The Departure of Art Robinson and Fallout from the First Mayo Clinic Study

Art Robinson, 1974.

[A history of the Linus Pauling Institute of Science and Medicine, Part 3 of 8]

By late 1978, the Linus Pauling Institute of Science and Medicine had reformed its fundraising strategy, an action which proved to be quite successful. As a result, for the first time in its five years of existence, LPISM was not struggling to keep its head above water.

This wave of good fortune carried with it unforeseen negative consequences. In particular, Rick Hicks and Art Robinson began to come into conflict over the best way to invest this sudden surplus. Robinson suggested that LPISM move to Oregon – which had recently announced “Linus Pauling Day” in honor of its native son – and build a campus of its own. The idea was not popular with many staff, most of whom did not want to leave the Bay Area.

At the same time, Robinson began cultivating ties with the Orthomolecular Research Institute in Santa Cruz, California, which was headed by Arnold Hunsberger. Linus Pauling was not pleased with this idea, as he felt Hunsberger’s research hypotheses to be off the mark. Pauling had also met Hunsberger and had said that his impression was “not a very favorable one.”

Robinson continued to press for closer ties between LPISM and ORI, a source of growing tension between him and Pauling. In particular, Pauling was angered when he learned that Robinson had begun to tailor experiments in accordance with Hunsberger’s ideas without first consulting Pauling. When confronted, Robinson defended his decision and redoubled his arguments for collaboration. Their relationship continued to sour and morale at LPISM plummeted as the tension between Pauling and Robinson mounted.

In June 1978, Pauling issued a memorandum to Robinson, ordering him to consult the Executive Committee - comprised of Pauling, Robinson, and Hicks – before making “any important decisions.” Robinson responded by immediately firing Hicks. Pauling responded in turn by overruling the termination and demanding Robinson’s resignation within thirty days. He then proceeded to issue a memorandum informing Institute staff that he had stripped Robinson of his position, and that the staff was to disregard all further instructions from Robinson. The next day, the staff arrived at work to find a second memorandum from Robinson, declaring that he was still the president, that neither Pauling nor Hicks had the authority to relieve him of his duties, and that he would not resign.

Pauling memorandum of July 10, 1978.

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The Board of Trustees met in mid-July to try and settle the dispute. They decided to place Robinson on a thirty day leave of absence, empowered Pauling with all executive authority and told him to resolve the issue. On August 15, with Robinson’s leave expired, Pauling was elected President and Director of LPISM. On August 16, Pauling promptly informed Robinson that he was taking over all of Robinson’s research, Emile Zuckerkandl was being appointed Vice-Director, and that Robinson was fired.

Now that Robinson was gone, LPISM attempted to consolidate and return to normal. Pauling asked Steve Lawson to assume a portion of Robinson’s research agenda, a request to which Lawson consented. Over the course of 1978, Lawson had steadily become less involved with the financial arm of LPISM and more involved with its scientific work. Zuckerkandl also tasked Lawson with setting up a cell culture facility where the two would conduct research on the differences between primary and metastic cancer cells, as revealed by protein profiling. Lawson worked closely with UC-San Diego, University of Colorado, and SRI International. He was later joined on that project by Stewart McGuire, Eddy Metz, and Mark Peck, all fellow employees at LPISM.

Robinson, however, did not take his firing lightly and on August 25, LPISM was informed that Robinson was suing the organization for $25.5 million, alleging a breach of contract and unlawful termination among other charges. LPISM’s lawyers began gearing up for a serious legal battle, standing firm in their conviction that the Institute had done nothing wrong.

Meanwhile, the Institute’s vitamin C research continued on despite the added burden of the Robinson lawsuit. In early October 1978, Pauling convinced Ewan Cameron to accept a one-year appointment to LPISM while the two worked on a book about vitamin C and cancer. Additionally, Pauling, Cameron, Lawson, and their coworker Alan Sheets began an experiment to determine the effects of vitamin C on chemotherapeutic drugs. The research took the form of a toxicology experiment in which multiple groups of fish were subjected to chemotherapeutic agents in their water, after which various groups were given different amounts of vitamin C while the research team observed the results.

