. She spoke on “The Quest for Peace in America” to the many different NGOs, peace and conflict resolution societies, and service organizations in attendance. While in town the couple also reunited with members of the Australian Congress for International Cooperation and Development.

While the purpose of Pauling’s visit was not necessarily political, French nuclear tests were at the forefront of current issues and Paulng’s opinion on the matter was often queried. Unsurprisingly, he voiced his support when Australia appealed to the International Court of Justice to halt the tests taking place in the Pacific. He also spoke to the Attorney General, Senator Murphy, and announced that he would back Australia’s case at the World Court. This favorable opinion of the government’s actions was a turn-around from previous years, during which the government’s knee jerk fear of communist influence was a consistent source of consternation for the Paulings.

The last leg of the trip consisted of a few days in Tasmania, Australia’s small island state. The couple arrived there in the city of Hobart, where Pauling delivered a university lecture, and after which he and Ava Helen were whisked off to the Tasmanian wilderness. They toured the remote area of Strathgordon and stayed a couple nights in a chalet on Lake Pedder. Strathgordon is located in the Southwest National Park, an area known for its natural beauty and attractiveness to tourists looking to fish, bushwalk and rock climb, among other activities. It was a lovely way to end their visit, the final one that they would ever make to Australia.

The Paulings Down Under

[Part 1 of 2]

Linus and Ava Helen Pauling journeyed to Australia and New Zealand three times across the span of three different decades. They visited for scientific and political reasons, and grew to admire many aspects of the region; in particular the people, their peace movement and the scenery. But the couple’s feelings toward the Australian government were decidedly mixed.

In November 1959, the couple ventured to the southern hemisphere for the Australian and New Zealand Congress for International Cooperation and Disarmament and Festival of the Arts, held in Melbourne from November 7-14. The gathering was a high-profile and mildly controversial event, sponsored by people from many different professions: professors, lawyers, scientists, writers, doctors, church leaders, Australian labor party activists and trade unionists. By day the congress consisted of meetings and conferences, while at night members traveled to different town halls around Melbourne to do promotional work.

Cold war tensions ran rampant throughout the Congress as, at the time, the Australian government was wading through its own period of McCarthyism. Trade unions, whose leadership positions were widely held by Communist Party members, were represented by large numbers and heavy influence at the Congress.  Due to consequent perceptions of communist influence, the Australian government had officially denounced the Congress prior to its start. Asked by the press for his views on the issue, Pauling framed the government’s actions as “politically rational but morally irrational.” One of the few additional foreign guests at the conference, British writer J.B. Priestly, who was actually well-known for his socialist views, threatened to walk out if the conference was dominated by communists.

For her part, Ava Helen found the sentiment ridiculous. She wrote in her journal

I made a statement in most of the talks that I gave that I saw no use whatsoever in holding a conference to discuss peace unless communists were present; we have communists in this world and it is with them that we must come to some agreement about the world in general.

Despite the controversy, many international figures lent their names in support of the conference, including such major figures as Eleanor Roosevelt and Indian Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru.

Mark Oliphant.

An especially controversial member in attendance was Sir Mark Oliphant, an Australian physicist known for his role in the creation of the atomic bomb and a friend of the Paulings. (Following Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Oliphant, like Linus Pauling, became a peace activist and a harsh critic of nuclear weapons.) Oliphant created quite a stir when he withdrew his sponsorship midway through the Congress. This action understandably led members to assume that the withdrawal was due to some lack of belief in the peaceful goals espoused by the Congress.

However, in later correspondence, Oliphant revealed his motivations as being both more nuanced and ambivalent. His concern centered on the fact that the focus of the Congress was to create momentum to pressure governing bodies to disarm. During the proceedings, Oliphant was disappointed that more tangible solutions were not being discussed, but later came to agree with the goals of the Congress and expressed regret over his withdrawal. Later their trip, the Paulings made a point of visiting Oliphant in Canberra at the Australian National University, where he was director of the School of Physical Sciences – clearly there were not hard feelings between friends.

