Force of Nature- The Life of Linus Pauling

by Thomas Hager

  But his feelings about a scientist's role in public debate were changing. In 1939 he read The Social Function of Science, a long, detailed, and devastating critique of the failure of science to grapple with world affairs written by John Desmond Bernal, the English crystallographer. The book effectively destroyed the notion of science as an island of rationality immune from less lofty human concerns. "It used to be believed that the results of scientific investigation would lead to continuous progressive improvements in conditions of life," Bernal wrote, "but first [World War I] and then the economic crisis have shown that science can be used as easily for destructive and wasteful purposes, and voices have been raised demanding the cessation of scientific research as the only means of preserving a tolerable civilization. Scientists themselves, faced with these criticisms, have been forced to consider, effectively for the first time, how the work they are doing is connected with the social and economic developments which are occurring around them." Bernal, a committed Marxist and an advocate of world government, proposed that scientists should move toward a socialist model in which their talents were used for the good of the people rather than to prop up a capitalist economy. He also understood that scientists themselves were a major impediment to the creation of a socialist Utopia. In Bernal's view the typical scientist was at best a middle-class conformist, at worst a capitalist lackey, "a salaried employee of the State, of an industrial firm, or of some semi-independent institution such as a university which itself depends directly or indirectly on the State or industry. Consequently the real liberty of the scientist is effectively limited, by the needs of his livelihood, to actions which are tolerated by his paymasters." Scientific workers must organize, Bernal wrote, take control of their own work, recognize their social responsibilities and act upon them. "Set science free, and it will work for the good of humanity far more effectively than it does now for the gain of a few."

  Pauling devoured the book, made it a topic of discussion in his seminar classes at Caltech, and sympathized with most of its message. His curiosity about the world had been extended by Ava Helen to questions of privilege and politics in America; now he began to believe that scientists might have something useful to say about those issues. Like Bernal, he believed that because much of the progress of the modern world was rooted in scientific advances and scientists were better informed about these advances than anyone, they could have an important rule to play in public debates. Scientists also had a technique—the scientific method—by which to analyze data coolly and rationally. He saw no reason why a scientist, given enough information, could not apply that method to think through a political or social issue, such as how to handle Hitler.

  Ava Helen then encouraged Pauling to read Union Now, a book in which the American political journalist Clarence Streit outlined the dangers of totalitarianism and offered a new idea to fight it: consolidation of the world's democracies into a federation modeled on the union of American states. Streit's book, with its appealing idea of extending the basics of the U.S. Constitution to the entire world, became a mini-phenomenon, spawning a Union Now movement that by 1940 claimed three thousand members in sixty chapters across the United States. Ava Helen became an enthusiastic promoter of Streit's philosophy. Both Paulings became charter members of the Pasadena chapter, and Ava Helen spent many afternoons sitting behind the counter at the group's downtown storefront office.

  With his wife's urging, Pauling made the first political speeches of his life in 1940. His topic was Union Now, the containment of fascism and the need to prepare to fight the next war. At first, he was a bit uncomfortable speaking about topics that had little to do with science, but he soon found that he enjoyed it. Standing in front of small audiences in junior high school auditoriums or the living rooms of private homes, he could speak with a passion unsuited to his scientific talks. It brought back the excitement and satisfaction he had felt exercising his skills as senior orator at Oregon Agricultural College (OAC). "Should not our country help Britain now to fight the thing which is attacking her and will probably attack us when she is polished off?" he asked his audiences. "This means going to war, and we, as idealists, are by nature pacifists and opposed to war. But we are being forced into war anyway—we are vigorously preparing for war, and who among us believes that we are not going to have war sooner or later? ... It is the cancerous growth of Nazism—of dictatorship in general—that must be eradicated from the otherwise orderly organism of the world." He ended his speeches with a stirring vision of a planet at peace, organized and run by a stable, democratic world government.

  The idea of the "orderly organism of the world" in which Hitler played the role of a disrupting cancer put Pauling's emerging political sense in line with his view of science: He believed that the world of human affairs, like the world of molecules, could be understood and made rational. Once again, structure was the key. If mankind lived in a correctly structured world—one in which nationalism was replaced with world government, capitalism with scientifically engineered socialism, and totalitarianism with democracy—suffering would decrease, and war would become obsolete. The world would be made healthy. Some of those goals were in the future, but Hitler was an imminent danger to the vision and must be dealt with immediately.

  Pauling's increasingly activist left-wing beliefs placed him in the minority both at Caltech and in staunchly Republican Pasadena. In the fall of 1940, when Caltech students tried to set up an election-year debate with professors arguing for the presidential contenders, they had trouble finding anyone willing to take Roosevelt's side. Finally, they turned to Pauling, who said he would give it a try. The Caltech economics professor who championed Wendell Willkie did not stand a chance. "Pauling ran rings intellectually around the other man," remembered John Edsall, a Harvard professor then visiting Caltech. "It was rather a dazzling display, a bravado performance." Willkie won Pasadena in the election (as Republican candidates did every year Roosevelt ran) but Pauling had discovered that taking on the role of gadfly could be fun.