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The year 1979 started with good news. LPISM was informed by Hoffmann-LaRoche, the world’s largest producer of vitamin C, that they had seen sales more than double during the 1970s, and they fully recognized that Pauling was the cause. As a thank you, they had decided to donate $100,000 a year to the Institute.

The happy days were not to last long. In April, LPISM received an advanced release of the results of the major Mayo Clinic study on the treatment of cancer with ascorbic acid. Its primary investigator, Charles Moertel, had concluded that vitamin C did absolutely nothing to help cancer patients. Pauling was stunned and immediately began writing to Moertel to discuss the study in detail.

Then, over the summer, Art Robinson filed six more charges against LPISM and Pauling, bringing the total number of suits to eight and the total requested damages to $67.4 million. The year-long and highly publicized suit was greatly hurting LPISM’s reputation, and the Institute noticed a subsequent decrease in the donor funds flowing their way.

“Vitamin C Fails as a Cancer Cure,” New York Times, September 30, 1979.

Things then went from bad to worse when, on September 27, the New York Times published the Mayo Clinic study, definitively stating its conclusion that vitamin C was useless in treating cancer. Pauling immediately responded by pointing out that the patients involved in the test were undergoing cytotoxic chemotherapy, which he felt crippled their immune system. He also asserted that the trial was not conducted for long enough to develop accurate results.

Pauling’s response to the New York Times article, October 24, 1979.

Charles Moertel returned fire, defending his results and questioning Pauling, implying that he was fanatical in his zeal for vitamin C and refused to acknowledge the truth. Pauling and Moertel began exchanging volleys in public, writing articles and giving interviews that attacked the research and competence of the other. Unfortunately for Pauling, he took the worst of it, as many people began to agree with Moertel, thinking Pauling to be too enamored with vitamin C to see any negatives. Funding plummeted as donations shrank and LPISM began finding large numbers of grants rejected outright with no chance for an appeal.

Pauling refused to give up. Shortly after the New York Times article was released, he and Cameron published their book, Cancer and Vitamin C. Pauling personally bought 16,000 copies of the publication and mailed them to every member of Congress and to countless other physicians and researchers. This action helped Pauling’s cause significantly as many of the recipients read the book, or at least glanced through it. And even those recipients who didn’t read the text were made more aware of Pauling and his research. Likewise, in the marketplace the book sold well despite the bad reception it received from professional reviewers – the public seemed interested in Pauling and Cameron’s ideas.

In light of this, National Cancer Institute head Vincent DeVita agreed to a second round of trials. However, in doing so DeVita once again chose the Mayo Clinic to host the trials and chose Moertel to lead them. Pauling was furious with these decisions, an understandable point of view considering that he and Moertel had spent the past few months publicly accusing one other of being incompetent.  Pauling was also now without his co-author: their book completed, Ewan Cameron returned to Scotland to fulfill his duties at Vale of Leven Hospital. Before leaving, he was appointed a Research Professor at LPISM for a period of five years.

With a new decade approaching, the easier times of the mid-1970s were clearly gone and by early 1980 the future was once again uncertain. While the tensions evident during the Art Robinson era were now history, his lawsuits and the Mayo Clinic trials severely detracted from the future prospects of LPISM. Unfortunately for the Institute and Linus Pauling, their immediate future was not going to be a happy one.

Important New Hires and Battles with the National Cancer Institute

Art Robinson and Rick Hicks with LPISM visitors, 1977.

[A history of the Linus Pauling Institute of Science and Medicine, Part 2 of 8]

By the end of 1975, the Linus Pauling Institute of Science and Medicine found itself teetering on the brink of financial collapse. Linus Pauling was donating his entire salary and even personal funds from his bank account to LPISM, and every employee had taken meaningful pay cuts. Everyone involved realized that the organization could not hope to succeed if business was to continue as usual.

An important change came in March 1976, when Richard Hicks was hired to help with fundraising. This move proved to be a windfall as Hicks interjected new energy and ideas into the search for additional income. One of the Institute’s most important employees for many years, Hicks rather quickly utilized his talents to help alleviate the extreme financial problems of 1975.  With Hicks on board, the Institute was only treading water, but the imminent threat of drowning had lessened.

