Wooden Anniversary

It’s a bit hard for us to believe, but this week marks the fifth birthday of the Pauling Blog.

The blog was started in March 2008 with a couple of different ideas in mind.  Most immediately, a stamp honoring Linus Pauling was soon to be released by the United States Postal Service and we (the OSU Libraries Special Collections at the time) wanted to get our hands on a mechanism for both promoting and covering the event.

More broadly, we had long felt a need for a space where we could conduct outreach and present research in a more flexible context than had previously been the case.  Prior to the blog, Special Collections was able to present stories about Pauling mainly through our Documentary History website framework or through smaller TEI-based exhibits.  Both platforms worked well (and continue to do so) but both also required a fair amount of time and energy to construct.  Our website at the time included a News feature as well, but the audience for this was limited to those who happened across our department homepage, and by definition the tool was really only useful for announcements of newly released projects or upcoming events.

Once the stamp event had concluded, part of what we attempted to do with the blog was to tease out smaller stories from the massive documentary history websites that had been released up to Spring 2008.  In effect, we viewed the documentary histories as collections unto themselves for student researchers to review and utilize in developing blog posts.

As such, were able to put together posts about, for example, Linus and Ava Helen Pauling’s trip to Lambaréné, Gabon in 1959 to visit Albert Schweitzer.  The trip is touched upon in the Linus Pauling and the International Peace Movement documentary history, but it is more fully explored on the blog, a platform which allows for greater investigation into the supporting documents available on the documentary history site but not discussed at length within the framework of the site narrative.

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With time we pretty well exhausted the documentary-history-website-as-collection idea, so we moved on to more original research conducted specifically for release on the blog.  (Not coincidentally, it is at about this time that we started posting once per week, rather than twice.)  Doing so has allowed us to explore many more of the fascinating nooks and crannies residing within the monstrous Pauling archive.  It has also provided a terrific experiential learning opportunity for our student writers.

For those who may have wondered, creating the Pauling Blog is a group project.  The site is overseen by one of the Special Collections & Archives Research Center’s faculty, but most of the writing is generated by a talented cadre of students. In five years, at least twenty people have written posts for the blog, most of them undergraduate students.  Our student writers have gone down many paths once leaving the Valley Library – dental and optometry school, public policy work, graduate studies in Spanish and even one person who decided to stick around the department and is now a vital part of our operations.  Presently we have three student writers on staff – a graduate student in the history of science, a senior who plans to pursue further study in public history and a senior looking forward to a career as a midwife.  All three are careful, tenacious researchers and will be tough to replace when they move on.

The student writers are assigned a topic, given tips on where in the collection to look for resources and then off they go.  Their texts are completed well in advance of their posting, and before they go online they receive a thorough line edit from the faculty member in charge of the project.  Since March 2008 they have compiled 408 posts, generally in the neighborhood of around 1,000 words in length.  The sum of that work now comprises a significant resource for Pauling studies; one full of original research not deeply explored by any of Pauling’s biographers.

And they have attracted an audience: in 2012 the blog recorded over 110,000 views, a close to 30% increase over the previous year’s traffic.  While the resource certainly has its regular followers, most of the traffic that hits the Pauling Blog arrives via search – with perhaps 410,000 words of searchable text inhabiting the web and over 1,100 images as well, there is plenty of content for people to stumble across.

It’s worth noting as well that, just as Pauling was truly a man of the world, so too is our’s an international audience.  While the lion’s share of traffic is based stateside, in 2013 alone WordPress has recorded visitors from far flung locations including Mozambique, Benin, Laos and Djibouti.

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Five years is a long time for a blog of this sort to keep chugging along, but we have no intention of going anywhere.  The Pauling Papers are truly epic and the only limitations on this project, it would seem, are our own initiative and creativity.  So keep expecting fresh content from this space, usually every Wednesday, except when meetings, email or the hectic pace of life in the reading room render Wednesdays unavailable.

