An Interview with the Author of “Ava Helen Pauling: Partner, Activist, Visionary.”

[Part 1 of 2]

We’re dedicating the entirety of this month to celebrating the release of the new book, Ava Helen Pauling: Partner, Activist, Visionary, the first biography of Ava Helen Pauling, now available from the OSU Press.  In the coming weeks, readers can anticipate lengthy excerpts from this exciting new publication, but for today and next week we offer an exclusive interview with the book’s author, Dr. Mina Carson.  Dr. Carson is an Associate Professor of History at Oregon State University and an alum of the Special Collections & Archives Research Center’s Resident Scholar Program.  Transcribed video of her 2009 Resident Scholar presentation, “Hidden in Plain Sight: The Life of Ava Helen Pauling,” is available here.

Pauling Blog: What was the genesis of this book?

Mina Carson: Really and truly the genesis was that I ran into a graduate student, Linda Richards, in Milam Hall in the upstairs hall and she said “did you know that nobody has worked on the Ava Helen Pauling papers and that the [OSU] Press may be interested in publishing a biography?” And I thought, “that’s very interesting.” And she knew that I was interested in peace studies and she knew that I was interested in women’s history and we had worked together on a course before. So I came over and looked at the papers and chatted with the Press and that was that.

PB: Had you any concept of Ava Helen before then?

MC: No and in fact I looked up Trevor [Sandgathe]‘s Wikipedia article and that’s all that was out there. I had worked as a faculty member when I first came here in the early ’90s – I came in ’89 – but in the early ’90s I was appointed to what was then the Ava Helen Pauling Peace Lectureship when Linus was still with us. And for a year I was actually chair of that and so I knew about Ava Helen from that experience. But nothing, I didn’t know anything, I had no concept of her personality or activities or anything like that.

PB: Can you talk about your research process once you started in on this project?

MC: Yes, it was actually very funny. The process itself began in a very, in retrospect, humorous way because the summer that I started doing research I broke my wrist. And it was, fortunately for me, the left hand which I don’t use but I started with her general correspondence, not the very personal family stuff but the general alphabetized correspondence and I started by trying to read the letters into a dictation program. And I came up with some very funny wordings and so I quickly figured out that that was not going to work and fortunately I quickly got my typing hands back again. But I started with the general correspondence and that was not a bad idea because it really gave me a sense of the overall list of her correspondence and it also plunged me into her adult life. So I really did get a pretty quick exposure to the range of her correspondence in her 40s, 50s, and 60s and maybe even 70s actually.

Dr. Mina Carson, Spring 2013.

And then I went back and read the love letters which are, of course, largely from Linus to Ava Helen. But that also was just a complete eye-opener, it was so much fun because I could picture where they had been here on the campus. And then I just dropped into various places, filling in the blanks. I did this in a very non-linear way, which is sort of my way when I research, and I finally figured out that I needed to look at the family financial stuff. And that was wonderful and filled in a lot of blanks and also gave me a sense of how the Paulings lived, because your priorities come popping right out in your financial records.

And finally I went beyond – so as I said, extremely non-linear – finally I went beyond the wonderful collection of photos that are accessible on the web and went into the physical boxes of photographs and, wow, that filled in a ton of blanks for me. What I learned from that, that I hope to keep in my mind, is that the photographs create a narrative; they’re not just a sub-narrative and in some cases they’re a parallel narrative. But they really are a narrative in and of themselves partly because they were so well cataloged and also partly because you see people, faces, and you make connections that you didn’t have before. You know where people were in particular years, for example, or what schools the kids went to. That was very helpful.

PB: And one of the interesting and somewhat unique aspects of the book is that it does intersperse a lot of photographs throughout the text rather than just having a couple sections of photos. It’s kind of dedicated all throughout.

MC: Yeah I really wanted that. When I’m reading a book, I keep the photos section for a special treat, you know, and I was tempted to do what I do myself. But then I decided that definitely was not the way to go because there are so many parts of her life that are not really accessible in the papers but that the photographs do fill in. So having the photographs available all the way along was really helpful; I thought they’d helped the reader to picture people.

Ava Helen Miller, 1922.

PB: You gave a talk in 2009 where you asked the question “how does the biographer write the life of a wife? Especially one so infused with the work of her husband?” How did you go about trying to answer that question?

MC: It’s a question that honestly I’m still working on. And in fact, one of the early manuscript reviewers said that – say she – could just see me all the way through the manuscript saying “oh wait no, it’s not a biography of Linus! Oh wait no, it’s a biography of Ava Helen, I have to focus on Ava Helen!” And that reviewer actually wanted more information about Linus to get the whole tapestry in there. One of the things I tried to do – and this really is kind of my thing, it’s what fascinates me – is I tried to knit together her external interests, her public interests with her private interests. And since she never held elected office, although she was an officer of a major peace organization for a brief time, she never was a public figure in particular. It wasn’t challenging to tell her public story but it was really easier to tell her story as a private person who developed a public side as her passions for various causes became more pronounced through her life, and as she became clearer about who she was in relation to her marriage. So her public persona became more pronounced as she got older. She hadn’t started as a public person and then buried it, rather the reverse.

But the challenge was how do you tell the story of a wife? And the story was she was a wife, first and foremost, and in a sense fortunately. Although she had a very strong personality, she married a guy who really did want her to be front and center if she wanted to be. At least that’s who he was by the 1950s. That doesn’t really answer the question very well, but it was a struggle. It was a struggle to try and balance Linus’ huge personality and public presence with the real sparseness of records for Ava Helen. And fortunately her personality emerges so strongly through the records that I could at least sketch in a little bit of who she was and reconstruct her record from there.

PB: You talked a little bit about a shift in Linus’ perspective towards his wife’s public persona – maybe that’s not characterizing it quite right – but do you see evidence that there was some sort of a mutual agreement beforehand where she would keep a lower profile? That the two of them had agreed that she was going to stay in the house and raise the kids and there was a shift at some point?

MC: Linus seems to go in different directions on that. I mean there was one point in their early correspondence, their courtship correspondence, where he actually says “so are you going to study science and take a Ph.D.?” And I don’t know that he was just fooling around. He always believed – and bless his heart, because it’s not particularly true – but he always believed that she was brighter than he was. And I think in his heart he knew that he had the kind of mind that was a world changing mind. And that she had a really quick intelligence, without the kind of major suppleness of his.

And so she could have, I think, done any number of things. And later in her life she decided that she maybe should have, or at least had dismissed her possibilities too fast. And I think that’s right. I think that’s particularly correct because mothering is not the thing – I mean she made a job of it but not always a good job, it wasn’t really her thing. But I think that Linus, had she said “you know what, I need us to devote some of the family resources to my finishing college and I need to be a teacher or I need to be a lab assistant or I need to be a professor,” he would have probably said “okay then, let’s go in that direction.” That’s my guess. I think it was her set of priorities that she had, in a sense, hammered into herself and had hammered into her by the culture that a woman’s duty was to her husband and to raise beautiful, healthy children, that she kind of went in that direction. And led him to assume that she was going to do that.

Pauling family portrait, 1926.

And also I think it’s clear that she made it her job to push his career and that fit the culture for women at the time. I mean, to be ambitious for your husband was a fit with American culture at that time. So she kind of settled for that but, you know, you just watch her with these toddlers, you watch her with Linus Jr. in the early years, and she just doesn’t know what to do with this kid. And then you watch her with toddlers and she is overwhelmed at one point by three toddlers basically, three little kids, and it’s like, that’s not her thing. It’s just not her thing. She does it with energy and resolutely but it’s not her thing.

PB: Yeah. And then when Crellin came around it was really not her thing.

MC: No, exactly. And that really was unexpected and not particularly welcomed by her.

PB: Well this leads into the next question. The book is in part a family biography and that’s one of its strengths; could you talk a little bit about the family dynamics?

