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 of [...]

Pauling’s Theory of Resonance: A Soviet Controversy

“As to the Russian scientists and the scientific controversies, I must say that I have great difficulty in understanding what is happening. The most likely explanation seems to be that some of the Russian scientists are taking advantage of the political situation to advance themselves at the expense of their colleagues. Others are then drawn [...]

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 [...]

Condon, Oregon: Pauling’s Wild West

“Is the small town a place, truly, of the world, or is it no more than something out of a boy’s dreaming? Out of his love of all things not of death made? All things somewhere beyond the dust, rust, and decay, beyond the top, beyond all sides, beyond bottom: outside, around, over, under, within?”
- [...]

Herman Pauling’s Letter to The Oregonian

“We cannot imagine what it is but I feel that either ourselves or our children will someday stand before the world as a specimen of a high standard of intelligence.”
-Herman Pauling, letter to Belle Pauling, 1905.
The documentary record of Linus Pauling’s early years is, unfortunately, rather thin.  Much of what we know about Pauling’s life [...]

Pauling on Global Warming

President-elect Obama’s recent nomination of Oregon State University’s Dr. Jane Lubchenco as head of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has been big news in this community of late.
We had occasion to work with Dr. Lubchenco a bit last year, as she was one of the speakers who presented at our conference, “The Scientist as [...]

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, [...]

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 — [...]

The Ancestry of Ava Helen Pauling

Ava Helen (Miller) Pauling’s ancestry is less-rigorously documented than is the case for Linus Pauling. We have, however, been able to piece together a family tree and have unearthed a few interesting facts in the process.
On Ava Helen’s mother’s side, we are able to trace the family lineage back to Philip Edmond Linn, a [...]

Beaver Pep

“Q – What is your reaction to Sandy Koufax leaving the Dodgers?“
“A – I haven’t really developed a reaction to that.  Doesn’t the young man have some kind of a pain in his arm?“
-”Scientific Genius Dotes On Comic Strips, Miniskirts, But Can’t Cure Golfer’s Slice,” The (Portland) Oregonian, December 2, 1966.
[Photo by Andy Cripe, (Corvallis) [...]