After the week-long Congress came to a close, the Paulings left, buoyed by a feeling of optimism. Ava Helen hoped that another congress would happen very soon, and that the next time around an actual plan could be put in place.

Their obligations completed, Linus and Ava Helen ventured on to other cities in Australia: Adelaide, Sydney, Brisbane, Canberra, Newcastle, and Wollongong. While travel plans often revolved around her husband, Ava Helen had her own agenda for the trip. In her diary she noted, “While I am here in Australia for five weeks, I want particularly to learn as much about Australian women as I can.” Viewed in this light, Ava Helen, who worked for the US National Board of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, deemed the trip a success. In particular, she took the opportunity to speak to various women’s groups while her husband was delivering his usual chemistry lectures at high schools and universities.

While traveling about, the Paulings were particularly impressed with the Australian labor movement. They had visited coal mines, gas and electric plants and railroads, and met with the leaders of various unions. As it turned out, Australia’s trade unions were huge proponents of the peace movement. Ava Helen noted,

The broad support of the Congress by the labor unions both officially and by individual members is one of the chief reasons it was so successful… We became well acquainted with many aspects of Australian life because of meeting many people in these various cities, and we were particularly impressed with the labor movement in Australia. As far as we could tell, most of the trade unions in Australia definitely want world cooperation and peace and are willing to work for it. They feel that the cold war is detrimental and that it should be stopped.

When not busy fulfilling their commitments as scientists and peace delegates, the couple took in the famously lush scenery of the countryside. Drives along the coast and mountaintop picnics were worked into the itinerary. After making their way through Australia, the pair moved on to New Zealand, where they made stops in Wellington (and had lunch with the Prime Minister), Christchurch, Timaru, Dunedin, and Auckland. All the while, they promoted their message of peace from the congress.

After a five-week long adventure, the Paulings embarked on the long trip back to the States.  It would be five more years before they made a return trip to Oz.

Symposia and the Peace Ship: Pauling in Latin America, 1980s.

Ava Helen and Linus Pauling, dancing the samba in Brazil, September 1980.

[Part 5 of 5]

The 1980s were a very busy decade for Linus Pauling with regards to trips to Latin America. Over the course of the decade, he attended various scientific symposia in Brazil, Mexico and Venezuela, and also participated in a variety of peace activities – delivering a peace talk in Colombia, meeting with the leaders of several governments, and participating in the “Peace Ship,” a vessel loaded with humanitarian aid provided by the governments of Norway and Sweden, which sailed from Panama to Nicaragua in July and August 1984.

Having participated in the Second International Vitamin C Symposium in 1978, Pauling once again traveled to Brazil in 1980 for the third iteration of this gathering, which took place in Sao Paulo and Rio de Janeiro. The Symposium ran from September 2-13, with Pauling seated as the guest of honor. He arrived in Manaus on September 4 and did some sightseeing to start off his visit. Later he traveled to Sao Paulo and the conference got underway. He gave the opening speech the day after the Symposium began.

Session titles at the symposium were familiar to those who had followed Pauling’s recent career: “Vitamin C in Immunology,” “Vitamin C in Lipid Metabolism,” “Other Aspects of Vitamin C,” and “Vitamin C in Cancer.” Pauling coordinated and participated in the program on vitamin C and cancer, presenting a paper titled “The Incidence of Squamous Cell Carcinoma in Hairless Mice Irradiated with Ultraviolet Light in Relations to the Intake of Ascorbic Acid.” This paper reported the results of a study that Pauling had conducted along with three other investigators, in which they observed the development of large malignant skin tumors in 700 hairless mice.

According to Pauling’s text, the mice, divided into groups, were “intermittently exposed in a standard way to long-wavelength ultraviolet light over a period of 110 days,” while each group was given a consistent diet containing a different amount of Vitamin C from group to group. At the end of the study, it was determined that a strong correlation existed between the number of tumors that the mice developed and the amount of Vitamin C in their diet.