MC: Oh wow, yeah. I think, like most biographers, I didn’t look for the places where I connected with my own experiences but you feel them as they come along. And one of the places is – and a minister at the Unitarian church here in town helped me understand this in the context of the Pauling history, which was that they joined the Unitarian Fellowship in Los Angeles in the early ’60s but they connected up with that church in the ’50s. And they really, interestingly, represented a very strong cultural strand of humanism in the middle of the 20th century.

And part of that was an emotional style and a family style. It was rationalist: the kids will emerge as good citizens if we just give them good educations and launch them out on their own. And so a lot of the lack of warm fuzziness in that family jibed with the kind of ideology that they had absorbed or were comfortable with in terms of raising children. So the kids are really left very much on their own. The parents worry about them, they’re proud of them, they have concerns – are they really going to use their capabilities to the fullest extent? They worried about Linus because at one point Linus Jr. had – what was it, it was hilarious – I think it was an accordion for heaven’s sake and he wouldn’t practice. Well who of us had not had a kid who wouldn’t practice the accordion? I mean who would? But this was a serious concern for them.

The Pauling family, 1946.

And so Linus Jr. – and he’s told us this time and time again – Linus Jr. grew up with the assumption that he had to be a scientist. That was what he was expected to be, and of course it wasn’t his thing. He remembers actually reading psychology very early on and finding it fascinating but he was also interested in history and social science, he was a literature guy and none of that was really rewarded in this family. Plus his education was interrupted by World War II and all the confusion around that, so he never was allowed to, in a sense, put down roots in one place. And I think the longest he probably spent anywhere after Polytechnic in the early years in Pasadena was Harvard Medical School. So Linus Jr., the oldest child, had to emerge as his own person pretty late in life, and with a lot of kind of discouragement, both subtle and overt, from his parents. A lot of worry over who he was and who he was going to be.

And actually, I have to admit, this was very much my parents’ approach to life too and it’s a cautionary tale for me as the parent of teenagers. I watch Linus and Ava Helen raising Linus Jr. and the other kids and think “oh boy, I’ve got to start doing things differently at home.” Because all three of the boys came out with really kind of low self-esteem shall we say, wondering how they could ever fulfill the Pauling expectations. And part of it was Linus and part of it was Ava Helen, a big part was Ava Helen. And when her kids did not perform to specs she was tough, she was scornful, she had expectations. A lot of parents think that’s what we’re supposed to do as parents but having become very familiar with that family I have my doubts.

PB: Well there is a sense that Ava Helen may have come from a somewhat difficult background herself. It’s not as well documented.

MC: It’s not well documented at all. She was eight or nine when her father left the household so she was very young. Her sisters reported quite late in life that she was the favorite of the father who vanished but she never tracked him down. She met him, I think, maybe once more when she was a young woman and had just married Linus but there is no track record of her trying to reconnect with him, even though she apparently ends up with his politics, which is interesting.

Nora Gard Miller in front of the house that she maintained for her children on S. 15th Street, Corvallis, 1924.

I think her mom was a huge influence on her but I also think her mom was a heck of a lot more easy going in many ways than Ava Helen. But what her mom apparently instilled in her dozen children was a respect for education. I don’t know where that family got its resources but most of the kids went through OAC. Granted, Oregon Agricultural College was, relatively speaking, a lot cheaper than Oregon State University is today. But still, her mom came to Corvallis and rented a house here, while four or five of her kids went through school including Ava Helen. And she discouraged Ava Helen from an early marriage, wanting her to finish her undergraduate career.

The family history on her side is really sketchy. I think her sisters, particularly after she married Linus, kind of wanted her to stay in touch; there were polite sisterly relations among them. But Ava Helen also, I think, was a bit snobbish about the rest of her family and that was a point of difficulty. That really was.

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

The Legacy of the Crellin Laboratory

Linus Pauling in his office, Crellin Labs, 1955.

[Celebrating the 75th anniversary of the dedication of the Crellin Laboratory at the California Institute of Technology.  Part 3 of 3]

By the late 1940s, the Gates and Crellin Chemistry Laboratories had emerged as a major center of research globally; all of this accomplished despite the fact that the Crellin labs only opened in 1938.  With the conclusion of World War II, the labs were able to transfer their research back to their original pre-war queue. In the case of the Crellin Lab, this meant a resumption of work on projects deemed important to the Rockefeller Foundation’s Science of Man agenda.

In January 1947, after the conclusion of the very productive war years and almost a decade after a massive explosion and ensuing fire which caused about $14,000 in damages, the Gates and Crellin Laboratories were inspected for safety. The review showed a marked improvement in conditions since the inspection that followed the August 10, 1939 fire. Indeed, the building had seen scarcely any lab injuries since 1946.

Nonetheless, safety inspectors remained concerned, mostly because the facility was lacking in chemical showers – first response equipment crucial in the event of human contact with acid. The inspectors likewise found that too many laboratory doors were kept locked, that the workshop lacked adequate guards on its machines, and that the library’s ladders were too flimsy. On the plus side, the housekeeping was rated as “excellent.”

The Crellin Laboratory, ca. 1938.

Within a few months of the inspection, a Barnstead purification system was installed on Crellin’s third floor to provide the chemistry labs with distilled water. The project wasn’t cheap – it was initially bid at just over $1,300 and Linus Pauling was infuriated when the contractor abruptly, and without explanation, increased this bill to $1,900. Regardless, the new addition was important, and helped the lab’s chemists to continue to improve upon their research.

In 1948 Pauling and his family moved to England for a two-term stay at Oxford University. Once everyone had settled in, Pauling took the time to write a friendly letter to Edward W. Crellin, the benefactor after whom the Crellin Laboratory is named.  ”Now that spring has come here,” he wrote, “and the weather is more like that in Pasadena, I myself find that I think about you more and more often, and wish that I could just come up the street in order to have a talk with you.”

Alas, this opportunity would never present itself as, in mid-May, Pauling received a telegram from back home informing him that E.W. Crellin had died. Shortly afterward, Pauling received another note saying that E.W. Crellin had left $5,000 in his will for Crellin Pauling, at eleven the youngest Pauling child.

By the 1960s, Caltech had fulfilled a prediction made by Max Delbrück in 1947:  it had become to biology what Manchester was to physics in the 1910s. A major reason for this was the capacity for work provided for by the Gates and Crellin Laboratories of Chemistry. Their labs in organic chemistry and physical chemistry were used to help solve biological matters and had proven invaluable to science, especially to the Science of Man agenda.

In the roughly twenty years that Linus Pauling ran the labs, he increased the size of the departments using the space and boldly directed their activities as he saw fit. As with most periods of change, this era of progress was not without its discontents: some people felt that Pauling enjoyed being in the spotlight a little too much, and that this hindered collaboration. But few would even attempt to deny his effectiveness. That his tenure in Pasadena coincided with the flourishing of Caltech’s reputation is not a coincidence.

The Gates and Crellin Laboratories of Chemistry continue to stand as a globally renowned research center to this day. On the same token, Gates and Crellin also comprise the oldest facility still in use on the Caltech campus. The Gates portion of the structure was damaged in the 1971 San Fernando earthquake, but was rebuilt and revamped, and now remains a major component of Caltech’s research infrastructure. The Crellin wing currently houses laboratories in organic and bio-organic chemical synthesis, in addition to key departmental apparatus, specifically the nuclear magnetic resonance, electron paramagnetic resonance, and mass spectrometry facilities. While physical chemistry labs remain important in the space, now under the direction of Dennis Dougherty, organic chemistry research has taken on preeminence in the Crellin lab generally.

Jonas Peters, the Executive Officer of the Division of Chemistry and Chemical Engineering at Caltech, (who was kind enough to answer our questions as we researched this piece) says that the future of the lab is dynamic and hard to determine, with projects and plans changing depending on the interests of its staff. Recently of note, a new biochemistry project was initiated in the Crellin Lab by Douglass Rees, one “dedicated to unlocking the mysteries of nitrogen fixation by the enzyme nitrogenase.”