We’ll close with a list.  For readers who are relatively new to the blog, here are ten of our favorite posts from olden days, followed by a nugget about Pauling that we just discovered yesterday and feel that we have to share.  Enjoy and thanks for reading!

10. Linus Pauling Baseball! (a perennial favorite)

9. The Roger Hayward compendium (much of which has since been repurposed into a major Omeka exhibit)

8. Angry and Frustrated, Pauling Considers a Run for the U.S. Presidency (a short post about an extraordinary document)

7. Creating The Pauling Catalogue (a collection of technical pieces providing an overview of the work that resulted in a six-volume, 1,800 page reference work featuring over 1,100 illustrations)

6. A Halloween Tale of Ice Cream and Ethanol (a fun story and a revealing glimpse into Pauling’s powers of observation and description)

5. William P. Murphy: Condon’s Other Nobel Prize Winner (an amazing historical coincidence)

4. The Anesthesia series (one of our first forays into fairly extensive original research about a lesser known component of Pauling’s scientific research)

3. The Pauling Chalkboard series (another such foray)

2. Lawrence Badash, 1934-2010 (remembering a good man and the story of what almost was)

1. The Quasicrystals series (the most ambitious bit of research and writing that any of our students has ever taken on)

…and a nugget that made us smile. From the National Academy of Science biographical memoir of Wendell Phillips Woodring:

Woodring became professor of invertebrate paleontology at the California Institute of Technology in 1927. During his teaching years, he became a close friend of Chester Stock, professor of vertebrate paleontology, of Ralph Reed, who sharpened his knowledge of the geology of California, and of his own student, diatom specialist Kenneth Lohman. During this time, much to his great amusement in later years, he and his wife employed Linus Pauling, later two-time Nobel laureate, as an occasional baby sitter for his two daughters.

Linus Pauling and the Structure of Proteins: A Documentary History

Today is Linus Pauling’s birthday – he would have been 112 years old.  Every year on February 28th we try to do something special and this time around we’re pleased to announce a project about which we’re all very excited: the sixth in our series of Pauling documentary history websites.

Launched today, Linus Pauling and the Structure of Proteins is the both latest in the documentary history series and our first since 2010′s The Scientific War Work of Linus C. Pauling. (we’ve been a little busy these past few years)  Like Pauling’s program of proteins research, the new website is sprawling and multi-faceted.  It features well over 200 letters and manuscripts, as well as the usual array of photographs, papers, audio and video that users of our sites have come to expect.  A total of more than 400 primary source materials illustrate and provide depth to the site’s 45-page Narrative, which was written by Pauling biographer Thomas Hager.

Warren Weaver, 1967.

That narrative tells a remarkable story that was central to many of the twentieth century’s great breakthroughs in molecular biology.  Readers will, for example, learn much of Pauling’s many interactions with Warren Weaver and the Rockefeller Foundation, the organization whose interest in the “science of life” helped prompt Pauling away from his early successes on the structure of crystals in favor of investigations into biological topics.

So too will users learn about Pauling’s sometimes caustic confrontations with Dorothy Wrinch, whose cyclol theory of protein structure was a source of intense objection for Pauling and his colleague, Carl Niemann.  Speaking of colleagues, the website also delves into the fruitful collaboration enjoyed between Pauling and his Caltech co-worker, Robert Corey.  The controversy surrounding Pauling’s interactions with another associate, Herman Branson, are also explored on the proteins website.

Linus Pauling shaking hands with Peter Lehman in front of two models of the alpha-helix. 1950s.

Much is known about Pauling’s famously lost “race for DNA,” contested with Jim Watson, Francis Crick and a handful of others in the UK.  Less storied is the long running competition between Pauling’s laboratory and an array of British proteins researchers, waged several years before Watson and Crick’s breakthrough.  That triumph, the double helix, was inspired by Pauling’s alpha helix, discovered one day when Linus lay sick in bed, bored and restless as he fought off a cold. (This was before the vitamin C days, of course.)

Illustration of the antibody-antigen framework, 1948.