On September 10, Pauling traveled to the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, where he gave the opening speech for the First International Symposium on Recent Advances in Vitamins.  Sessions at this meeting included, “Vitamin A,” “Hipovitominosis and Public Health,” “Vitamin C Complex,” “Microbiological Measurements of Vitamins,” and “Nutrition and Vitamin Deficiencies.” Pauling concluded the symposium with a closing speech and left Rio for home on September 13.

Pauling went to yet another symposium in January 1981, this time in Mexico City and focusing on the subject “Metabolic Treatment of Heart Conditions.” The conference took place at Juarez Hospital in the Mexican capital, and was coordinated by Dr. David Contreras, Chief of Cardiology at the hospital. At this short, two-day meeting, Pauling only gave one lecture, “Treatment of Old Age.”

Pauling with Nobel laureate economist F. A. Hayek at the Darwin Conference, Caracas, Venezuela, November 1982. (El Diario)

After Ava Helen’s death in December 1981, Pauling did not travel to Latin America again until November 1982, when he was invited to a Darwin Symposium in Caracas, Venezuela. He gave a lecture on November 8 at the Central University of Venezuela titled, “Darwin and the Adventure of Thought,” as well as a lecture titled, “The Joy of Research.” In the latter, Pauling talked about his capacity to find joy in scientific discoveries made by others, specifically citing his excitement in learning of the uncovering of clues to the extinction of dinosaurs as found in clay layers. But even more joy, Pauling suggested, could be felt through one’s own process of discovery. As he recounted on a different occasion

When Ernest Lawrence got married…I was an usher at the wedding, in 1931.  I drove back in the car with some people and I said that I was happy because I had in my pocket a crystal of sulvanite, Cu₃VS₄.  And I had just determined the structure of this and it was a very striking structure; anomalous, it didn’t fit in with my ideas about sulfide minerals.  But I knew what the structure was, nobody else knows, nobody in the world knows what the structure is and they won’t know until I tell them.  This is an example of the feeling of pleasure I had on discovering something new.

Pauling’s next trip to Latin America was for the International Symposium on Vitamins in Nutrition and Therapy, held in Cartagena and Bogotá, Colombia, in 1983. Pauling arrived in Bogotá on November 22, and went to Cartagena the next day. After returning to Bogotá on the 27th he met with President Belisario Betancur, who led the country from 1982 to 1986. Pauling also gave a speech, “The Necessity of World Peace,” in Cartagena. In it he discussed the terrifying possibility of a third World War and how it might result in the extermination of the human race. He commented that cooperation was necessary in order for world’s superpowers to survive, since retaliation would be suicide.

During his speech, Pauling also made mention of the Korean airlines crisis of 1983, in which Korean Airlines Flight 007 was shot down by Soviet interceptors over the Sea of Japan after entering Soviet airspace around the time of a planned missile test. All the passengers and crew on board were killed, including Lawrence McDonald, a member of the United States House of Representatives. The Soviet Union eventually claimed that the aircraft was on a spy mission. According to Pauling, “President Reagan saved the world by not taking retaliatory military action, as was urged on him by the right-wingers in the U.S.”

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El Mundo, July 25, 1984.

In 1984 the Nicaraguan government was struggling to rebuild itself under a new government, the Sandinista National Liberation Front (FSLN), after suffering a bloody oppression under the Somoza family’s 43-year dictatorship, and a civil war from 1978 to 1979. Opposing the FSLN were the U. S.-backed Contras, guerrilla fighters engaged in violent struggle with the Sandinistas. Amidst the chaos, the government of Norway, along with a small group of Nobel laureates, decided to help the suffering people of Nicaragua by delivering a shipload of humanitarian aid in the summer of 1984.

The Peace Ship, as it was called, started its journey in Panama City on July 23 with a press conference, before sailing up to Port Corinto, Nicaragua. Passengers on board the Norwegian ship W/V Falknes included Pauling; Adolfo Perez Esquivel and Betty Williams, winners of the Nobel Peace Prize; George Wald, winner of the Nobel Prize in Medicine; and the leaders of various religious groups.

