Scenes from the 2012 Linus Pauling Legacy Award

A capacity crowd of some three-hundred people gathered in Portland last Thursday April 19th to hear Dr. Roald Hoffmann deliver a fascinating lecture, “Indigo: A Story of Craft, Religion, History, Science and Culture.”  Dr. Hoffmann traveled to Oregon to receive the seventh Linus Pauling Legacy Award, which was granted during a dinner that preceded his [...]

Scenes from the Linus Pauling Science Center grand opening

(Video courtesy of Graham Kislingbury, Mid-Valley Newspapers) We were there when ground was broken in September 2009.  Now, just over two years later, it was our great pleasure to attend the grand opening of the magnificent Linus Pauling Science Center, new home to the Linus Pauling Institute and to components of the Department of Chemistry. [...]

Big News

We are very excited to announce the release of our latest website, The Scientific War Work of Linus C. Pauling:  A Documentary History.  The fifth in our documentary history series, the project took us nearly thirteen months to complete. As with the previous four documentary histories, the war site is comprised of a Narrative, a [...]

Scenes from the 2010 Linus Pauling Legacy Award Event

Dr. Roger Kornberg received the 2010 Linus Pauling Legacy Award this past Tuesday and lectured before a capacity crowd at the Oregon Historical Society’s Miller Pavilion.  Here are a few images from an entertaining and illuminating evening. Fully transcribed video of Dr. Kornberg’s lecture will be made available soon on the OSU Libraries Special Collections [...]

Holiday Traditions at the Pauling Home

Linus Pauling, Jr. recounts his boyhood memories of Christmas trees and mistletoe in Pasadena.

The Oppenheimer Minerals

For a short period of time in the late 1920s, Linus Pauling and J. Robert Oppenheimer were colleagues at the California Institute of Technology.  While the tenor of their relationship was, in the end, rather tumultuous, the two did share many common interests. One such interest was a passion for minerals.  Both Pauling and Oppenheimer [...]

The Pauling Centenary Conference

The date February 28, 2001 is meaningful to many residents of the Pacific Northwest.  At 10:54 AM that morning, the Nisqually earthquake, a magnitude 6.8 temblor located northwest of Olympia, Washington, shook the earth beneath the greater Seattle-Tacoma area and ultimately caused over $1 billion in damage. Some 200 miles south in Corvallis, faint signs [...]

Pauling’s Contacts with Martin Luther King, Jr.

Linus Pauling is recognized as one of the greatest peace activists of the 20th century. From the end of World War II until his death in 1994, Pauling was a central figure in the fight for nuclear disarmament and a great proponent of human rights. Though his primary focus was international peace and weapons reduction, [...]

Pauling Inducted Into the California Hall of Fame

By our count, Linus Pauling was granted forty-seven honorary doctorates over the course of his lifetime, as well as every meaningful award that a scientist can receive.  He remains, of course, the only person to have received two unshared Nobel prizes – images of the Nobel medals and many other of his awards can be [...]

Creating The Pauling Catalogue: Special Features

[Part 8 of 9] Thanks in part to a number of special features that have been incorporated into the published Pauling Catalogue, the finished product is far from a simple listing of archival holdings. For starters, each volume contains an introduction by either a major historian of science, a member of the Pauling family or [...]