Later in 1976, Pauling published Vitamin C, the Common Cold, and the Flu, an updated version of his earlier book Vitamin C and the Common Cold. The book sold reasonably well and managed to bring some much needed cash in to LPISM, though not as much as the organization had hoped. Additionally, Ewan Cameron and Pauling published another paper on vitamin C and cancer, which stated that terminal cancer patients lived longer and enjoyed a higher quality of life when given supplemental vitamin C.

Just as conditions were starting to improve, the Institute suffered another major setback when investigators from the National Cancer Institute visited LPISM to check on the progress of its hairless mice skin cancer study. In their report the investigators frowned upon the Institute’s tiny staff, what it deemed to be bad management by its administrators, and Pauling’s frequent absences. Their harsh judgement helped to “sink the Institute’s future grant requests” for many years afterward, thus forcing LPISM to redouble its efforts to secure new sources of private funding.

On the research front, Art Robinson began working with Kaiser-Permanente to set up a national sample bank with tens of thousands of blood and urine samples that LPISM could utilize for better research. The collaboration was moving along smoothly until Kaiser realized that the bill for the project would be in the neighborhood of $5.8 million, at which point Kaiser decided to scrap the deal in a most expedient fashion. In 1977, a year after negotiations had started, Robinson was informed that the plan was rejected because it was too ambitious and vague.

Robinson wasn’t the only one receiving that response. Pauling had been seeking grant funding from the NCI from the moment that its investigators’ report had been released. He reasoned that if the NCI was complaining that LPISM was too small, then they should give him more money to expand. By 1977 he had been turned down four times by the organization, each time under the auspices of his proposals being too ambitious and vague.

In light of the bad press that accompanied the NCI’s dismissals, Pauling sent copies of his proposals and rejection letters to twenty-four members of Congress, including the senators heading the committees on health and nutrition, Ted Kennedy and George McGovern respectively. He received no response, and in turn asked his lawyer if he could sue the NCI for bias. His lawyer advised him that there was no legal precedent for such a case, and that the chances of successfully suing a federal agency were “less than slim.”

Linus Pauling and Emile Zuckerkandl, 1986.

In early 1977, LPISM hired two people, both of whom ended up making major contributions to the Institute. First they hired Emile Zuckerkandl to lead their research on genetics. Zuckerkandl brought a different type of personality to the Institute. He and his family had fled Austria shortly before the onset of World War II, as they were wealthy and Jewish. In fleeing they had managed to bring with them some of their rare artwork collection, which Zuckerkandl would show to his coworkers at LPISM from time to time. A renowned scientist, Zuckerkandl had worked previously with Pauling at Caltech, collaborating and co-developing a theory of molecular evolution.

The second person of note to be hired was Stephen Lawson, who was brought on board to assist with direct-mail solicitations for fundraising. Lawson’ s position was very much at the entry level.  When he was hired he was not associated with the Institute in any way, and his only concrete knowledge of Linus Pauling harkened back to a chapter during his student days at Stanford University, when he saw Pauling protesting the firing of a tenured instructor.

About this time, the NCI also brought someone in: a new head named Vincent DeVita. He was more open-minded about Pauling and his vitamin C work, and was aware of how much public support Pauling had accumulated. As a result he consented to speak with Pauling and, after a multi-hour meeting, agreed to set up a conclusive clinical trial on vitamin C and cancer. When asked about the apparent reversal of the NCI’s opinion of Pauling’s work, DeVita responded that Pauling “can be a very persuasive man.” By March DeVita had arranged for the trials to be carried out at the prestigious Mayo Clinic, headed by the esteemed Dr. Charles G. Moertel. Pauling and DeVita met again in April to discuss the details of how the trial would be conducted.

Vincent DeVita, 1999.

On the eve of the Moertel study, circumstances appeared to be improving across the board for the Institute. With more apparent support for his research, Pauling expanded his program and in 1977 began a new series of tests designed to determine the effect of vitamins on tumor growth. The tests utilized 600 hairless mice as subjects. Additionally, LPISM managed to acquire enough funds to hire a professional direct-mail company for fundraising, and was able to place a number of successful advertisements in major financial periodicals including Barron’s and the Wall Street Journal. With these changes, LPISM saw a hefty boost in its incoming funds.