Those on board sent a message “To People of Conscience, From the Peace Ship,” which stated,

[this ship] carries instruments for health and life, not implements of war; medicines, educational materials, fertilizers, small fishing boats and paper donated by the governments of Norway, Sweden and non-governmental organizations to facilitate Nicaragua’s forthcoming [November 1984] national election.

Pauling and Wald also sent a telegram to President Reagan, informing him of their mission and noting their intent to issue a statement in Managua backing “the right of self-determination, support for the efforts of the Contadora Group to bring peace to the region, the cessation of all foreign intervention, and the withdrawal of all foreign advisers from the region.”

After the Peace Ship arrived in Nicaragua, Pauling and Wald rode to Managua in a Land Cruiser driven by Daniel Ortega Saavedra, a member of the Junta of National Construction that ran the FSLN. At the time, Ortega was running for President of Nicaragua and he would eventually win the November elections that year, the first presidential election held in the country’s history. Pauling commented in his notes that as they drove through the countryside, Ortega and his men were on the lookout for Contras who might attack, and kept submachine guns on the floor of the Land Cruiser. Pauling said of Nicaragua, “It is a miserably poor country. I felt about as bad concerning conditions there as I had about India…”

Accompanied by Ortega and Wald, Pauling visited a small hospital in Managua in which wounded soldiers who had been injured by the Contra forces were being treated, and also visited the medical school in León. He likewise gave a lecture at a medical conference in Managua celebrating the fifth anniversary of the National Health Service.

Pauling also went on a trip to the countryside to visit an active volcano, which he found to be home to flocks of green parakeets. This trip was hosted by Humberto Ortega Saavedra, Daniel Ortega’s brother and the commander-in-chief of Nicaragua’s armed forces.

Pauling flew out of Managua on August 4, but experienced some complications during his trip home: his passport was confiscated as he traveled from one airport to another, and was not returned to him until his arrival in San Francisco. He commented in a letter to his children that he suspected he was being harassed as a result of his and Wald’s telegram to President Reagan, sent while on board the Peace Ship.

[Above: Pauling diary entry regarding the confiscation of his passport. 4 Aug 84 In Mexico City my passport was taken & kept by the Mexican Immigration.  I got on Mexicana 970 for SF, but kept asking for my passport. I think that a flight [?] is on it- I saw a US passport. He put it in a long envelope & told me that I would receive it after Mazatlan.  It [sic] Mazatlan I was told that I could stay aboard the plane.* Only then did I have the idea that the US govt was confiscating my passport,  with the collaboration of the Mexican govt. *All other passengers got out to go through immigration, etc.]

After his return to the U.S., Pauling continued to act on behalf of Nicaragua’s struggle for peace and freedom. He supported the International Committee of the Support of War Victims of Nicaragua, and endorsed a resolution authored by two doctors, Robin W. Briehl and Kenneth Barnes, which opposed the “U.S.-directed violations of human rights and interference with scientific development in Nicaragua.” This resolution was submitted for consideration to the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and urged the U.S. government to stop funding the Contras, as well as aid in the safe release of a kidnapped medical brigade.

While Pauling continued to advocate on behalf of various Latin American causes, his voyage on the peace ship marked his last major trip to the region.  So concluded a long string of memorable activities and experiences that had begun some thirty-five years before.

Science and the Future of Humanity: Chile, 1970

Mr. Ireland, Ava Helen Pauling, Linus Pauling and Enrique Kirberg, Chile, January 1970.

[Part 3 of 5]

Perhaps because he traveled so often, Linus Pauling sometimes found himself visiting volatile places at dangerous times. One such example was a trip to Chile in 1970, taken when he and Ava Helen were invited to the Universidad Técnica del Estado for the university’s Summer School.

