Force of Nature- The Life of Linus Pauling

by Thomas Hager

  He wanted the prize, he gambled, and he lost.

  He regretted it, of course, the remainder of his life, although he was soon back to his usual cheerful self around the lab. Within a few months he could joke with Alex Rich about it, asking him how his new project on a special form of DNA was going, then adding, "You work hard on that problem, Alex, because I like most of the important discoveries to be made in Pasadena."

  The encounter with DNA would become the stuff of legend in the literature that would spring up around its discovery. Watson and Crick would take center stage, with Pauling assuming the smaller part of an offstage voice, a legendary Goliath in a far land felled by two unlikely Davids. A year would rarely go by after 1953 without someone, a scientist or writer, asking him where he had gone wrong.

  Ava Helen finally tired of it. After hearing the questions and explanations over and again, she cut through the excuses with a simple question. "If that was such an important problem," she asked her husband, "why didn't you work harder on it?"

  CHAPTER 18

  The Prize

  Silence

  The story going around Caltech in the summer of 1953 was that Pauling's new building was the payoff from an old racing debt.

  This was the Norman Church Laboratory of Chemical Biology, a sizable research facility that would physically link Pauling's chemistry buildings to Beadle's biology labs—a bricks-and-mortar manifestation of his and Beadle's grand plan. The money for the building had come from the will of a wealthy longtime Caltech trustee whose passions had included breeding racehorses. DuBridge often told the story of how Church, accused in the 1930s of doping winners, had asked his friend Millikan if there was anyone at Caltech who could run scientific tests on his horses and clear his name. Millikan sent him to Pauling, who, according to DuBridge's story, figured out how to screen Church's Thoroughbreds for the suspected drugs and showed that the horses were clean. "Norman Church never forgot that," DuBridge said. "He owed a debt to Millikan and Pauling for getting him out of trouble." The debt was paid twenty years later, according to the story, with a $1.5 million bequest for Pauling's new building.

  That was a large chunk of money, but not enough to finish the building Pauling wanted. The Church Laboratory was to be a symbol of everything Pauling now recognized as the future of chemistry, a future in which the old science inspired a new biology. He envisioned a grand five-story temple to basic research, the biggest building on campus, two floors of laboratories underground and three above, with spacious laboratory suites arranged and equipped in the most modern manner, to be shared equally between biology and chemistry.

  It had to be big. Pauling desperately needed space, and so did Beadle. Fed by the postwar boom in science funding, the staffs of their two Caltech divisions had grown by 50 percent in less than five years. Pauling's innovative research program was drawing scores of postdoctoral fellows, each needed lab and study space; the lion's share of the old Gates and Crellin laboratories was devoted to their work. The other faculty were starting to grumble about being squeezed out by things as nonchemical as Campbell's immunology program.

  So Pauling designed a laboratory twice as big as the Church bequest could pay for—going against the wishes of President DuBridge, who argued that he and Beadle should build only what they could afford. The first $1.5 million paid for the shell of the building, and in the early 1950s, Pauling began looking for an equal sum to finish it, furnish it, and fund operating expenses. It was not easy to find. All of the large foundations had already said no two years earlier when he and Beadle had hit the streets looking for funds for their laboratory of medical chemistry, and the federal government at the time was not funding large capital projects.

  There was only one rather unlikely place left to turn. Through the early summer of 1953, Pauling worked with Beadle to finish a massive 100-page grant request to the Rockefeller Foundation in which they asked for the extraordinary sum of $1.5 million to finish Church and keep it running for more than a decade. It was in many ways a reiteration of their 1945 grand plan, now expanded to include joint research into fifteen areas of inquiry for molecular biology—everything from protein structure to the properties of viruses, enzyme chemistry to experimental plant ecology, general physiology to a concentrated attack on the chemistry of nucleic acids. It was a long shot—Pauling knew from his conversations with Weaver that the foundation was moving away from such large-scale grants for the sciences—but Pauling bet that his recent success with protein structures, a triumph as important to Weaver as it had been to Pauling, would pave the way for his request. In July 1953, Pauling's request was forwarded to Weaver, and everyone held their breath.