Buoyed by the success of the direct-mail strategy, LPISM began focusing its fundraising on this type of marketing. The move proved to be very effective and non-governmental donations increased from 50% of LPISM’s funding to 85% -the organization received almost $1.5 million in private donations in 1978 alone. For the first time in its short history, LPISM wasn’t suffering from financial hardships.

The Founding of the Institute of Orthomolecular Medicine

The Institute of Orthomolecular Medicine, 2700 Sand Hill Rd. Menlo Park, CA.

[Ed Note: 2013 marks the fortieth anniversary of the founding of the Linus Pauling Institute, known variously over time as the Institute of Orthomolecular Medicine and the Linus Pauling Institute of Science and Medicine.  For the next several weeks, the Pauling Blog will be celebrating LPI's anniversary by publishing an in depth history of the organization.  This is post 1 of 8.]

In 1969 Linus Pauling was given his own laboratory at Stanford University for his work on schizophrenia, where Art Robinson, a colleague and fellow researcher, joined him. By 1972 Pauling and Robinson had decided that their Stanford facility no longer afforded the space necessary to continue their research, and in May of that year Pauling requested that the university construct a new building to house an expanded lab for him to use.

The institution hesitated in responding, as its administration was somewhat wary of Pauling at that time, given the controversy that surrounded both his scientific interests and political activism.  Pauling had recently co-authored controversial work with the Scottish physician Ewan Cameron about vitamin C and its usefulness in treating cancer, research which alienated him from much of the medical community. For its part, Stanford was very unsure about the wisdom of giving him a new lab to further that research.

Likewise, Pauling was working hard and visibly for global peace in the middle of the Cold War, activities which had long caused many people to suspect that he harbored communist sympathies. Almost as if to verify that accusation in their minds, he had been awarded the Lenin Peace Prize by the Soviet Union in 1970. Pauling was a harsh and public critic of the war in Vietnam, President Richard Nixon, US nuclear policy, and US foreign policy, which only served to legitimize some people’s doubts about Pauling’s loyalty to the United States. And if that wasn’t enough, Pauling had also publicly protested Stanford’s firing of a tenured professor known to have leftist, anti-war leanings. Stanford took these numerous activities into consideration, and decided to deny his request.

In response, Robinson suggested that Pauling step down from the Stanford faculty and move their research off campus, which they did, relocating in early 1973 to a building that Robinson had found nearby. Their new home was at 2700 Sand Hill Rd. in Menlo Park, across the street from the Stanford Linear Accelerator building. The space was in an office building shared with Kemper Insurance, a location never designed to accommodate scientific research. Nonetheless, Pauling and Robinson adapted, figuring out how to fit their lab into a footprint of less than 20,000 square feet – an area designed to hold desks and chairs instead of wet labs.

An Institute employee working at the Sand Hill Rd. facility, 1974.

Freed from their affiliation with Stanford University, Pauling, Robinson and Keene Dimick – a biochemist who agreed to help pay the rent for their new quarters – decided to form a brand new institute. On May 15, 1973, the Institute of Orthomolecular Medicine was founded as a California non-profit research corporation with the stated goal of researching biology and medicine.

(In late 1973, Pauling decided to sever all of his professional ties with Stanford, equally annoyed with the university as it seemed to be of him. However, he still retained a number of good friends amongst the faculty there, with whom he maintained close ties and corresponded frequently.)

Immediately the Institute began trying to solve a problem which would plague it for most of its existence: funding. Pauling and Robinson began by lobbying all of their friends and associates for money, trying to entice them in part by offering them largely honorific positions on the Board of Associates of their new Institute. Over thirty people agreed to help, including Francis Crick, Maurice Wilkins and a number of other Nobel laureates. The funds generated weren’t princely, but they were enough to get the Institute standing.

On the research end, the Institute began by continuing the program that Pauling and Robinson had been conducting at Stanford – mostly work on vitamin C and metabolic profiling. The new labs contained a large number of animal experiments, which took up a great bulk of the very limited space, as did the Volcano Source Field Ionization Mass Spectrometer, a new device that was being developed by Bill Aberth, a recent hire who had previously worked for SRI International.