The Paulings were asked to attend by Professor Enrique Kirberg, the Rector of the university, who had visited Pauling in the States and was very enthusiastic to host him as a guest speaker for the Summer School. During this time, Chile was still under the leadership of President Eduardo Frei Montalva, who had been elected in 1964 but who, by 1967, was experiencing opposition from both conservatives and leftists. That political atmosphere was such that, as Pauling noted in his diary, he and Ava Helen were escorted everywhere by three detectives with guns at their hips, who even followed them on a tourist trip into the mountains.

The Paulings arrived in Pudahuel, Chile, on January 8 and the inauguration of the Summer School took place on January 9.  Pauling spoke at the inauguration, delivering his lecture “Science and the Future of Humanity” entirely in Spanish, taking forty minutes. In this speech, which he gave often, he stated that scientists ought to be involved with politics, disarmament policy, and international relations, and that they should be concerned with morality and justice, since science is so closely intertwined with morality and ethics. Pauling opined that scientists were not using their knowledge efficiently enough to benefit humanity, and argued that people should follow the Golden Rule, but should also go beyond it, to minimize the suffering of humans and animals, as well as to conserve natural resources.

Pauling likewise stated that war must be abolished and replaced by worldwide laws based on an accepted principal ethic. According to Pauling, “The misuse of a great part of the world’s wealth, and the poor distribution of the rest, is one of the greatest causes of human suffering.” He spoke out against the Vietnam War, noting that although militarism is a major cause of suffering in the world, a large number of powerful countries continued to spend too much money on military build-up.

Another grievance that Pauling presented in his talk was the size of the world’s population: in 1970 it was only about 4 billion, but Pauling believed, at the time, that the world had already surpassed its optimum population. Global malnutrition was his evidence for this supposition. His solution to the problem of overpopulation was to diminish it little by little, until it would reach the ideal number of one billion in the year 2200. At this population level, Pauling reasoned, all humans could lead a pleasant life.

Pauling concluded his speech with the opinion that scientists needed to become altogether more involved in society by doing a number of things: adopting political standings, educating the public by explaining problems and solutions, educating the leaders of the government, and gaining an understanding of worldwide problems. Pauling also believed that, as informed political groups, scientists should press the government and voters to make better choices.  Young peoples’ protests gave him hope for the future, since he was sure they would not give up hope even when they grew old. He had faith that the young people of the 1970s would make changes in the world to make it more just and moral.

After the inauguration of the Summer School at the State Technical University, the Paulings took a short trip to the beautiful city of Pucón, in the shadow of the Villarrica volcano. After spending a few days there, they returned to Santiago and the university, where Pauling met with groups of students, and later with the Committee for Peace.  On January 19, he received the National Congressional Medal of the Senate. That same day, he visited the Central Chemistry Laboratory, met with more students, and later met with professors and Chilean scientists. While in Chile, Pauling also had the opportunity to meet Salvador Allende, who would be elected President of Chile in September of 1970. The Summer School conferences at the Technical University of the State would take place on the 20th, 21st and 22nd of January and the Paulings flew home to the U.S. on Friday the 23rd.

After Chile’s military coup in 1973, Allende’s government was overthrown and General Augusto Pinochet assumed power. Amidst this upheaval, the Rector of the Technical University of the State, Enrique Kirberg, whom Pauling had met and befriended, was arrested by the government.  Kirberg was then taken to Dawson Island, a component of the Tierra del Fuego archipelago in the Strait of Magellan, that is subjected to Antarctic weather and was used to house political prisoners suspected of being communist activists. He remained on the island for more than a year, living in camp conditions, before being returned to Santiago where he was found guilty of tax fraud and given a long prison sentence.

When Pauling caught wind of his friend’s plight in 1974, he wrote a letter to General Augusto Pinochet, President of the Military Junta in Chile, inquiring about Kirberg’s whereabouts and asking that he be permitted to leave the country if he wished. Kirberg was eventually freed and, in 1975, Pauling received a letter of gratitude from his friend, thanking him for being a part of the peace movement which contributed to his release from prison.