Many more discoveries lie in waiting for those interested in the history of molecular biology: the invention of the ultracentrifuge by The Svedberg; Pauling’s long dalliance with a theory of antibodies; his hugely important concept of biological specificity; and the contested notion of coiled-coils, an episode that once again pit Pauling versus Francis Crick.

Linus Pauling and the Structure of Proteins constitutes a major addition to the Pauling canon. It is an enormously rich resource that will suit the needs of many types of researchers, students and educators. It is, in short, a fitting birthday present for history’s only recipient of two unshared Nobel Prizes.

Happy birthday, Dr. Pauling!

Clarissa Lee, Resident Scholar

Clarissa Lee, January 2013.

Clarissa Lee is the most recent alum of the Oregon State University Libraries Resident Scholar Program, having completed her stay in Corvallis in early January. Lee is a Ph.D. candidate in the Program in Literature at Duke University.

The focus of Lee’s research and writing is the notion of speculation in contemporary quantum theory; or, more generally, “speculative physics.”  While at OSU, Lee dug deeply into the History of Science rare book collection, the History of Atomic Energy Collection and the Ava Helen and Linus Pauling Papers in support of her dissertation.

Lee’s Resident Scholar presentation, “Experiments, Fictions, and the Question of Science-Modeling in Speculative Physics,” gave a glimpse into her ambitious research agenda as it is currently evolving.  From the abstract of her talk

In trying to work out what speculation entails, I have returned to the prehistory of particle physics, to earlier chains of physical epistemological developments in areas such as electricity, radioactivity and nuclear physics, especially in terms of their experimental-instrumental design and the formalistic developments that drive them forward….I will also explore the relationship of specific developments in particle physics to astrophysics and cosmology (with a nod towards the space science of the 1960s) especially over questions of space-time and locality of extra-terrestrial objects (as well as their relationship to String theory and hidden dimensions.)

According to Lee, her time at OSU

helped me shape…the arguments I am making about the freedom and constraints involved in physics speculation, especially through some of the physics problems faced by scientists in moving between theoretical prediction and experiment.

Lee’s research “is also interested in theorizing and constructing models of fiction…through the use of speculative science fiction as well as speculative science fact, for the purpose of extending the imaginative realm of the scientific real.”

To this end, Lee made extensive use of Linus Pauling’s collection of Analog: Science Fact and Fiction paperback periodicals. Along with detective stories and the occasional walk, reading science fiction was Pauling’s favorite leisure activity, and his papers include thousands of dog-eared science fiction monthlies – a much-needed escape for Pauling from the unrelenting pressures that surrounded him for much of his life.

For Lee, sources like Pauling’s Analogs are useful in

trying to formulate some preliminary ideas concerning how fictionalizing can be used as a way for creatively modeling existing scientific ideas, theories and facts that aid scientists in pondering about more speculative areas of science, while also using scientific material to deal imaginatively with interdisciplinary studies of science and the humanities.

The Resident Scholar Program, now in it sixth year, offers research stipends of up to $2,500 in support of researchers wishing to make extensive use of materials held in the OSU Libraries Special Collections & Archives Research Center.  More information about the program, including the application form, is available here. The deadline for 2013 applicants is April 30th.

Now Accepting Proposals for 2013 Resident Scholars

The Oregon State University Libraries Special Collections & Archives Research Center (SCARC) is pleased to announce that applications are once again being solicited for its Resident Scholar Program.

Now in its sixth year, the Resident Scholar Program provides research grants to scholars interested in conducting work in the Special Collections & Archives Research Center. Stipends of $2,500 per month renewable for up to three months (for a total maximum grant award of $7,500) will be awarded to researchers whose proposals detail a compelling potential use of the materials held in the Center. Grant monies can be used for any purpose.

Researchers will be expected to conduct their scholarly activities while in residence at Oregon State University. Historians, librarians, graduate, doctoral or post-doctoral students and independent scholars are welcome to apply. The deadline for submitting proposals is April 30, 2013.