Pauling wanted to help people with his research on vitamin C, and in 1974 he opened a small outpatient clinic which was run by John Francis “Frank” Catchpool, a doctor whom Pauling had met in 1959 while visiting Albert Schweitzer’s medical hospital in Africa. Unlike Schweitzer’s venture, the Institute’s clinic was immediately beset with major problems – liability was too high and funding was too low. Additionally, because vitamin C was cheaper than other medication, the clinic often found itself overwhelmed by destitute patients. The staff often ended up working for free, as people would arrive who were too poor to pay anything, but Cameron and other staff would still help out of sympathy and a desire to do good. Due to severe limitations on resources, the clinic closed in 1975, eight months after it opened.

Interior view of the Sand Hill Rd. facility, 1974.

As 1974 progressed, the Institute’s funding problems became increasingly ominous, exacerbated by the fact that Robinson was one of the only people on staff who was adept at fundraising. In July the Board decided to start addressing the problem by renaming the Institute of Orthomolecular Medicine. They came to the conclusion that the term “orthomolecular” was not only too difficult to explain to most potential donors, but that the term had been tainted by a recent barrage of attacks on vitamin C by the American Psychological Association. They also decided that having Pauling’s name attached to the Institute would help with funding, due to his international fame and respect.

On July 26, the Institute was renamed the Linus Pauling Institute of Science and Medicine (LPISM). The Board’s choice proved to be a good one, and more funding began to come in. Even still, it wasn’t enough, and for much of 1974 LPISM was kept afloat through financing from Pauling and Robinson’s personal accounts. Unsurprisingly this too proved to be insufficient and by early 1975 LPISM was in danger of succumbing to bankruptcy. Desperate, the Institute’s administrators were forced to exact pay cuts for all employees, but did so on a sliding scale designed to minimize the impact on workers with already low salaries.

It was at this point that Robinson confronted Pauling, accusing him of neglecting his work as president. Pauling had in fact been neglecting daily duties, boasting to the press at one point: “I don’t waste time on needless details.” Unfortunately, many of these details weren’t needless, and his administrative inattention was harming the Institute. Pauling asked Robinson if he thought he could do better, to which Robinson replied that he could. Pauling responded by making Robinson President and Director of LPISM. Still the financial issues became worse: Pauling donated 75% of his income to LPISM for the first half of 1975, and then 100% of his income in the second half of the year.

In the meantime, the Institute staff began experimenting on hairless mice. For a week before the tests, they would feed the mice food full of vitamins C and E. Next they began irradiating them with ultraviolet light to produce skin cancer and observed the effects of the high-vitamin diet on cancer growth. As a result of this research, Pauling developed a cocktail of vitamins, which he put into a single dose that he called the “Linus Pauling Super Pill.” The Institute considered marketing the pill to raise additional funds, but that plan fell through and the Pauling Super Pill was relegated to a formula in a filing cabinet.

The Institute found itself in a bad place by the end of 1975; saddled with massive financial problems, it was uncertain if it would survive. And amidst this struggle, fortunes were about to get both better and worse for the Linus Pauling Institute of Science and Medicine.

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!

Atomic Desalination

In June 1947, Linus Pauling gave a speech in which he spoke about potential non-military uses for atomic power. One potential use that he mentioned in passing was “atomic desalination.” Pauling hypothesized that nuclear energy could be used to desalinate large amounts of seawater in a cost efficient manner – possibly at a rate of five cents per ton of water – and use it for irrigation purposes in arid climates such as those found in and around Los Angeles.

Pauling was not the first scientist to suggest this possibility but he was the most famous. As a result, rather quickly he began receiving letters inquiring into what he had said. Notably, he received letters from Dr. M.R. Card of the Desert Water Association and Samuel B. Morris, the General Manager and Chief Engineer of the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power.

Card was excited by Pauling’s speech and requested that Pauling come talk more about the subject to the Desert Water Association. Pauling declined as he was about to leave for an eight month stint in England as visiting professor at Oxford. He also wrote that he felt atomic desalination to be a technology that would be a long time in coming because of barriers erected by the U.S. government. Specifically, Pauling observed that the government was hesitant to use atomic power for any non-military use and, as such, fuller exploration of atomic desalination would have to wait until the government relaxed its grip on nuclear technology.