Though the specifics are uncertain, it is apparent that the Crellin laboratory, now seventy-five years old, is thriving and will continue to provide useful and exciting research for many years to come.

The Origins of the Crellin Laboratory

Architectural schematic for the third floor of the Crellin Laboratory.

[Celebrating the 75th anniversary of the dedication of the Crellin Laboratory at the California Institute of Technology.  Part 1 of 3]

By the early 1920s, the California Institute of Technology had become, in the minds of some, “the hub of America’s scientific establishments.” This point of prestige was especially notable because Caltech was so new and very geographically distant from other major scientific research enterprises, which were predominantly located on the east coast or around the Great Lakes region. Part of this success was due to the construction of the Gates Chemistry Laboratories, built in 1917 and expanded in 1927.

The prestige and skill exhibited by Caltech caught the attention of the very influential and wealthy Rockefeller Foundation, which began supporting certain of the Institute’s operations in the early 1930s.  This support was crucial for many reasons, one of them being that, by 1930, the Gates Laboratory had reached capacity. A.A. Noyes, chair of the Chemistry department at the time, commented that there was “literally no space for another research man,” and that greatly expanded facilities were exactly what the department needed to fulfill its vast potential. Linus Pauling, working in the Gates Lab, opined that the Institute was home to “the most forward looking Department of Chemistry with respect to physical chemistry in the world.” This was in no small part due to the superior leadership of Noyes, who had dramatically expanded the Chemistry and Chemical Engineering departments during his legendary tenure.

X-ray apparatus assembled on Linus Pauling’s desk in the basement of the Gates Laboratory, 1925. Pauling’s hat is seen in the rear of the photo.

The Rockefeller Foundation apparently agreed with Pauling’s assessment of Caltech’s capabilities, and in the early 1930s began to grant substantial funds to the Institute to further its leading positions in the fields of biology and chemistry. Specifically, the Institute held a key position in the development of a new field being pushed by the Foundation – a field described in 1938 as “molecular biology” by Rockefeller staffer Warren Weaver. Considering that the Great Depression was still in full swing, these additional funds were a godsend as research money was understandably difficult to come by.

In 1936, after some debate and controversy, Pauling was appointed the Chairman and Director of Caltech’s Division of Chemistry and Chemical Engineering, and also the Director of the Gates Laboratory of Chemistry, a position he held until 1958. Pauling was pleased with his increased responsibility and control, and decided that he wanted to revamp the department, and the labs in general, to better suit his vision for Caltech.

The Rockefeller Foundation agreed to provide Caltech with more money for purposes of expanding the Chemistry department and the Gates Lab. To this end, the Foundation also courted Edward W. Crellin, a retired steel magnate who lived in Pasadena. Fairly quickly, still in 1936, Crellin agreed to donate $350,000 – about $5.7 million in today’s dollars – in support of the construction of an expansion to the Gates lab, which was to be renamed the Gates and Crellin Chemical Laboratories. A year later, Crellin donated an additional $5,000 to provide floor coverings for the lab.

Edward W. Crellin.

Pauling was so pleased by Crellin’s contributions that he named his son, born June 4, 1937, Edward Crellin Pauling. Even though Edward Crellin and Crellin Pauling never got to know each other – Edward Crellin died when Crellin Pauling was only 11 – he was still flattered by Linus Pauling’s gesture, and left $5,000 in his will for Crellin Pauling.

The architects for the building initiative were Francis Mayers, Oscar Murray, and Hardie Phillip, and the project was expensive. In March 1937, Pauling received a memo from the Chemistry department that suggested cuts to the building, in order to reduce costs. The memo listed 29 suggested reductions that would lower the total cost by $47,039. The list also included three suggested additions, which would add $965 to the bill. His eyes firmly set on a world-class facility, Pauling agreed to consider only a few minor possibilities: “omit some ceiling inserts” ($240), “simplify water proofing on vertical walls” ($450), “omit birch strips on exterior walls” ($158), and “use skim coat plaster” ($200).

In addition to the building itself, outfitting costs for the new space were also high. The equipment required for the lab to function ran to $36,000 – $51,000, depending on the contractor. In addition, basic chemicals were an extra $1,200. The Chemistry department rejected Pauling’s request for more specialized analytical machines, as they would tack on an extra $4,500.

The process of bartering for and ultimately purchasing the materials that the new lab would need was slowed down in July 1937 by over three weeks, when Carl Niemann, a colleague that Pauling had entrusted to do much of the purchasing, was hospitalized. Niemann wrote in a letter to Pauling that he had gone to see a doctor because he had a chunk of rust embedded in the cornea of his left eye, “and the first attempt to remove it was not particularly successful.” He was then hospitalized and had to “have the disturbing element removed and the seat of the injury cauterized.” Despite the potential severity of the injury, Niemann made a full recovery, and the quest to secure the necessary chemicals resumed.

Once the needed equipment and chemicals had been secured, more attention was paid to the new laboratory’s décor, and Caltech had a bronze tablet cast. The tablet, which was eventually installed at the entrance of the lab, read simply: “Crellin Laboratory of Chemistry. The Gift of Edward W. and Amy H. Crellin. 1937.”

Remembering Crellin Pauling: The Later Years

The Pauling family at Deer Flat Ranch. Crellin stands far right. 1973.

[Part 2 of 2]

In April 1966, Crellin Pauling accepted an appointment to join the faculty of the University of California, Riverside. He did so, however, with mixed emotions, explaining to his brother Peter

I will be gratified to be on my own, so to speak, and I feel that the Riverside campus of UC is quite a stimulating place, and will develop very nicely. On the other hand, I don’t have a hell of a lot of confidence, and find myself somewhat frightened by the prospect of being responsible for classes and so on. Well, we shall see.

Crellin was sad to leave the Seattle area in favor of a region beset with smog, but he remained optimistic about the opportunity.

Two years later, in 1968, Linus Pauling made a trip to the Riverside campus to give a lecture as part of the university’s Centennial Celebration. Crellin introduced his father, an act which he felt did not help in his pursuit to establish his own identity at the university. However, he told Peter that he was becoming closer with his parents during this time and, in general, things were looking up.

I now, for the first time in my career, feel that I am working on something that is my own, and feel really in the forefront of research in my field. I have a paper in press, in the PNAS, the work for which has all been done in the past three months. In addition, experiments that we have underway are very promising, and will be very exciting, if they hold up. So maybe I can make it after all! I find that a degree of satisfaction with my work does wonders for my self-esteem. In turn, this new self-confidence does wonders for my general outlook on life, and for my relationship with people generally.

When Crellin’s eldest daughter Cheryl was in sixth grade, Crellin and Lucy told her that they were going to get divorced, which became final near the end of 1968. Not long after, Crellin met Kay Cole, a student in one of his microbiology classes at UC-Riverside. Kay loved his class and the way he taught and they quickly began to spend more time with one another. The couple married a few years later at the courthouse in Rubidoux, California, in the presence of Kay’s three children, a simple ceremony immediately followed by dinner some friends. Hoping to eventually gain custody of Crellin’s children, they began their life together in Southern California.

Kay and Crellin Pauling, 1987.

Kay and Crellin were fairly low key and they often spent their free time traveling – France was a favorite destination – going to the movies and shopping at farmers markets. Kay embraced Crellin’s children, although it was hard at first for the whole blended family to get along, especially when they were all living together in a three bedroom house. On July 22, 1973 the home became a bit more crowded when Kay gave birth to a son, David Crellin Pauling, described by his father as, “a charming and welcome addition to our household.”