It is anticipated that applicants would focus their work on one of the four main collecting themes of the Special Collections & Archives Research Center: the history of Oregon State University, natural resources in the Pacific Northwest, multiculturalism in Oregon and/or the history of science and technology in the twentieth century. For 2013, proposals that focus on using the history of science and technology collections will receive highest consideration, though proposals can address use of any of the SCARC collections.

Detailed information outlining the qualifications necessary for application, as well as the selection process and the conditions under which awards will be made, is available at the following location (PDF link): http://scarc.library.oregonstate.edu/residentscholar.pdf

Additional information on the program is available at the Resident Scholar homepage and profiles of past award recipients are available here.

Mary Jo Nye on Pauling’s Models

In the Fall of 2009 and Spring of 2010, Jane Nisselson, founder of the film and design studio Virtual Beauty, served at Resident Scholar in the OSU Libraries.  The intent of her visit was to gather research in support of a film which examines the importance of model building in science, both historically and in present day.

The above clip is a rough cut of part of this work.  It features OSU historian of science emeritus Dr. Mary Jo Nye discussing Pauling’s early breakthroughs in structural chemistry and the importance of model building within the chemical world.  “The iconography of chemistry,” she says, “is molecular representation.” All of the artifacts shown in the clip are held in the Ava Helen and Linus Pauling Papers.

Nisselson’s film, tentatively titled “Unseen Beauty: The Molecule Imagined,” is still in development. For more preliminary clips of this project, see the Virtual Beauty website and the Virtual Beauty channel on Vimeo.

Dr. Pnina Abir-Am, Resident Scholar

Pnina Abir-Am

Dr. Pnina Abir-Am, historian of science at Brandeis University’s Women’s Studies Research Center, is the first individual to complete a term as Resident Scholar in the OSU Libraries for the 2012-13 school year.  An accomplished scholar, Abir-Am has authored and edited a number of noteworthy publications, including the influential book Uneasy Careers and Intimate Lives: Women in Science, 1789-1989 (Rutgers University Press, 1987, 1989) co-edited with Dorinda Outram.

Abir-Am traveled across the country to conduct research in support of another book, DNA at 50: A Revisionist History of the Discovery of DNA Structure, scheduled for publication in 2013.  Delving into the Pauling Papers, the Jack Dunitz Papers, the David and Clara Shoemaker Papers and the History of Science Oral History Collection, Abir-Am sought “to better explain Pauling’s failure with solving the structure of DNA by examining in greater detail his deployment of a group known as ‘Pauling’s boys.’”

In her Resident Scholar presentation, Abir-Am argued – as have many others – that Pauling was ideally positioned to solve the DNA structure, given his great successes in protein research from 1936-1951 and culminating in his elucidation of the alpha-helix.  The question then, is why did he fail to discover the double helix?  Why did he lose the “race” to James Watson and Francis Crick?

The reasons for the failure are manifold, and Abir-Am acknowledges many that have been pointed out by other researchers.  For one, Pauling was very casual in his approach, believing protein structures to be of more importance than DNA.  He also underestimated the research being conducted by certain of his peers, including Erwin Chargaff, J.T. Randall and Rosalind Franklin.

In particular, Abir-Am argues that Pauling disregarded the work being conducted at Kings College, London, believing that physicists like J.T. Randall and Maurice Wilkins could not be expected to solve a complex biological structure like DNA, as their training left them ill-equipped for the task.  By the time Pauling did get serious about the DNA structure, he was too far behind the competition, using poor quality data and rushing a structure to print. Indeed, in the end, Pauling’s attitude toward DNA could be summed up as “too little too late,” a situation further reinforced by the political problems – culminating in the revoking of his passport – that he faced throughout 1952.

Abir-Am sheds new perspective by focusing on the social structure surrounding Pauling at Caltech during the early 1950s. In examining the story from this perspective, Abir-Am wonders what “Pauling’s boys” – understudies, peers and other colleagues including Alexander Rich, Robert Corey, Eddie Hughes, Verner Schomaker, Jerry Donohue, David Harker and Pauling’s second-born son, Peter – could have done to render Pauling’s attempt at DNA more successful.