For his part, Morris was curious if Pauling had any specific plans in mind and if he was optimistic, given that atomic desalination held the potential to dramatically alleviate the city’s chronic water problems. He was also concerned about Pauling’s hypothesized cost, writing

…while five cents per ton impresses the layman as a very low cost, actually… [this is] a higher cost for undistributed water at sea level than any irrigation water delivered to the land with which I am familiar.

In support of his argument, Morris noted that Los Angeles’ current method of piping water from the Colorado River cost about $15 per acre, while a rate of five cents per ton would actually cost over four times as much, at about $68 per acre. Pauling was in England by that time and never responded to Morris.

Publication Unknown, ca. June 1947.

Over a year later, in December 1948, the idea of atomic desalination was again suggested by Dr. Robert J. Fowler, head of the chemistry department at John Hopkins University, during a speech at an alumni function. He and many fellow chemists had come to the conclusion that nuclear energy might be the only economical method of conducting large-scale desalination. He also suggested that, while such a technology was likely many years distant, small supplementary atomic desalination trials “may be imminent.”

Fowler’s proposal was based on experiments that had been run at the Hanford Nuclear Reservation in Washington state. The plan was to insert piles of uranium along an ocean coastline, in the water. The increased temperatures generated by the piles would evaporate the seawater, which would be collected and then recondensed in large distillation plants.

Many scientists were excited about and supportive of this proposed technology. However, numerous others expressed concern that water collected in this way would be utterly lacking in mineral content and would therefore need to be fortified, thus increasing the cost and complexity of the process.

Pauling never showed any increased interest in the subject beyond the periodic comments that he delivered to press in 1948. The rest of the scientific community showed an intense interest, but this lasted only a short time as well. For whatever reason, the idea never really took off and the proposed nuclear desalination projects faded from public awareness.

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Artist’s rendering of a proposed nuclear desalination plan. (Credit: Oak Ridge National Laboratory)

The term “nuclear desalination” is still in use today though its meaning differs from Pauling’s and Fowler’s conception. Modern nuclear desalination utilizes “conventional” desalination techniques, but these techniques are powered by nuclear reactors instead of fossil fuel plants. The World Nuclear Association (WNA) reports that the most common method of desalination is reverse osmosis, a method by which water is “driven by electric pumps…through a membrane against its osmotic pressure.”

This process is extremely energy-intensive. According to the WNA, reverse osmosis requires about 6 kilowatt hours of electricity per cubic meter of water. Whether fueled by nuclear power or fossil fuels, the WNA reports that desalination costs about 70-90 cents per cubic meter of water. Noting this, researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology are hoping to increase the effectiveness and decrease the cost of desalination by inventing better filters. Currently they are working on a graphene sheet filter that is one atom thick.  Graphene is a carbon and is a markedly more effective filtering substance than are other alternatives.

In 2007 Dr. Nolan Hertel of the Georgia Institute of Technology wrote in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution that nuclear desalination was more energy efficient and cost effective than was the use of fossil fuel plants. He wrote that Kazakhstan, India, Japan and Russia all have effectively utilized nuclear desalination and that the rest of the world should learn from their example.

Currently, the WNA reports that Australia, India, Israel, Russia, and the United States have functioning nuclear desalination plants. Of note, currently all of the US plants are located on board military aircraft carriers, but the US government is in the process of building plants on land. The WNA also points out that Algeria, China, Egypt, Ghana, Indonesia, Iran, Jordan, Mexico, Oman, Kuwait, Libya, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Spain, Tunisia, the United Arab Emirates, and the United Kingdom are all in the process of designing or building plants. It is worth mentioning that the Iranian plant project appears to have stalled at the time of this writing.

The International Atomic Energy Agency – a component of the United Nations – is likewise encouraging nuclear desalination plants. The agency has developed a Desalination Economic Evaluation Program (DEEP), which they offer as a free download on their website. DEEP is “a tool made freely available by the International Atomic Energy Agency, which can be used for performance and cost evaluation of various power and water co-generation configurations.”

While the technology of nuclear desalination, as imagined by Pauling and Fowler, never came to pass, it does exist in a different form and appears to be growing. One presumes that Pauling – or at least the 1948 version of him – would be pleased to see nuclear power being used in a peaceful technology that benefits humanity. It remains to be seen, however, whether the technology will prove to be as helpful as he once claimed would be the case.

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.