  Hitlerism, however, remained Pauling's main political concern. For a while he flirted with the idea of joining the American Association of Scientific Workers (AASW), the left-wing offshoot of a British association that Bernal had helped start in the late 1930s to encourage scientists to think about the social effects of their work and to mobilize them toward using science for the welfare of society and away from war projects. The AASW picked up a number of prominent supporters, but they lost Pauling when the group published a resolution in Science in 1940 urging the United States to remain neutral in the European war. Pauling thought that only war would defeat Hitler. He publicly protested the AASW's "peace at any price" program and joined the Committee to Defend America by Aiding the Allies and the American Friends of the Chinese People.

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  His feelings about fascism were shared by a majority of American scientists. As the blitzkrieg swept across Europe in the spring of 1940, the president of the National Academy of Sciences, Caltech graduate Frank Jewett, began lobbying Washington, D.C., to mobilize scientists for the coming war. The government responded by creating the National Defense Research Committee (NDRC), a group designed to organize and fund the nation's scientific war effort, the functional equivalent of the National Research Council that Hale had started during World War I. The president of the Carnegie Institution, MIT-educated electrical engineer Vannevar Bush, was picked to head it and in 1941 oversaw its amalgamation with the Committee on Medical Research to form the Office of Scientific Research and Development (OSRD).

  It was the beginning of a new era of collaboration between science and government in the United States. As the rumors of war increased, Bush began gathering a core group of advisers who would determine where billions of dollars in national defense money would go. Caltech's Richard Chace Tolman was tapped to head the NDRC division on armor and ordnance, and he arrived in the nation's capital in the summer of 1940, bringing the Caltech nuclear physicist Charles Lauritsen with him as his vic
e chair.

  Pauling was brought east, too, but for his ideas, not his administrative ability. In October 1940 he joined thirty other chemists at a discussion of wartime needs called by Division B of the NDRC in Washington. Pauling finally felt he was going to be able to do something positive to fight the Nazis, and he listened eagerly as a group of military officers presented the researchers with a wish list of needed breakthroughs, including new medicines, better explosives, and more accurate monitoring and detection devices. Pauling paid special attention when a navy officer outlined a potentially deadly problem in submarines. There was no easy way to accurately monitor the level of oxygen in those tin cans, the officer said, making it difficult to adjust levels for safety and efficiency on long underwater runs. With too little oxygen, the men would get weak and drowsy; too much increased the danger of an explosion.

  On the way home on the train Pauling thought about ways to make an oxygen meter. Taking advantage of what he had learned in his hemoglobin research about oxygen's unusual magnetic properties, he considered ways the same properties might be used to make a meter. The more oxygen there was in a sample of air, the more attracted it would be to a magnet. But how could you measure it? The magnetic changes caused by slight differences in oxygen content would be very small, especially compared to the mechanical forces required to move a needle on a dial.

  Then he thought about Archimedes. Two thousand years before, the Greek philosopher had discovered a way to determine how dense a liquid was by suspending a solid body in it: the denser the surrounding liquid, the more it would buoy up whatever was put in it. By measuring the difference in weight, buoyed and unbuoyed, the liquid's density could be calculated. Replace the liquid with an air sample and carefully suspend a test body in it that would react to changes in a magnetic field, Pauling reasoned, and changes in the oxygen content of the sample would cause the test body to behave differently. He began to make a sketch. The test body would have to be small and delicately balanced to measure slight changes. Pauling thought of a tiny glass dumbbell, the ends filled with air, balanced and glued onto a fine quartz fiber. The magnetic field could come from an ordinary horseshoe magnet. String the silica strand across the ends of the magnet. Then any changes in the magnetic properties of the air surrounding the test body would cause it to reorient itself in the magnetic field, to swing until it reached a new equilibrium with the torsion of the strand. The degree of swing would be very small, but perhaps it could be amplified for the viewer by reflecting a light off the test body onto a scale. He started making some sketches.

  When he got back to Pasadena, Pauling gave them to Reuben Wood, a more mechanically minded colleague, and Wood set to work. The hard part was making the tiny dumbbell and balancing it on the thread; once that was done, Wood glued a tiny mirror onto the dumbbell to reflect the beam of light, attached it across the magnet, and set up the whole thing inside a bell jar, with a flashlight for a light source and a piece of tissue paper pasted to the jar wall for a scale. The prototype was up and working in a matter of days.

  A few weeks later, Pauling was on his way back to Washington, D.C., with the first Pauling Oxygen Analyzer carefully nested next to him in the berth of the train. He was very proud and a little nervous. In the middle of his first night out from Pasadena he awoke suddenly with a premonition that his meter was not going to work. He switched on the overhead light, carefully unboxed the device, and switched on the flashlight. The device was not behaving correctly. The reflected light on the tissue paper showed an oxygen level that was definitely too low; in the jostling to get on the train the meter must have gotten out of calibration. It was all too delicate; his design was not sturdy enough for real-world use. "I'd better get off the train and go back to Pasadena," Pauling thought. He looked out the window in despair. Then he felt a rush of relief. Everywhere he looked he saw mountains. The train was climbing over the Continental Divide. The meter was accurate—it was correctly reading the lower oxygen concentration at a higher elevation. He repacked his meter and happily went back to sleep.