Abir-Am posits that “the boys” could have done plenty: collect x-ray crystallographic data, collaborate on model building, make calculations, serve as delegates at conferences and even collect intelligence on rivals.  To some extent all of this did occur, but never to the point where Pauling shied away from his manifestly wrong triple-helical structure.

In thinking about what could have gone differently, Abir-Am offers three possible conjectures as to why “the boys,” all hugely talented, didn’t steer Pauling down a more productive path:

1. They did voice their objections but Pauling ignored them since, after the success of the alpha-helix, he was no longer seeking advice;
2. Long accustomed to accepting Pauling’s ways, “the boys” lost the ability to criticize his work;
3. Pauling did not inform “the boys” of his interest in DNA because he wanted to surprise them.

By the conclusion of her stay, Abir-Am was still wrestling with these questions and evaluating her conjectures.  An entire chapter of her DNA book will be devoted to Pauling’s failed structure – we’ll be very excited to read it!

The OSU Libraries Resident Scholar Program offers stipends of up to $2,500 per month to support research using the collections of the Special Collections & Archives Research Center.  For more on the program, check out its homepage. And to read of the work done by past Resident Scholars, see this link.

Update

After seeing this post, Dr. Abir-Am asked that we add some comments of her own, which are included here.

My initial reaction to OSU-SCARC’s (Oregon State University, Special Collections and Archive Research Center) Paulingblog’s entry of 11-21-12, reporting on my lecture “‘Pauling’s Boys’ and the Mystery of DNA Sructure” was “Wow, they did a better job than I might have done on my own!” Indeed, OSU-SCARC’s Program for Resident Scholars is a scholar’s paradise: a spacious reading room flooded by sunlight provides a superb “room with a view” of gorgeous Oregon trees. State of the art equipment scans archival documents straight into your flash drive. Rare, as well as recent, books that scholars might need to complement one’s ongoing archival research, line the reading room’s walls forming tasteful panels. The entrance is flanked by two glass cases for archival exhibits that rotate periodically and give the foyer a museum look.

But above all, SCARC is a paradise because of its angelic people, all eager to help resident scholars make the best of their precious stay. I was amazed at how readily the SCARC personnel not only guided me through the maze of archival documents in their care, but also helped me in preparing essential visuals. By displaying photomontages of Pauling and his associates, I was better able to convey his enigmatic predicament, as a leading molecular structurist who missed the solution of DNA structure, even though he was surrounded by many gifted and loyal associates, or “boys” in his era’s jargon. Along these lines, a slide of attendees at the Pasadena international conference on “Protein and Nucleic Acid Structure” which Pauling organized in September 1953, captured by photo 2 above, (click for enlargement) distinguished between “boys” from rival groups by color circles around their heads. These graphical devices were critical for my new argument that the outcome of competition over DNA structure was a matter of group rather than individual action.

Having spent considerable time in many archives on both sides of the Atlantic ocean, I have to conclude that OSU-SCARC, situated in the remote splendor of the Pacific Northwest, provides greater scholar-friendly opportunities than anything I have seen, including my prior favorite CCAC. (Churchill College Archive Center in Cambridge, UK) I now count SCARC scholars among my cherished colleagues and consider their work to be a valuable resource for my own chapter on Pauling & Co.’s effort with DNA structure. Last but not least, SCARC’s interest in this chapter, as well as in my forthcoming book DNA at 50 proved invigorating in propelling me toward a speedier revision of both chapter and book.

The Paulingblog’s Photo 2 conveys the civilized environment of OSU Libraries’ Willamette Lecture Room. For the sake of completeness, I wish to remind future applicants that the environment outside OSU’s library can also become a much cherished memory, especially the wild rapids of the McKenzie River which we survived during the Labor Day weekend preceding my 9-5-12 talk. Hopefully, the treasures I left untouched, whether in the archive or in the nearby Oregonian wild nature (e.g. Upper Klamath – I signed a petition to open it for rafting – Crater Lake, Sunset Bay) will soon cheer additional beneficiaries of SCARC’s Program for Resident Scholars.