In 1982 the family moved to Portola Valley, California, where Kay worked at Foothill College as a teacher of microbiology, cell biology and molecular biology, a post that she held for 18 years. Crellin also had a new job as Associate Professor at San Francisco State University, where he later became chairman of the Biology Department. A year prior to this big move, Crellin and the family had spent a sabbatical year in Corvallis at Oregon State University, studying halophytic bacteria. Crellin noted that their time in Oregon went by very quickly, but that he and Kay were able to work hard and be “fruitful professionally.”

San Francisco brought with it many new opportunities for Crellin, including his collaboration with Lane Khan, with whom he wrote a grant to the National Science Foundation in support of high school molecular biology instruction. Their main focus was to teach kids at an earlier age about recombinant DNA, restriction enzymes, cutting DNA and running gels. As a means of achieving this, Crellin and Khan launched a program where scientific equipment would travel among schools, allowing students to conduct experiments for a couple weeks, before the equipment kits traveled to the next high school participating in the program.

Crellin and Linus Pauling with Lynne Martinez and Ahmed Zewail, 1991.

In the early 1990s, Crellin began working with Steve Dahms, a chemistry professor at San Diego State University. The duo started another program together called CSUPERB – the California State University Program for Education and Research in Biotechnology.  The program brought together a group representing all of the campuses in the California state system and sought to mobilize and support collaborative student and faculty research. To this day, the organization continues to sponsor research and an annual meeting where students talk about their work and where CSUPERB awards various prizes. It is at this meeting that the Crellin Pauling Award for Outstanding Teaching is given to a graduate student in honor of Crellin’s passion for teaching.

When Linus Pauling died in 1994, Crellin was by his father’s side. He and Kay also planned the memorial service and the music. Following his father’s death, Crellin was placed in the difficult position of having to serve as executor of the Pauling estate. Serving in this capacity proved to be a lot of work, but was also on opportunity for Crellin to grow closer to his oldest brother, Linus Jr., who had spent most of his adult life in Honolulu. Nonetheless, as proceedings moved forward, conflicting opinions arose among his siblings concerning certain aspects of settling the estate, resulting in numerous tensions.

Pauling family reunion, 1994.

Amidst it all, in December 1996, Crellin was diagnosed with a particularly aggressive form of colon cancer – a shocking turn of events in part because he had undergone a colonoscopy less than a year previous and received a clean bill of health. He had surgery to help forestall the advance of the disease but decided against chemotherapy once it became clear that the cancer had already spread to his liver. Others recall that Crellin didn’t see much point in making himself miserable with chemo when it was only going to prolong his life and wasn’t going to change the outcome of his disease. Instead, he preferred to live out his days with a greater quality of life.

Crellin’s diagnosis resulted in a rapid decline, leading up to his death on July 27, 1997, at his Portola Valley home.  Only sixty years old, the youngest of the four Pauling children was the first to pass away. Reflecting on the death of her husband, and onetime teacher, some fifteen years later, Kay Pauling noted, “I’m a very fortunate person to have been able to know and love Crellin and to know and love his Dad, and I can’t imagine how my life would have been if I hadn’t taken that class.”

Edward Crellin Pauling, 1937-1997

Crellin Pauling, 1991.

[Ed Note: June 4, 2012 marks what would have been the 75th birthday of Crellin Pauling, the youngest of Linus and Ava Helen Pauling's four children.  In commemoration, we present today the first installment of a two part biography exploring Crellin's life and work.]

A kind and gentle man, Crellin Pauling was a talented and well-liked teacher who enjoyed a long scientific career. Always interested in people, he would often interact with those he didn’t know, sharing his sense of humor while learning something interesting about those with whom he interacted. He was more than a scientist, husband, father, teacher and youngest son of Linus Pauling. He held a passion for life that was evident through his numerous hobbies, including traveling, fishing, sailing, gardening, cars and airplanes. His eldest daughter, Cheryl, describes him as being “just a wonderful person.”

The lengthiest portion of Crellin’s career was spent at the University of California – Riverside, where he was eventually promoted to Full Professor. Crellin mainly taught general biology to freshmen students at Riverside, but towards the end of his time there also started teaching general genetics, all the while conducting experiments in his lab with the support of a handful of student assistants.

Most of his research focused on DNA repair and replication, which was a huge interest of his. He discovered in E. coli the first DNA ligase mutant, which is a temperature sensitive mutant of E. coli. In 1975 he co-authored an article titled “The induction of error-prone repair as a consequence of DNA ligase deficiency in Escherichia coli.” The manuscript, written alongside Lawrence S. Morse from the department of microbiology at the University of Chicago, was reviewed by Linus Pauling and submitted for publication in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

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Crellin Pauling with a friend, 1940.

Born on June 4, 1937 at Huntington Memorial Hospital in Pasadena, California, Edward Crellin Pauling – named after a steel magnate who donated the funds for Caltech’s Crellin Laboratory for research in organic chemistry – joined older siblings Linus Jr., Peter and Linda. Several anecdotes from his childhood, as recorded by his mother, suggest that Crellin possessed a nimble mind from a young age.  In November 1945, Ava Helen noted this interaction with her eight-year old son:

On Saturday, November 10, at the dinner table, I said to Crellin, ‘If we had a circle 10 inches in diameter, that is 10 inches across, what would be its circumference, that is, how long would a string have to be to go clear around the circle?’

In perhaps a minute Crellin said, ‘I think it would be 32 inches.’ I said, ‘That’s pretty good, how did you decide that it would be 32 inches?’ Crellin said, ‘Well, its 10 inches across and it would take about three of those to go around – that would be 30 inches – and then a little more would make 32 inches.’

Crellin attended Polytechnic Elementary and Junior High School in Pasadena, California from 1943 to 1950. One of his fondest memories of his childhood was getting to ride to school with his dad every morning, a chance to spend some quality time with his busy father. Crellin received satisfactory grades, often receiving his lowest marks in English and penmanship and his highest marks in history. His sixth grade teacher wrote, “Crellin is a pleasant, helpful member of the group. He should get better results in arithmetic. The homework in this subject is often carelessly done. He understands the processes and can quickly raise the grades with more careful work.” In 1949, he received a certificate of honor from the school for his work in choral music.

Peter, Linda and Crellin Pauling, 1946.

In 1950 Crellin moved to the Chadwick Boarding School in Palos Verdes, California and it is through his notes to home that we are now able to trace the development of his personality. In the letters that he sent, usually to his mother, Crellin discussed a series of roommate changes, his classes, his enjoyment of baseball and basketball, girls that he fancied and ideas for Christmas presents, always signing his name either “Crellie” or “Crelly” with multiple X’s and O’s.

As he moved into adolescence he developed a love of cars, often reminding his parents to have their own vehicles regularly inspected and to get frequent oil changes. In one letter to his mom, he wrote, “English makes a little better sense, but not much. This letter will be very short, because I must be doing some studying. I think I will go into art and model cars in clay.”

Crellin on the Queen Mary, headed to England, 1948.

Although the letters to his parents did not betray a high level of unhappiness, others recall Crellin as having hated boarding school. In the words of Crellin’s widow, Kay

He felt like when Linda went off to Reed that he was the only child left at home and his parents didn’t want to deal with him so they put him in boarding school so his mother could be free to travel as much as she wanted to with Daddy. He finally talked them into letting him come back home and he graduated from high school in Pasadena.

Indeed, Crellin was twelve years younger than his oldest brother Linus Jr. and five years younger than his closest sibling Linda. As a result, a sense of isolation brought about by his age permeated many of Crellin’s feelings about his childhood.

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The Pauling family in Sweden for the Nobel Chemistry Prize ceremony, 1954. Crellin stands second from left.

