Linus Pauling
From Philosopedia
Pauling, Linus Paul (28 February 1901 - 19 August 1994)
A chemist, Pauling is the only person to have received two unshared Nobel Prizes, the chemistry prize in 1954 and the peace prize in 1962. He was active in promoting peace, world disarmament, and the cessation of nuclear weapon testing.
Many know of him because of his advocacy of taking large quantities of Vitamin C in order to fortify the body against colds, for his announcement resulted in pharmacies being immediately unable to maintain adequate supplies.
During World War II, ignoring the widespread resentment against Japanese-Americans, he hired as his gardener a young man whose parent had been born in Japan - in retaliation, vandals defaced Pauling’s house to show contempt for his brand of social conscience.
In 1952, Pauling was denied a passport, partly because he had incurred the suspicion of Sen. Joseph R. McCarthy, who had accused him of having a “well nigh incredible” record of membership in Communist front organizations. Pauling denied under oath that he had ever been a Communist, and it turned out that he had applied for a passport in order to go with his wife, Ava, to participate in a London conference on the structure of proteins.
Meanwhile, Pauling’s The Nature of the Chemical Bond was regarded as hostile to the dialectical materialism of Marx, Engels, and Lenin, and when the Soviets criticized his work Pauling countered by calling Stalinist science distorted.
A Unitarian and son of an Oregon druggist, Pauling dropped out of his Portland high school as a form of protest against taking courses that he regarded as pointless. Gaining entrance to Oregon Agricultural College without a high school diploma, he majored in chemical engineering, was quickly recognized as a prodigy, and eventually became a fellow of the Linus Pauling Institute of Science and Medicine.
When a professor at the California Institute of Technology, he had said there were “many aspects” of religion that offered no conflict with science. But he said there was some question as to the extent to which a “good scientist” could accept religious dogma. Challenged about this on the NBC TV program, “Youth Wants to Know,” he was told that Dr. Robert A. Millikan of the same school had declared that “the more he read and the more he studied, the more he was sure about the existence of God.” Pauling commented: “My experience has been different, in a sense almost opposite, of Professor Millikan.”
In 1961 the American Humanist Association named Pauling Humanist of the Year. For him, “Humanism is a rational philosophy . . .a philosophy of service for the good of all humanity, of application of new ideas of scientific progress, for the benefit of all humankind.”
In 1972 he won the Lenin Peace Prize, and in 1974 he won the U.S. National Medal of Science. For three decades or more, Pauling was a member of the First Unitarian Church in Los Angeles. He wrote No More War! (1962) and How To Live Longer and Feel Better (1987). Often photographed with his beret atop his head, Pauling remained to the end irreverent, iconoclastic, and outspoken.
(Pauling was an honorary member of the Bertrand Russell Society.)