Rafting on the McKenzie River, Labor Day weekend, 2012.

SCARC Has a New Virtual Home

We reported on something similar nearly three years ago and we’re happy to announce again today that the department behind the Ava Helen and Linus Pauling Papers – the Special Collections & Archives Research Center (SCARC) – now has a new and improved web presence.  As first revealed yesterday on our sister blog Speaking of History

It is with great pleasure that we announce the official launch of our new department website!  Please find it at http://scarc.library.oregonstate.edu and be sure to update your bookmarks away from the old University Archives and Special Collections sites, which will no longer be maintained…

(Click here to read the whole blog post, which offers a tour of all that is new and exciting on the site.)

The SCARC website took nearly ten months to complete from its initial conception to today’s reality, traveling through many different versions along the way.

The version 1 schematic of the proposed SCARC website.

The project was initiated out of need to present the contents of the former Special Collections and University Archives websites in one spot, the result of the two departments having administratively merged in September 2011.  While seemingly a daunting task, the process was made much easier by the fact that both departments had committed to Encoded Archival Description (EAD) as the platform on which archival collections would be prepared and published for consumption on the web.

Though the combined department serves as caretaker of 1,034 collections (and counting), this commitment to a uniform descriptive practice, in tandem with xsl programming skill within the department, allows now for the generation and presentation of more than 900 finding aids in a relatively painless manner.  Certain of the finding aids suffer from wonky encoding, but most of the description is currently presented in a clean and user-friendly fashion, and we’re working to clean up the few troublesome collections that remain.

A glimpse at a few collections from the M alphabetical sort.

The interplay between xml and xsl also allowed us to “tag” each collection with genres and themes, which could then be output as static html pages available to users who wish to browse the collections by a specific orientation.  In other words, if one is interested in viewing only collections containing photographs, that option is available. The same is true for collections containing audio, video or books, as well as collections focusing on university history, the history of science, natural resources, multiculturalism or local history.  And from the perspective of content description, the “tagging” process could not have been simpler.  The screenshot below provides a glimpse of the collections.xml file that guides the theme and genre sort, as well as the image and caption that illustrates each collection.  The simplicity of what you see is just another example of the power of xml (at least when placed in the hands of a strong xsl programmer).

The new SCARC site also made great use of the model presented by Linus Pauling Online in developing a series of portals that provide access to the great swath of digital content generated by Special Collections and University Archives over time. Beginning in the mid-1990s, both units began digitizing in mounting volume to the point where, in 2011, a huge amount of content was available 24/7 to many different types of user groups…if they were able to find it.  The new site organizes all of this digital content into collection development-specified portals meant to improve ease of access.

Linus Pauling Online

This approach was based on the example of Linus Pauling Online, a sleekly designed landing page for all of the Pauling-related digital content that had been generated by Special Collections over more than ten years worth of dedicated work.  Launched in January 2009, the beauty of Linus Pauling Online is its ability to provide “one stop shopping” for anyone interested in Pauling who happened upon our web space.  Now, a similar arrangement is offered to users seeking out digitized content related to the four primary collection development themes lying at the heart of SCARC’s mission.

The Oregon Multicultural Archives Digital Resources page.

The finalization of the SCARC website marks a major step forward for the department as it allows us now to present different types of intellectual content in a single space and using uniform tools.  In the near term, look for more digitized videos related to the history of Oregon State University or the Pacific Northwest.  Look also for more digitized and encoded manuscripts as well as deeper description of collections of all kinds.

Within SCARC the Pauling Papers are now one of 1,034 collections.  But fans of Pauling needn’t worry that his life and work will get lost in the shuffle.  Of SCARC’s ten professional staff, two FTE are devoted to history of science collections and plenty of ideas are in the works for new projects emanating out of the Pauling Papers.  Not least of these is the Pauling Blog, which will continue to provide weekly outreach related to history’s only recipient of two unshared Nobel Prizes.