Following high school, Crellin began his university studies at Reed College in Portland, Oregon, where he intended to major in chemistry, but ended up graduating with a degree in biology. At Reed, Crellin generally enjoyed himself a great deal, reading books about chemistry and physics, while diving into courses in mathematics and genetics. Crellin was also active theater at Reed, most notably playing a role in “The Mikado,” a comic opera set in Japan. Throughout his first couple of years, he hinted at the possibility of changing his major to philosophy or another discipline in the liberal arts because he no longer felt interested in chemistry but intended to go to medical school after graduation.  In the end he stayed in the sciences, a decision that surely pleased his parents.

Having settled on a course of study, Crellin also began spending a great deal of time with one of his classmates, Lucy Neilan Mills, an art major. Lucy, who was from Evanston, Illinois, was a talented artist and knitter who enjoyed pottery, cooking and playing the piano. Crellin hoped that his parents would like her as she “approached his ideals quite nicely.” Shortly after telling his mother that he was in love with Lucy, the couple were married at Lucy’s grandmother’s house in Oswego, Oregon on November 21, 1956. The Christian ceremony included forty of the couple’s closest friends, although Crellin was upset that his parents were not able to attend. The two were in love and looked forward to buying a house together and starting a family.

Lucy Neilan Mills and Crellin Pauling on their wedding day, 1956.

A short time later, Crellin and Lucy’s first child, Cheryl, was born.  Still students, the young parents moved into an apartment on SE Clinton Street in Portland, while Lucy took a French literature course and Crellin took plant evolution, animal physiology and humanities classes. Crellin seemed to be thrilled with fatherhood, telling his parents all about Cheryl and mentioning that, “she is growing day by day. She has suddenly decided that she likes to sleep twelve hours a night.” In his letters Crellin recounted Cheryl being able to flip herself over from tummy to back and becoming quite vocal by cooing, which was a hit around school. “We are very proud of her and are very happy to have her,” he wrote.

By the end of his junior year, Crellin had passed his exams and chosen his thesis mentor, Dr. Gwilliam, who was an invertebrate zoologist. Crellin decided that he was interested in two fields, physiology and invertebrates, specifically marine zoology. At this time, he considered graduate school at either Berkeley or the University of Washington and looked forward to spending the summer in Pasadena, where Lucy would be able to take piano lessons and he could land an enjoyable summer job working with one of his favorite immunologists.

A few months later, on October 18, 1958, the couple’s second child, Kirstin, was born, while Cheryl was now learning how to hold her own spoon and cup and was almost potty-trained. Crellin graduated from Reed in 1959 and then the family moved to Seattle, as he had decided on the University of Washington for graduate school.

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Crellin Pauling with his mother, Pasadena, 1950s.

Crellin remained in regular contact with his parents during the family’s time in Seattle, telling them all about how school was going and how well their apartment was shaping up. He also wrote frequently to his brother Peter, who was in London. Crellin and Lucy attended a Unitarian church and he was happy as a graduate student, enjoying the fact that a few of his friends from Reed had also decided to attend UW.  In his correspondence he often pondered scientific topics, noting in one letter to his parents,

There certainly are some interesting questions to think about. The present idea of a chromosome is that it consists of a protein backbone with the DNA as little side chains. The question of separation of the two strands of DNA is interesting; I wonder if the segment completely uncoils, or if there is some process of breakdown and reformation.

As his studies advanced he felt ever more confident in his decision to come to UW, remarking in particular that the courses were of “quite good caliber.”  And as always, the updates to home included details on life and family: plans for Christmas break in Pasadena, excitement in seeing Kirstin starting to talk, a recent sailing trip on Lake Washington. As the end of 1959 approached, Crellin was busy preparing for finals and discussing research topics with Dr. Motulsky, while Lucy took care of the children and sewed Christmas presents.

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Cheryl Pauling, age 4 months, doing some exploring. 1957.

Crellin loved being a father, speaking often and affectionately about his children. Kay Pauling recalled, “I have never known a man who loved and devoted his time to his kids as much as Crellin did.” In a typical letter to his parents, Crellin wrote, “Our kids are growing by leaps and bounds. Kirstin sprouted a couple of teeth the other day and Cheryl is a real rambunctious little rascal, full of spirits. I am still amazed at the completeness of her vocabulary, and of her ability to form sentences.”

The family expanded on December 31, 1960 when Edward Crellin Pauling, Jr. was born, a boy described by Crellin as having bright blues eyes and being, “very handsome and very, very good.” He didn’t cry much as a baby and his sisters were keenly interested in him, always wanting to hold him. Crellin loved watching the children ride their trikes and was impressed with how Cheryl seemed to be developing a “quite sensitive nature with regard to music.” He was likewise enthralled with living in Seattle and was excited to someday start a vegetable garden and have a lawn to mow. As summer 1961 approached, the family made plans to go on a picnic for Cheryl’s birthday and Crellin said that she would be “tinkled pink” if her grandparents could come.

Pauling family picnic, 1950s.

In an oral history interview conducted many years later, Cheryl reflected on her childhood with her dad by reminiscing about sitting on her father’s lap while he played solitaire and taking family trips to the Pauling home at Deer Flat Ranch. She also noted her father’s capacity for innovative thinking:

He was really crafty in a way I didn’t realize until later, as I look back. I remember one time when we went to the ranch he made kites for us out of balsa wood, string and newspapers. And when I was really little, I remember he used to make Christmas ornaments – at least for more than one year he made Christmas ornaments with toothpicks by gluing tissue paper on them and getting tetrahedral shapes and things like that.

Deer Flat Ranch, where Linus and Ava Helen lived, was full of great memories, especially for the grandchildren, because it was within walking distance to the beach, it had a long and steep driveway that was perfect for running down, there were cows to ponder and, of course, plenty of family. Cheryl recalled that the ranch, “was always special, because we were always going to see either Grandmamma or the cousins, so aside from the fact that the ranch was a beautiful place to be, it was always fun. There were always other family members there that we were looking forward to seeing.” Crellin loved being at the ranch and was always busy with a project, using the chainsaw and doing anything hands-on, only rarely sitting around reading or studying.

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Crellin Pauling speaking at his father’s sixtieth birthday celebration, 1961.

By 1963 Crellin had progressed in his studies at UW and was looking toward the future and his next pursuits. He considered taking a job in New Zealand or Hawaii, but decided instead to opt for a post-doctorate degree in biophysics, which he eventually did complete at Stanford, working on DNA repair with Professor Phil Hanawalt.

But before Stanford, Crellin needed to complete a lengthy experiment on optical densities. He was heavily invested in this project, writing that

the past six months have been the most productive in my career in terms of results per unit experiment. I am feeling pretty good, actually. I have lots of ideas, and plenty of things to do after I get out. I’m kind of anxious to get out, although I’m not particularly anxious to leave Seattle.

By the end of his time at Washington, Crellin was still greatly enamored with his children, mentioning in a letter that he was looking forward to buying Crellin Jr. a go-kart, for the enjoyment of them both. More than anything, Crellin looked forward to getting his degree and starting something new, although he knew he was going to miss the Pacific Northwest.

The Paulings Go to England, 1947-1948

Crellin Pauling on the Queen Mary, 1948.

[Ed Note: Throughout 2011 the Pauling Blog will be featuring stories of the Paulings' travels around the world.  This is part 1 of 5 in a series exploring the Paulings' time in England, where they lived and worked for parts of two years after the close of World War II.]

The Second World War had come to a close and Linus Pauling was in transition from his war-time work back to the regular goings-on at the California Institute of Technology when he received an enticing invitation. Frank Aydelotte, American Secretary for the Rhodes Scholarship Trust and director of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton (academic home of such greats as Albert Einstein), wrote Pauling in January of 1946 proposing his appointment as the George Eastman Visiting Professor at the University of Oxford for the coming academic year.

The appointment would include a Professorial Fellowship at Balliol College – among the oldest of Oxford’s thirty-eight colleges. It was an attractive offer; with only two or three lectures a week required of him, Pauling would have ample time to visit other European universities and steep in the vibrant culture of international chemistry.

