An Era of Discovery in Protein Structure

[The Paulings in England: Part 4 of 5] Though metals were consuming a good portion of his time during his fellowship at Oxford, Linus Pauling’s other projects never strayed far from his thoughts.  High on the list were the mysteries of proteins, whose structures and functions were slowly starting to be unraveled. Pauling’s interest in [...]

The Medical Research of Linus Pauling

By Tom Hager [Ed Note:  In October 2010, Pauling biographer Tom Hager delivered a talk sponsored by the Oregon Health Sciences University which detailed and discussed the various contributions that Linus Pauling made to the medical sciences, including the controversy over his strong interest in orthomolecular medicine.   With the author's permission, excerpts of this talk [...]

Remembering Harvey Itano

“The discovery by Dr. Itano of the abnormal human hemoglobins has thrown much light on the problem of the nature of the hereditary hemolytic anemias, and has changed these diseases from the status of poorly understood and poorly characterized diseases into that of well understood and well characterized diseases.” -Linus Pauling, 1955. We were saddened [...]

Mastering Genetics: Pauling and Eugenics

“I have suggested that the time might come in the future when information about heterozygosity in such serious genes as the sickle cell anemia gene would be tattooed on the forehead of the carriers, so that young men and women would at once be warned not to fall in love with each other.” -Linus Pauling, [...]

Mutations and Malaria: Pauling’s Adventure in Genetics

During the 1940s, Pauling had established sickle-cell anemia as a molecular disease, a pioneering concept that synthesized biology and chemistry in a revolutionary manner. Other interests had pulled him away from this important work, however, for the better part of a decade. Then, in the early 1960s, he was introduced to research suggesting that rates [...]

The Importance of the Concept of Molecular Disease

“The idea of Dr. Linus Pauling that an abnormal hemoglobin molecule might be responsible for the sickling process initiated the study of the hemoglobin molecule in hereditary anemias.“ – Harvey Itano. “Clinical States Associated with Alterations of the Hemoglobin Molecule.” Archives of Internal Medicine, 96: 287-97, 295. 1955. During his lengthy career, Linus Pauling maintained [...]

Pauling’s Theory of Sickle Cell Anemia

“We owe to Pauling and his collaborators the realization that sickle cell anaemia is an example of an inherited ‘molecular disease’ and that it is due to an alteration in the structure of a large protein molecule, an alteration leading to a protein which is by all criteria still a haemoglobin.“ – Vernon M. Ingram, [...]

Linus Pauling, Vitamin C and the AIDS Crisis

“Many orthomolecular substances are so free from toxicity that they show beneficial effects over a 10,000-fold range of concentrations. Yet if you take even ten times the amount of aspirin that many patients take, for example, you’d be dead; hundreds of people do die every year from aspirin poisoning. And all of the other major [...]

Pauling’s Methodology: Electrophoresis

[Electrophoresis image extracted from the published version of Arne Tiselius' Nobel lecture, December 13, 1948.  A digitized version of this lecture is available here courtesy of the Nobel Museum.] “The item of $7,500 for apparatus, supplies, animals would permit us to use the large number of animals required for some of our projected researches, and [...]

Thinking Structurally: The Roots of Pauling’s Hemoglobin Work

“Linus Pauling is one of that select group of individuals whose lives have made a discernible impact on the contemporary world. His contributions to molecular chemistry have been substantial and fully deserving of the recognition that he received in the form of a Nobel Prize in chemistry….Pauling continued to do productive scientific work throughout his [...]