Roald Hoffmann video – and two others – are now available

Roald Hoffmann, April 2012.

The fully transcribed video of Dr. Roald Hoffmann’s presentation, “Indigo – A Story of Craft, Religion, History, Science and Culture,” is now available on the Special Collections & Archives Research Center website.  Hoffmann’s talk was delivered in conjunction with his receipt of the Linus Pauling Legacy Award, presented in Portland on April 19, 2012.

A packed house of some three-hundred people was thoroughly engrossed by Hoffmann’s lecture, which lent credence to the professor’s reputation as a talented speaker.  In tracing the historical development of indigo, Hoffmann first noted that Hebrew scripture has required, from very early on, that a small tassle of the garments worn by observant Jewish males be dyed blue. For generations this decree presented something of a problem in that the only known source of indigo in ancient times was the gland of a specific type of Mediterranean snail – 10,000 of which were required to produce a single gram of dye.

As technologies advanced, various plant species were discovered that could produce a similar shade of blue. However, as Hoffmann noted, the world would need to be completely covered with indigo plants ten feet high to color the 2-3 billion pairs of blue jeans now thought to be produced each year. Hoffmann used this statistic to expound upon the power of chemistry and its ability to create synthetic forms of the dye.

Dr. Hoffmann was the fourth Nobel laureate to receive the Legacy Award and the seventh honoree overall. Previous awardees include chemists Roger Kornberg, Roderick MacKinnon and Jack Roberts, and biologist Matthew Meselson.

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Paul Emmett, ca. 1970s.

Two other lectures, both by past OSU Libraries Resident Scholars, are also now freely available online.

“The Useful Science of Paul Emmett,” given by Dr. Burtron Davis of the University of Kentucky, discusses Davis’ ongoing research in support of a biography of Emmett (1900-1985), who is remembered today as the “Dean of Twentieth-Century Catalysis Chemistry.”

Emmett is recalled by Davis – once a post-doctoral student of Emmett’s – to have been a kind and talented man who enjoyed a long and distinguished career. Best known for his formulation, with Stephen Brunaur and Edward Teller, of the BET equation, (which Davis calls “Nobel quality work”) Emmett also made major contributions to the scientific understanding of ammonia synthesis and the Fischer-Tropsch process. In reviewing these highlights of Emmett’s biography, Davis’ lecture provides both an overview of Emmett’s major scientific achievements while also lending a glimpse into Emmett’s habits and personality from one who knew him and has continued to study his work.

A second lecture, “Hidden in Plain Sight: The Life of Ava Helen Pauling,” was delivered by Oregon State University professor of history Dr. Mina Carson, who is writing a biography of Ava Helen.  Carson’s talk, which was given in late 2009, reflects her thinking at that time as she developed the framework of her book, which will be published in 2013.

At the time, she noted that attempting to write the life of Ava Helen Pauling forces the biographer to confront a number of difficult questions. Perhaps the most vexing is this: how does the biographer write the life of a wife? In particular, a wife who enjoyed her own world-changing career but whose life and work were inseparably fused with, and in many ways dependent upon, her husband’s work and fame?  In ruminating on these topics, Carson also reflects on the major choices that Ava Helen made at critical points in her life as she sought to clarify her own interests and identity.

These three releases comprise only the latest additions to the large cache of digitized video available on the SCARC website.  The full list of contents is available here.

USANA Visits the Pauling Papers

A few months back we gave a tour to some folks from USANA Health Sciences, a nutritional supplements company that has partnered with the Linus Pauling Institute on a number of initiatives over the years.  One of our guests brought along a video camera to document the tour.  Here is his perspective on what it’s like to wander through our back stacks.

 

 
The video was first published with this post on the blog What’s Up, USANA?, which has written on Pauling and the LPI many times before.

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.