La Cronología de Pauling

We’re very pleased to announce that the Pauling Chronology, written by biographer Robert Paradowski and published online in 2009, is now available in Spanish. We believe that the Paradowski Chronology is the best “one-stop” resource available online for those interested in learning more about Linus and Ava Helen Pauling’s life. Elegantly written and rigorously detailed [...]

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 and the Soviet Union in the 1960s and 1970s: The Thawing of Frosty Relations

As the dynamics of Soviet dogma evolved, the enmity surrounding the so-called “resonance controversy” simmered down, and by the late 1960s Pauling had gone from being a disparaged name in Soviet chemistry to a respected scientist and much-admired advocate of nuclear test bans and international peace. Pauling’s first visit to the Soviet Union in 1957 [...]

Paradowski’s Pauling Chronology

“According to Zelek S. Herman ‘the best biography in my opinion is the short one by Pauling’s only authorized biographer, Robert J. Paradowski who has extensively studied Pauling’s scientific work and who knew him for many years.’ Unfortunately this biography/chronology, though written in English, was published in a hard-to-find Japanese volume. Paradowski’s 1972 University of [...]

Snapshots of Pauling’s Childhood in Condon

[Ed Note: The Pauling Blog wears a black armband today for the Oregon Historical Society Library and the End of the Oregon Trail Interpretive Center, both of which have been forced to close due to budget considerations.  The state of Oregon is little more than two weeks removed from its sesquicentennial celebration and it is [...]

The Building Blocks of Linus Pauling Day-by-Day

Any given page in the Linus Pauling Day-by-Day calendar is the product of up to four different XML records.  These records describe the various bits of data that comprise the project – be they document summaries, images or full-text transcripts.  The data contained in the various XML records are then interpreted by XSL stylesheets, which [...]

Linus Pauling Day-by-Day: The Internet Just Became A Bit More Crowded

In 1999 we hatched the crazy idea of trying to document every day of Linus Pauling’s professional life. Researchers were, at the time, honing in on a draft of the human genome, and our thinking was, if scientists can map the exact genetic details of human existence, why can’t we map the daily activities of [...]

Pauling in the ROTC

As most of our readers are no doubt aware, this past Tuesday was Veterans’ Day in the U.S. and Remembrance Day in many other parts of the world.  In honor of this global occasion, we thought it appropriate to discuss a component of Linus Pauling’s story that may come as a surprise to many — [...]

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 [...]

Now Playing On the Special Collections Website…

In recent days, a large amount of great new content has been added to the Oregon State University Libraries Special Collections website. Here are some of the highlights: New Videos First and foremost, almost nine hours of transcribed video from a major conference on the life and work of Linus Pauling has been added to [...]