Pauling felt deeply honored by the invitation and was anxious to return to Europe once more after his last visit in 1930. But the appointment would have to wait a year while he remained in Pasadena to develop the chemistry and biology programs at CIT and finish his freshman text, General Chemistry, published in 1947. After much correspondence between Aydelotte and Pauling it was decided in early 1947 that he would serve as Eastman Professor for the winter and spring terms of 1948.

Though the professorship was postponed, Linus and Ava Helen managed to squeeze in a visit to England and Switzerland in June and July of 1947 for a mix of vacation and conferences. As was typical, the Paulings were kept busy with a multitude of social affairs. But after much hustle and bustle in Cambridge, where Pauling received an honorary Doctor of Science degree from the University of Cambridge, and Oxford, where he made preparations for his coming professorship, some quiet days in London and Stockholm were found, which the couple “devoted exclusively to resting and sight-seeing.”

Pauling receiving an honorary doctorate of science from the Earl of Athlone, University of London. July 1947.

Pauling’s role at the forefront of American chemistry (he would learn right before embarking on his voyage in December 1947 that he had been chosen as President-Elect of the American Chemical Society) also garnered him a key place in chemical matters abroad, and his July was filled to the brim with meetings and conferences. After three days at the International Congress of Experimental Cytology in Stockholm, he returned to England for the International Congress of Pure and Applied Chemistry. This event coincided with the International Union of Chemistry, where Pauling presided as Congress Lecturer, as well as the Centenary Celebration of The Chemical Society at the University of London.

At the latter event, Pauling received another honorary degree and delivered an after-dinner speech on behalf of his fellow honorary graduates.  In it, he called scientists to action and leadership in ending war and expressed hope that soon there would be a “supra-national world government, and that we shall all be fellow citizens, citizens of the world.”

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Their two-month escape primed the Paulings’ excitement for their extended stay the coming year. However, the planning for the upcoming trip proved to be almost as difficult as the initial decision of when to go.

With England in the beginning stages of recovery from the war, travel in the UK was less than ideal. Securing a house for the five Paulings proved such a difficult task that the entire trip was on the verge of being canceled a month before departure. Ultimately the family decided to make the sacrifice of staying in a hotel – Linton Lodge – for several weeks until a small flat was finally procured for them.

The strict food rationing implemented in England during wartime carried over into the post-war years and presented a challenge for Ava Helen in preparing the very strict low protein diet necessary for keeping the effects of her husband’s nephritis at bay. Linus Pauling’s doctor, Thomas Addis, even wrote to The Ration Board to ensure that the visiting scientist would be able to receive the forty grams of protein (from eggs, milk, cheese, cereals, vegetables and fruits – not meat, chicken or fish) required by his unique 2,500-3,000 calorie diet.

Indeed, Pauling left no stone unturned in his planning, even writing to a doctor friend for advice on preventing seasickness. Despite initial skepticism that schools would be found for the children over in England, Ava Helen managed to enroll nine-year-old Crellin in the Dragon School – where he was the best man in his form – and fifteen-year-old Linda in the Oxford High School for girls, of which she maintained fond memories of the navy blue uniforms and fit in quite well, aside from her difficult Latin classes. Peter Pauling had just started his first term at Caltech, but was able to keep up with his studies overseas by studying independently with tutoring from an American Rhodes Scholar. Linus Pauling, Jr had just married Anita Oser – the great-granddaughter of John D. Rockefeller and Cyrus Hall McCormick – and the young couple remained in the States while the family embarked on their adventure.

Linus, Peter, Crellin, Linda and Ava Helen Pauling, 1947.

The excitement started for the Pauling children before they even boarded the Queen Mary and set sail for England on December 26.  During the holiday period, New York City was experiencing its worst snowstorm in years and it was the first time the three sunny California natives had seen the snow. Despite the marvels of the winter wonderland, the family really was stuck, and it was only by a stroke of luck (and some extra cash up front) that the Paulings were able to convince a taxi driver to push his way through to the docks and get them to their ship on time. They celebrated New Year’s Eve on the boat and in an interview Linda recalled that the members of the Canadian Ski Team, who were also on the same Atlantic voyage, were dancing with her all night – that is, until they found out that she was only 14!

Linus Pauling must have spent some time during the journey across the sea in introspective thought, for it was during this trip that he wrote his famous pledge, on the back of a piece of cardboard announcing one of his lectures: “I hereby make avowal that from this day henceforth I shall include mention of world peace in every lecture and address that I give.”  This pledge was just the first of many important moments in Pauling’s life that would occur as a result of his time in England.

A Sentimental Trip

Ava Helen Pauling, June 1981.

In the final months of 1981, Ava Helen Pauling was slowing down and making her final public appearances. She was spending as much time as possible with her husband and children, but encouraged Linus to stay busy and travel because of his difficulty dealing with emotional distress. She had been diagnosed with a form of inoperable cancer, and had decided against the use of chemotherapy.

According to his family, Linus Pauling was convinced that he would be able to save her through the use of vitamin C and other supplements. He was unable to talk about her final arrangements so preparations, including Ava’s memorial service preferences and her desire to be cremated, were discussed with her daughter Linda over a long weekend. After surgeries, a long term fight with cancer and a number of other medical complications, Ava Helen died in her home on December 7.

Following the death of his wife of nearly sixty years, Pauling was, understandably, quite lost. His children helped guide him through the funeral arrangements and Ava’s memorial service, andthough he gladly accepted their help, he was very resistant to other offers of assistance in the every day aspects of life. He stayed as busy as he could, and over the course of 1982 published three papers on the nucleus of the atom – a highly abstract program of work that afforded him some measure of escape from his grief.

He remained very lonely however, and was often lost in thought. According to those who knew him, Pauling was having trouble accepting the reality of his wife’s death. Biographer Thomas Hager wrote:

He still talked to her, holding phantom conversations as he spooned his vitamin C powder into his juice in the morning. He still looked for her, expecting to see her in the doorway, asking him to stop and take a walk, to come to lunch. He would cry and look out to sea. Then he would get back to work.

Though he was managing to get by under the circumstances, maintaining his health and taking care of himself during the following months, there remained a need for some kind of a mechanism that would allow him to deal with his grief. Just such an opportunity came in the form of his sixtieth Oregon Agricultural College class reunion. He decided to attend, and set off on what would become a long and meaningful journey.

Sixtieth anniversary reunion of the Oregon Agricultural College class of 1922.  Lucile and Linus Pauling are located second row from bottom, left.

His first stop was Dayton, Washington where he had worked for the Warren Construction Company in July 1923. He and his wife had spent a month there just after being married, and Pauling wished to revisit a number of locations that had meaning to the couple. He went to the intersection where the hotel they had stayed in once stood, and he walked around town and noted the place where Ava had outscored him on an IQ test they had taken.

The following morning he drove across the border into Oregon, visiting Arlington and then Condon, where he visited the grave of his grandfather Linus Wilson Darling for the first time. He spent the next day on the Oregon coast, seeking out former vacation and employment spots in Seaside and Tillamook, and then drove to Corvallis for a few days before attending his class reunion at Oregon State University.

The day after his reunion, Pauling spoke on the capitol steps in Salem, discussing nuclear weapons and the need for peace. He spoke later that same night, once again on peace topics, at the First Methodist Church in Portland. The next day he met with his sisters and a cousin to deliver to the director of the Oregon Historical Society the diaries that Linus Wilson Darling had kept in the late 19th century.

After lunch with his relatives he began his drive back home, stopping at a portion of highway along Grave Creek – he had spent five months in 1919 working on the highway there, sleeping in a tent near a covered bridge. At the time of his visit, the covered bridge was still in existence but the highway was partially destroyed, having been intersected by the construction of Interstate 5.