  - - -

  Putting his energy into finishing the Church Laboratory helped Pauling move beyond the sting of his loss to Watson and Crick.

  Still, the DNA episode altered the trajectory of his scientific interests. The most important effect was the loss of his enthusiasm for solving the structure of giant biomolecules. Although he kept part of his team at work on solving the complete structure of a globular protein, gave more thought to how proteins might aggregate into larger structures, and continued toying with a new model for collagen—joking to colleagues that although his stochastic approach dictated only one guess per structure, he and Corey deserved one each for collagen— these were the tail ends of projects; they ran on inertia. Pauling had lost much of his enthusiasm.

  Without a great research project on which to focus, Pauling busied himself with odds and ends. He organized an international meeting of protein chemists to be held in Pasadena in the fall of 1953. He wrote a few review articles and finished updating what would prove to be an even more successful second edition of General Chemistry. He wrote some entries on chemical subjects for a new edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica—a welcome honor for someone who had been entranced by the volumes as a boy.

  His only significant new scientific work was the publication of his new theory of ferromagnetism, which appeared in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences near the middle of the year. Magnetism had been one of Pauling's interests since his college days in Oregon, when he had tried one summer to explain the magnetic properties of elements from the facts he found in an old chemical handbook. He thought his new theory, which correlated a number of observations with a clever underlying theory, was an important piece of work.

  After it was published, however, no one seemed to pay much attention. A few weeks later, perplexed by the lack of reaction, Pauling wrote Slater to find out what he thought. The reply he received was uncharacteristically blunt. The new work was "extremely sketchy," Slater wrote. "This is the same objection which I have to many of your papers. I feel that such oversimplified theories do a great deal of harm, in that they tend to make the uncritical reader feel that problems have been worked out completely, when as a matter of fact I think we have hardly made a beginning toward their solution." Well, Pauling thought, Slater has always been a number cruncher, a man so enamored of working out problems to ten decimal places that he had trouble seeing the big picture.

  But Slater had a point. The same criticism could have been advanced a decade earlier with Pauling's immunological theory, but at that time other scientists had been afraid to do so.

  Now, with his DNA error a matter of public record, he no longer appeared invincible.

  - - -

  Through all the excitement over proteins and DNA, J. Edgar Hoover was watching for Pauling to make the mistake that would unveil him as a Communist. When Pauling—using a passport granted after the usual delays and eventual State Department overruling of Ruth Shipley's recommendations—traveled to Europe again in the summer of 1953, Hoover alerted the CIA, army and navy intelligence, the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC), and the security office of the Department of State that the outspoken chemist was about to be loosed on the world stage. He was kept under observation in Paris in June when he visited Irene Joliot-Curie, the daughter of Marie Curie and a Nobel Prize-winning physicis
t in her own right. Pauling was distressed to learn that she had just been denied foreign membership in the American Chemical Society (ACS) because of her Communist leanings. This, he felt, was an insult to a great French scientist and a chilling indication that politics was now to play a part in supposedly apolitical scientific societies. Pauling became disgusted with the ACS and considered quitting.

  In Stockholm in July, where Pauling attended the International Congress of Pure and Applied Chemistry, his every move was tracked. And here Hoover thought he had something: A report came in that Lars Sillen, a Swedish chemistry teacher and strong believer in world government, had entertained both Pauling and some of the Russian delegates at a dinner at his house. Who knew what secrets might have been passed? Hoover quickly notified the criminal division of the U.S. attorney general's office, attaching Budenz's statement about Pauling's Communist Party membership and suggesting, "The above is furnished for your information and in order that you may consider the possible prosecution of the subject for denial of his Communist Party membership."