Although Pauling would not return to Chile, he did serve as a sponsor for the National Coordinating Center in Solidarity with Chile, which contributed to the struggle for democracy during the military dictatorship. He also supported the Office for Political Prisoners and Human Rights in Chile during the late 1970s, and co-sponsored the Madrid World Conference in Solidarity with Chile in 1978.

The 1960s: The Nuclear-Free Zone, Oppression in Argentina and Molecules in Mexico

Illustration appearing in El Mercurio (Santiago, Chile), January 1962.

[Part 2 of 5]

In January 1962, Linus Pauling visited Chile in order to give an address at the Seventh International Summer School at the University of Concepción, and also to accept a certificate of honorary membership in the Chilean Society of Chemistry, one of many such honorary memberships that he received during his lifetime. While in Chile, the Paulings participated in the Summer School and also visited the Catholic University, the Technical University, the University of Chile in Santiago, the Experimental Station of the Institute of Agronomy in Chillán, and several other scientific institutions. Both Linus and Ava Helen gave lectures at many of the institutions they visited.

The theme of the Concepción Summer School was “The Man of Today, His Problems and His Future.” Pauling gave the opening address, titled “The Impact of Science on Man of Today and Man of the Future.” In this lecture, Pauling expressed his belief that mankind had accumulated enough knowledge to control the world instead of being controlled by it, but that with this knowledge came the power to destroy civilization. He thesis was a familiar one to those who had followed Pauling’s activism:

I believe in the philosophy of humanism – that the chief end of human life is to work for the happiness of man upon this earth, to work for the welfare of all humanity, to apply new ideas, scientific progress, for the benefit of all men – those now living and those still to be born.

One factor that works against the happiness of man, Pauling believed, is the variation in income which exists worldwide – a few people live in luxury while many suffer in poverty. He pointed out that economic injustice is “perpetuated by the oppressive powers of dictatorial governments,” and expressed his hope that these oppressive governments would give way to liberal and democratic governments.

In the same speech, Pauling also commented on the rapid progress of science and the new understanding of diseases caused by gene mutation, such as sickle-cell anemia and phenylketonuria. Some gene mutations, he added, are caused by the presence of radioactive materials released by nuclear bomb testing. Pauling continued, “I come now to the greatest of all the problems raised by the progress of science – the problem of preventing the destruction of civilization in a nuclear war.” He noted that the U. S. was in possession of 100,000 megatons of bombs, while only 20,000 megatons would be needed to decimate Russia. Likewise, Pauling estimated that the Soviets had produced 50,000 megatons of bombs, but that just 10,000 would be enough to destroy the U. S.

Pauling stressed to his Chilean audience that a nuclear war would not only destroy the U. S. and Russia, but would affect the Southern Hemisphere as well, in the form of nuclear fallout and genetic mutations. The only way to proceed in order to save the human race, Pauling concluded, was through complete disarmament, which must be supported not only by nations, but by individual people as well. “The survival of the whole human race now depends upon whether or not we can work together for the common good,” he concluded, stressing that world peace can only be achieved if nations adopt the moral values of individuals. After spending almost three busy weeks in Chile, Linus and Ava Helen returned home to California on January 22.

When Hurricane Flora hit Cuba in 1963, pounding the country for four days, Pauling attempted to visit in order to provide emergency disaster relief. However, the U.S. government did not allow him to travel to the Communist country, so instead, he and Ava Helen had to settle for supporting the Cuban people from afar. Pauling was also a member of Fair Play for Cuba, which was an organization that protested the trade embargo that the U.S. had placed on Cuba.