Pauling finally made it home two days before his wedding anniversary, having driven a total of 2,400 miles. It appears that the trip was just what he had needed, providing a frame of reference and partial relief from his loss. In a letter to an old friend, Pauling described his travels simply and decisively: “I went on this trip mainly to visit places where I had lived long ago.”

Linus Pauling, June 1982.

Following his return, Pauling decided to move out of the Portola Valley house that he and his wife had shared together. His youngest son Crellin moved in with his family, while Pauling bought a condominium on the Stanford University campus. He moved some of his belongings to his ranch at Big Sur, and others to Stanford. He decorated his new home with pictures of Ava and himself, framed awards, and furniture from their travels. The changes helped, but only to a degree. In September he wrote to his best friend, Lloyd Jeffress, “I am getting along pretty well, but I still feel quite lonesome. I have been working hard.”

Pauling became involved once again with his institute, and in early 1983 settled a lawsuit that had been consuming valuable time and resources. He spent half of his time at his ranch, and the other half in Palo Alto. He developed a routine, waking up before five in the morning, and reading himself to sleep at night after a full day of research and theory. Despite his loneliness, Pauling would live for another twelve years, continuing to pursue his scientific work, speak on world peace and manage his affairs.

Chargaff’s Rules

Erwin Chargaff, 1930.

“We have created a mechanism that makes it practically impossible for a real genius to appear. In my own field the biochemist Fritz Lipmann or the much-maligned Linus Pauling were very talented people. But generally, geniuses everywhere seem to have died out by 1914. Today, most are mediocrities blown up by the winds of the time.”

-Erwin Chargaff, 1985.

Erwin Chargaff, (1905-2002) a biochemist born in Austria, became interested in DNA earlier than most. In the 1930s, while he was working with the bacteria Rickettsi, he became aware of nucleic acids, and decided to educate himself about them.

In 1944, after Oswald Avery published his paper detailing the transforming principle of the Pneumococcus bacteria, Chargaff decided to devote his laboratory almost entirely to the chemistry of nucleic acids. Experimenting with these delicate substances was not an easy task, but eventually a chromatographic technique was developed that would allow for the separation and analysis of the base rings in DNA. This work would later lead to the development of Chargaff’s Rules, the topic of today’s post.

The guanine-cytosine base pair.

DNA has two main structural components – a backbone made up of sugar and phosphate groups, and a series of bases found in the middle of the molecule. There are four different bases found in DNA: Adenine (A), Cytosine (C), Guanine (G), and Thymine (T). These four bases can be divided into two categories, pyrimidines and purines. The pyrimidine bases, Cytosine and Thymine, contain only one ring, while the purine bases, Guanine and Adenine, contain two rings. In the DNA structure, the bases pair complementarily, meaning that a purine base will bind with a pyrimidine base. More specifically, Adenine binds with Thymine and Cytosine binds with Guanine.

The adenine-thymine base pair.

Although this information is now considered fundamental biology, it wasn’t fully understood until after Watson and Crick discovered the structure of DNA in 1953. However, Chargaff’s research in the late 1940s had suggested that the four bases paired in the manner described above.

When Chargaff first decided to devote his laboratory to nucleic acids, he allowed a postdoctoral student named Ernst Vischer to choose his research program from a list of suggested topics. Vischer decided to analyze the purines and pyrimidines in nucleic acids, and went to work developing the chromatographic technique so crucial to isolating the bases. Although his technique was rather crude, it did the trick and Vischer achieved great success. The results of the base analysis showed that the amounts of Adenine and Thymine were about equal, and also that the amounts of Guanine and Cytosine were about equal. Eventually, Chargaff came to the conclusion that in a single molecule of DNA, Guanine/Cytosine = Adenine/Thymine = 1. This concept would later become known as Chargaff’s Rules.

Chargaff’s Rules were officially announced in a lecture delivered in June of 1949 and were first published in May of 1950. However, Linus Pauling had heard about the ratios much earlier – straight from Chargaff in late 1947, while traveling to England for his six-month stay as a professor at Oxford University. Pauling, who considered the trip by ship across the Atlantic Ocean with his family to be a vacation, did not pay attention to what Chargaff told him.

Crellin Pauling, the youngest child of Linus and Ava Helen Pauling, mentioned the remarkable background to the incident in a speech given during a symposium to celebrate Pauling’s life that was held here at Oregon State University in 1995.

[Click here to view the rest of Crellin's talk]

Over time Chargaff mentioned his work to individuals beyond Pauling. In the spring of 1952, Chargaff met James Watson and Francis Crick.  A prickly character, it is clear that Chargaff didn’t think much of the duo. In his truly remarkable autobiography Heraclitean Fire: Sketches from a Life before Nature, Chargaff calls Watson and Crick “a variety act” and further describes them as:

One 35 years old (Crick), with the looks of a fading racing tout. . .an incessant falsetto, with occasional nuggets gleaming in the turbid stream of prattle. The other (Watson), quite undeveloped. . .a grin, more sly than sheepish. . .a gawky young figure.

He further notes that:

I never met two men who knew so little and aspired to so much. They told me they wanted to construct a helix, a polynucleotide to rival Pauling’s helix. They talked so much about ‘pitch’ that I remember I wrote it down afterwards, ‘Two pitchmen in search of a helix.’

[More samples from Chargaff's acid pen are available here]

Regardless of what he thought of them, Chargaff still mentioned his work to Watson and Crick. The information, although published almost two years earlier, seemed to be new to the pair.

Though Chargaff himself didn’t speculate much on his rules, and Pauling completely ignored them, they did prove to be extremely useful to Watson and Crick. With this new knowledge, the feedback they had received from Rosalind Franklin and Maurice Wilkins, and data obtained through their own research, Watson and Crick were soon able to correctly deduce the structure of DNA.

For more information on DNA, please visit the Race for DNA website, or check out the other posts in the DNA series. For more information on Linus Pauling, visit the Linus Pauling Online portal.

Stuck on a Cliff

New York Herald Tribune, February 1, 1960

On the morning of January 30, 1960, Linus Pauling told his wife Ava Helen that he would be out checking the fence lines along the boundaries of their ranch near Big Sur, California. A little before 10:00AM, Ava Helen watched as Linus walked towards the coast south of their cabin but did not notice – as Pauling mistakenly believed she had – as he veered away from the fence line and toward Salmon Cone, a small mountain in the Santa Lucia chain near the Pauling home. Linus was dressed comfortably, wearing slacks, a light jacket, and his characteristic beret. He and Ava Helen had planned to meet for lunch and thought that a friend would perhaps stop by around noon, both expecting Pauling to be back by that time.

For several years Pauling had been interested in finding the mouth of nearby Salmon Creek. He got the idea that the mouth was around China Camp area instead of Salmon Cone, and climbed several ledges that allowed him to walk east to investigate his theory. After a time he found and followed a deer path up several hundred more feet. The deer trail came to an end, but Pauling thought that he saw a spot twenty or thirty feet above him where the path picked up again and began trying to make his way to it over loose rocks. Unable to move east as he had hoped, Pauling was unable to retrace his steps back down or go further up the slope safely. A sickening realization washed over him – he was stuck.

A map included with the Herald Tribune article.

The ledge on which he was perched was about three feet by six feet. Loose rocks, leaves, and sticks covered the ledge; behind him was a sheer rock face. Pauling sat on the ledge for several hours thinking that Ava Helen would walk along the beach and see him stranded on the ledge but, as afternoon moved into evening, came to realize that he might have to stay the entire night perched on the little cliff. Having reached this conclusion, he began to dig a little hole with his walking stick in which he could sit. He dug until he had made the hole two feet by three feet and about a foot deep. He then used the extra dirt to create an eighteen-inch mound around the hole. His resting area completed, Pauling intently pondered a route off the ledge, only to become too frightened to continue on his own. Soon it was dark.

