Mastering Genetics: Pauling and Eugenics

“I have suggested that the time might come in the future when information about heterozygosity in such serious genes as the sickle cell anemia gene would be tattooed on the forehead of the carriers, so that young men and women would at once be warned not to fall in love with each other.”
-Linus Pauling, August [...]

The Theory of the Molecular Evolutionary Clock

“It thus appears possible that there would be no evolution without molecular disease.”
-Linus Pauling. “Molecular Disease, Evolution and Genic Heterogeneity,” 1962.
In the early 1960s, Linus Pauling and Emile Zuckerkandl, a French postdoctoral fellow who had arrived at Caltech in 1959, began researching the characteristics of hemoglobin extracted from a number of different species of animals. [...]

Pauling on the Homefront: The Development of Oxypolygelatin, Part 2

“Science cannot be stopped. Man will gather knowledge no matter what the consequences — and we cannot predict what they will be. Science will go on — whether we are pessimistic, or are optimistic, as I am. I know that great, interesting, and valuable discoveries can be made and will be made…But I know also [...]

Blood and War: The Development of Oxypolygelatin, Part 1

“On the basis of the information available to me, I have formed the opinion that oxypolygelatin solution…may well be a thoroughly satisfactory blood substitute, which could be manufactured cheaply in large quantities. It is probably superior to gelatin itself with respect to fluidity of solution, retention in blood stream, and osmotic pressure.”
Linus Pauling, March 14, [...]

Orthomolecular Psychiatry

“Ortho means ‘right’ — the right molecules in the right amounts. Orthomolecular medicine is the use of the right molecules or orthomolecular substances that are normally present in the human body in the amounts that lead to the best of health and the greatest decrease in disease. It is the most effective prevention in the [...]

Mutations and Malaria: Pauling’s Adventure in Genetics

During the 1940s, Pauling had established sickle-cell anemia as a molecular disease, a pioneering concept that synthesized biology and chemistry in a revolutionary manner. Other interests had pulled him away from this important work, however, for the better part of a decade.
Then, in the early 1960s, he was introduced to research suggesting that rates [...]

The Importance of the Concept of Molecular Disease

“The idea of Dr. Linus Pauling that an abnormal hemoglobin molecule might be responsible for the sickling process initiated the study of the hemoglobin molecule in hereditary anemias.“
- Harvey Itano. “Clinical States Associated with Alterations of the Hemoglobin Molecule.” Archives of Internal Medicine, 96: 287-97, 295. 1955.
During his lengthy career, Linus Pauling maintained a long-running [...]

Pauling’s Theory of Sickle Cell Anemia

“We owe to Pauling and his collaborators the realization that sickle cell anaemia is an example of an inherited ‘molecular disease’ and that it is due to an alteration in the structure of a large protein molecule, an alteration leading to a protein which is by all criteria still a haemoglobin.“
- Vernon M. Ingram, [...]

Pauling and the Rockefeller Foundation

“We are … particularly gratified that the Institute has found it possible to make a substantial contribution which will enable you to direct a larger proportion of our aid to the study of the substances of fundamental biological importance.”
- Warren Weaver to Linus Pauling, December 27, 1934.
It is obvious from much of his scientific work [...]

Linus Pauling, Vitamin C and the AIDS Crisis

“Many orthomolecular substances are so free from toxicity that they show beneficial effects over a 10,000-fold range of concentrations. Yet if you take even ten times the amount of aspirin that many patients take, for example, you’d be dead; hundreds of people do die every year from aspirin poisoning. And all of the other major [...]