That same year, Linus was invited by Professor N. Matkovsky, of the International Institute for Peace in Vienna, to visit the leaders of various Latin American countries. The purpose of the visit was to support the presidents of Brazil, Bolivia, Ecuador, Chile and Mexico in their publication of a declaration to make all of Latin America a nuclear-free zone. The declaration had been signed by the five countries on May 1st, 1963, and would lead to the ratification of the Treaty of Tlatelolco in 1967, which would prohibit nuclear weapons in Latin America and the Caribbean, and include thirty-three parties. Linus and Ava Helen accompanied Professor Matkovsky on his mission as guest observers, but they also had the opportunity to meet with the leaders of a few countries. Delegations took place on August 15 in Rio de Janeiro; the Paulings stayed in Brazil for about 3 days, and flew to Chile on the 20th.

Linus Pauling and Arturo Illia, as published in Consejo Argentino de la Paz, October 1963.

Later in August, Pauling spoke with Arturo U. Illía, the President-elect of Argentina, to address the prevention of a devastating war and the preservation of peace in the world. A few days after he spoke with Illía, Pauling gave a speech to Pharmacy and Biochemistry faculty at the National University of Argentina entitled “Molecular Structure and Evolution.”

A month after the Paulings returned home, they learned that more than fifty women workers for peace in Rosario, Argentina had been arrested, some of them individuals to whom the Paulings had spoken during their visit to Buenos Aires. Linus wrote a letter to Illía, asking him to take action on the arrest of the women. In the letter, Pauling named a few of the women that he and Ava Helen had met and demanded that they and the rest of the women be set free. He also expressed concern about the extreme action the government had taken in recent weeks.

I have been hoping that, after a period during which the authorities of the Republic of Argentina suppressed the rights of individual human beings and carried out many oppressive actions, your nation would take its place among the civilized nations of the world, would recognize the rights of individual human beings, and would abandon the dictatorial and oppressive policies that are characteristic of governments in backward nations.

He echoed his appeal in letters to the current President at the time, Arturo Mor Roig, and to Raul Andrada, a judge in Argentina’s federal court, but his entreaties went ignored.

Pauling's greeting to the National School of Chemical Sciences, Mexico, as reprinted in Gaceta de la Universidad, July 13, 1964.

Pauling’s next visit to Latin America came about in May 1964, to help celebrate the Congress of the Centenary of the National Academy of Medicine in Mexico City. At the Academy, Pauling gave a speech as the guest of honor, “Abnormal Hemoglobin Molecules and Molecular Disease.” In this talk, he first established that the molecules that make up our DNA are the most important molecules in the world, since “[t]he pool of human germ plasm is a precious heritage of the human race.” Pauling then discussed various molecular diseases, such as phenylketonuria, which was responsible at the time for one percent of the institutionalized “mentally defective” individuals in the U. S.

According to Pauling, the disease occurs when both the mother and the father of an infant carry a gene for phenylketonuria, in which case the offspring has a fifty percent chance of inheriting the defective gene. If the infant does inherit the gene, he or she would have it in a double dose, which would inhibit him or her from being able to manufacture the enzyme that catalyzes the oxidation of phenylalanine to tyrosine. As a result, if the infant ate a food containing protein, phenylalanine would build up in the bloodstream and interfere with the growth and function of the brain. The only way to treat this disease, Pauling continued, is to eat a diet of protein hydrosylate from which most of the phenylalanine has been removed. This treatment must be carried out within the first year of life, or mental retardation occurs, and the diet must be followed for the rest of the patient’s life.

After detailing the dangers and the solutions for phenylketonuria, Pauling held that, likewise, other molecular diseases could be controlled, such as sickle-cell anemia. Sickle-cell anemia is similar to phenylketonuria in that it is a molecular disease, but different in that individuals who carry only one sickle-cell gene, called heterozygotes, are protected against malaria.

Pauling rounded out his trip to Mexico by delivering another talk, titled “Molecules and Evolution,” at the National School of Anthropology.  Pauling also spent a great deal of his time in Mexico discussing the devastating effects of nuclear war, repeating his conviction that the United Nations should have custody and control of radioactive substances produced by the United States and Russia.  This work done, the Paulings left Latin American behind for a while, not returning to the region until a trip to Chile in 1970.  That visit will be the subject for our next post in this series.