Pauling did not want to fall asleep during his long night on the cliff because, for one, he was afraid he would not hear the calls of searchers. More importantly, Pauling was very concerned that, in the midst of sleep, he might roll off of the precipice and into the crashing ocean below. In order to remain awake, Pauling engaged in a variety of mental tasks. For a while he lectured to the waves about the nature of the chemical bond. He also listed the various properties of the elements of the periodic table. As the night dragged on, Pauling counted as high as he was able in as many languages as he could – German, Italian, French and eventually English. He even used his walking stick to try to tell time based on the positions of the constellations. In an effort to stay warm as well as awake, Pauling tried to move one limb or another at all times.

Moving his arms and legs was only part of Pauling’s process of keeping warm on this January night. Earlier in the evening, having decided that it would be necessary and prudent to remain on the cliff in the small hole that he had dug, Pauling began pulling up some of the bushes that were located near his little ledge. He broke them up into smaller pieces and placed them on the damp bottom of the hole. He then laid some of the intact branches over himself. He was not happy with the results, however, as he had to constantly pull out small leaves and twigs from inside his clothes – eventually he just broke the bushes into twigs, which he used as both mattress and blanket. Still wishing to be a bit warmer, Pauling unfolded the map that he had brought with him and laid it over himself. He later told his family that the map helped immensely although, luckily, it was not as cold a night as could have been the case.

Notes by Ava Helen Pauling. January 30, 1960.

As Linus was settling in for the night, Ava Helen had sprung into action to find him. When he missed their lunch date, Ava Helen had assumed that he had simply lost track of time and did not worry too much. But when 4:15 PM rolled around and there was still no sign of her husband, she went to the nearby ranger station for help and to call her son-in-law Barclay Kamb. As it turned out, a ranger came close to Pauling’s ledge near Salmon Cone but Pauling was unable to attract his attention and the ranger moved on to search other areas. At 11:30PM, a deputy sheriff from Monterrey called off the search for the night. The weather conditions were not conducive to a search – intermittent clouds and fog enshrouded the area from early evening until well-after Pauling had been rescued.

Undeterred, Barclay Kamb reached the ranch around 2:30AM and began searching for an hour and a half in the direction that Ava Helen had last seen Pauling…the wrong direction. At 6:00AM, he began searching in the same area again. Just before 10:00AM, Pauling finally heard another one of the searchers – a man named Terry Currence who was walking along the beach below the ledge. Pauling called to him and Currence scrambled in Pauling’s direction. Terry then called to the deputy sheriff, who maneuvered to a spot a little ways above Pauling. Currence was sent by the deputy sheriff to tell Ava Helen that Pauling had been found alive and well, and to send some rope back. While waiting for the rope, Pauling and the sheriff made their way off of the cliff using one of the paths that Pauling had been afraid to follow unassisted.

New York Times, February 1, 1960.

Pauling was in good spirits as he was led back to his cabin, even joking with the rescue team. Upon returning home, Pauling had lunch and some coffee. Ava Helen shooed-away the reporters who had assembled and thanked everyone who had helped to find her husband. The two packed up their car and the following day drove back to Pasadena. On Tuesday, Pauling went to his Caltech laboratory to give a lecture. When he reached his office, he walked past the small party that his office had put together to welcome his return and went into his office without saying a word. He locked his office and shoved a note under the door requesting that his day be cleared. His staff was unsure of what to do so they called in Barclay Kamb. Barclay came to Pauling’s office and drove him home.

Once home, Ava Helen put him to bed and called the doctor. Pauling had gone into mild shock and was told to rest in bed for several days. He was likewise afflicted with a severe case of poison oak, an unfortunate side effect of his bedding on the ledge. Pauling remained in bed and barely spoke; he cried at the sight of his grandchildren when Linda brought them over for a visit. The emotional and physical exhaustion that he suffered from his night on the cliff forced Pauling to take a much-needed rest and to finally let out some of the emotions that he had been bottling up for so many years of relentless work as a scientist and activist. The trauma was relatively short-lived though, and two weeks later he was not only talking and responding to letters but also honoring speaking engagements again.

The media response to Pauling’s plight on the cliff was swift and rampant. By 9:30AM on Sunday, news of Pauling’s disappearance had spread across the radio, and a half hour later, at 10:00AM, an overzealous reporter told San Francisco Bay area residents that Linus Pauling was dead. Two of Linus’s children, Linda and Crellin, were informed of the radio broadcast and for an hour were unable to discern otherwise – they thought their father was dead. After Pauling was found, news reports of the past weekend’s events were spread around the world, from Oregon to Massachusetts, India to Australia. Over the coming month Pauling received well wishes from colleagues, friends, family, and even strangers who had heard of his ordeal. One such telegram read as follows:

Dear Dr. Pauling, Will you be so kind as to stay off precipitous cliffs until the question of disarmament and atomic testing is finished? A needy citizen. [Signed] Marlon Brando.

For more on the life and times of Dr. Pauling, see the Linus Pauling Online portal.

The Pauling Catalogue: A Few Reviews

Linus Pauling, age 17.

[Part 9 of 9]

“[The Pauling Catalogue] constitutes an invaluable resource for historians of science and chemistry, scholars of science policy, and advocates of the peace movement, along with practicing chemists and scientists interested in the history of their fields, especially during the 20th century. It belongs in every academic library.”

George B. Kauffman, California State University, Fresno. The Chemical Educator, (2007): 12, 4, Media Reviews. http://chemeducator.org/bibs/0012004/12070303mr.htm

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Ava Helen and Linus Pauling, Jr., 1926.

“The catalog is ideal for historians of science, and is engaging for browsing by chemists, students, and general readers….Highly recommended.”

A. Viste, emeritus, Augustana College. CHOICE, 45-0288, (September 2007).

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Linus and Crellin Pauling at the Huntington Gardens, San Marino, California, 1939.

“For the illustrations alone, nearly twelve hundred of them, anyone interested in Pauling’s life should buy the catalogue . . .”

Jack Dunitz, ETH-Zürich, Switzerland. Bulletin for the History of Chemistry, Vol. 33, No. 1 (2008): 45-46.

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Peter Pauling and two friends, 1940.

“[Pauling's] concern for the humanitarian and ethical consequences of scientific discovery add an extra dimension of analysis for historians of science. It is fitting that his archivists have now published one of the finest catalogs for the papers of an individual scientist….The Pauling Catalogue is well worth the $125 purchase price and is a must-have for any Pauling researcher or university library.”

Gregory J. Morgan and Emily A. Jones, Spring Hill College. Journal of the History of Biology, Vol. 41, No. 2 (June 2008): 403-406.

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Ava Helen and Linus Pauling at home, 1957.

“Perhaps one of the largest personal archives in the world, the collection contains Pauling’s extensive scientific papers on structural chemistry, molecular biology, and nutrition.  The collection also documents the Paulings’ long-standing and mutual devotion to world peace, civil liberties, and nuclear nonproliferation — a devotion that led Linus to become the recipient of two unshared Nobel prizes…”

Patrick Shea. Chemical Heritage Newsmagazine, Winter 2007/8, Vol. 25, No. 4. http://www.chemheritage.org/pubs/magazine/review_peterson.html

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Linus Pauling harvesting abalone, 1963.

“One can go on, picking raisins from a rich cake — six rich cakes containing many thousand raisins and plums.  It must be made clear; the Catalogue is not a biography, far from it.  For that the best offering is probably still Thomas Hager‘s 1995 Force of Nature: The Life of Linus Pauling, but it provides an immense amount of information about Linus Pauling and his times and will be the invaluable source of material for future biographies, especially those that will be written when we, the people who knew Pauling, listened to him, and learned from him, have passed on.”

Jack Dunitz, Bull. Hist. Chem., 2008.

Linus Pauling on his deck at Deer Flat Ranch, Big Sur, California, 1987.

The Pauling Catalogue

The Pauling Catalogue is available for purchase at http://paulingcatalogue.org