  After the top brass saw it in action, Pauling was given a contract to make several hundred Pauling Oxygen Analyzers at Caltech. He patented the design, then had Holmes Sturdivant organize a small factory in the laboratory, with workers trying to blow molten glass into tiny spheres for the dumbbells and balance them on almost invisible threads. It was very hard work. It took all the air human lungs could muster to start the tiny dab of hot glass stretching; once it started, the pressure had to drop immediately or the bulb would blow too big. They found only one virtuoso graduate student who could clamp down on the blowing tube, coordinate his diaphragm, lungs, and mouth muscles, and create a decent sphere—perhaps once every two hundred tries.

  Realizing that this was not going to work, Pauling convinced the innovative Caltech chemistry professor-turned-manufacturer Arnold Beckman—inventor of the Beckman pH meter and founder of Beckman Instruments—to take over production. Beckman hired Pauling's workers, personally designed the world's smallest glassblowing machine, and found a way to draw out silica fibers so fine they could not be seen—workers had to find them by dropping a piece of folded paper over the spot where they thought they were. The meters he made were very accurate. Although the U.S. Navy argued over technical specifications until the war was over and never became a major buyer, several hundred units were sold to the British navy. The machine was also used in aviation-medicine studies, industrial plants, and in the incubators of premature babies. Royalties from sales were shared between Caltech—for years forming a significant part of its royalty income—Pauling, Sturdivant, and Wood. But the only one who made much money from it was Beckman, who, in the mid-1950s, sold the company he started to make the analyzers for a million dollars.

  Dr. Addis's Diet

  In March 1941, one month after his fortieth birthday, Pauling received the most significant award given him in the decade since the Langmuir Prize: the William H. Nichols Gold Medal of the New York chapter of the American Chemical Society. Pauling—"the outstanding theoretical chemist of the United States and probably of the world," the press release said—was again one of the youngest men to have ever received the medal, at the time considered American chemistry's most prestigious honor.

  The awarding of the medal was cause for a chemical celebration in New York City, capped by a black-tie dinner at the Hotel Pennsylvania. As the assembled chemists sipped their coffee, Pauling's old friend and Caltech roommate Paul Emmett regaled the audience with tales of their early days together. Then Emmett surrendered the podium to the great Columbia chemist Joseph Mayer, who outlined Pauling's scientific work.

  When Pauling's turn came to speak, everyone expected to see another knockout performance by the renowned speaker. But it quickly became apparent to those who knew him that something was wrong. Pauling's face looked bloated and puffy. His voice was flat. He mentioned at the beginning of his speech that he had been surprised to find his eyes swollen shut when he tried to open them that morning, then turned it into a joke about politicians not being able to see. But there was nothing funny about the way he looked and acted. He seemed drained of energy. He kept his speech uncharacteristically short and went back to his hotel room early.

  At a small dinner party at Alfred Mirsky's apartment the next evening, he admitted that he felt worn out and had gained about twenty pounds in the past few weeks, enough to have trouble buttoning his shirt collar and fitting into his shoes. One of the guests, a heart specialist from the Rockefeller Medical Institute, took Pauling aside, told him that edema like his was sometimes indicative of heart trouble, and asked him if he could quickly check him over. They went into one of the Mirskys' bedrooms, where the physician laid Pauling on the floor, palpated his extremities, and listened to his heart. It was puzzling. There did not seem to be anything wrong with his cardiovascular system, but the extreme swelling was certainly enough to warrant concern. The doctor told Pauling to come to his office at the institute the next day for a complete wo
rk-up.

  Ava Helen made sure that he went and that he took every test the Rockefeller doctors could give him. After hours of enduring various proddings and pokings and drawings of blood, Pauling waited nervously with Ava Helen for the results. Finally, they were ushered into a room filled with somber physicians. They were asked to take a seat. It appeared, one man said, that Pauling might have a serious problem. It appeared that his kidneys might be affected by a condition known as Bright's disease, which caused a progressive decrease in the body's ability to filter waste products out of the blood. As a result, fluids could build up and cause bloating. But the problem was potentially more serious than that. The tests also showed that he was passing an abnormal amount of protein in his urine, a signal that the kidneys themselves were being destroyed. This was indicative of a most serious form of Bright's disease. Pauling was silent, trying to work his way through what he had just heard. Ava Helen asked if people recovered from the condition. "Some do," answered one of the physicians. But the important thing now was to pinpoint the nature of his disease and discover what was causing it.

  Everything was a blur after that. They stayed another day, going through more batteries of tests. After they were done, the doctors told Pauling to cancel his remaining speaking engagements and return home immediately. They would help him find a suitable specialist in California.