  After due consideration, the Justice Department decided that trading toasts with Russian scientists did not constitute proof of Party membership. In the absence of further evidence, the attorney general again dropped the case.

  - - -

  Returning to Pasadena in September, Pauling put the finishing touches on arrangements for his international protein conference. Everyone who was anyone in the field had agreed to attend, and the combination of Pauling's personality, California sunshine, and the magnitude of the achievements of the past three years made it an ebullient event.

  Pauling made certain that the meeting was the antithesis of the Royal Society affair, with its drastically limited presentation and rebuttal times. In Pasadena only two or three papers were presented each day, each followed by unlimited discussion. Pauling talked about the biological meaning of his alpha helix and ways it might affect research in globular proteins; Watson reviewed the latest findings with DNA; Perutz gave an overview of a promising new approach to the x-ray study of large proteins involving heavy atom diffusion. Pauling and Ava Helen took Bragg and his wife on a thousand-mile, four-day motor tour of the Golden State, showing off the sites from Yosemite to Big Sur. Everyone had enough time to enjoy the beach and the mountains, and Pauling threw a terrific party at his house that spilled onto the lawn and down to the pool.

  The scientific discussions were far ranging. Much attention was given to the DNA discovery and the huge new areas of research it opened up. A few months earlier, the English biochemist Frederick Sanger had announced his success in separating the globular protein insulin into four separate chains and determining the order of amino acids in each one—final proof that globular proteins were composed of polypeptide chains, as Pauling had argued for nearly twenty years. Most of the objections to Pauling's protein ideas that the British had raised at the Royal Society meeting a year earlier had been answered to everyone's satisfaction; general agreement had been reached about the correctness and importance of the alpha helix and pleated sheets, and the Caltech team had given up on their earlier proposals for structures that the British had attacked, such as collagen and muscle. Instead of a rancorous debate, the Pasadena conclave became, as Hughes put it, "one big love-fest."

  A photo of the fifty or so attendees standing in rows on the steps of the Caltech Athenaeum is a snapshot of the founding fathers of molecular biology. At the time, Bragg was the only Nobel laureate in the group. But ranged around him were more than a half-dozen researchers who would win theirs during the next decade: Delbruck, Beadle, Watson and Crick, Perutz and Kendrew. And, of course, Pauling.

  The only dark cloud was the absence of the x-ray crystallographer Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin, another future Nobelist, who was denied a visa for entry into the United States. She assumed, she wrote Pauling, that the reason was because she and her husband were active in too many left-wing British political groups.

  - - -

  Pauling was beginning to chafe at his self-imposed political silence. After his Industrial Employment Review Board hearing in late 1951, he had quit several blacklisted organizations and given up all public appearances except those dealing with science. For two years he had forgone all opportunities to speak out against the madness of the Cold War—and there had been a number. In December 1951, a few weeks after his decision to go on political hiatus, Richard Lippman— the young physician who had taken over as Pauling's kidney specialist after Addis's death—phoned Pauling "in great agitation," saying that he, along with two other physicians, had been dropped from the staff of Cedars of Lebanon Hospital in Los Angeles. The reason, Lippman said, was "dislike of my political beliefs." More than doctor and patient, Pauling and Lippman were good friends, with Pauling impressed both by Lippman's kidney research—Pauling thought him "one of the most able young scientific men in the country"—and by their shared interest, in the days before Pauling quit the group, in the goals of the National Council of the Arts, Sciences and Professions (NCASP).

  Pauling looked into the matter and quickly concluded that Lippman was being blacklisted. Within weeks of being named a suspected Communist in a HUAC hearing, Lippman's U.S. Public Health Service grant for kidney research had been suspended. Then the hospital let him go. Pauling quickly wrote a letter to the chairman of the hospital's board of trustees expressing his "great indignation" at the board's action and attended a meeting held by some of Lippman's patients and other supporters to organize a protest.

  A few years earlier, Pauling would have carried the torch for the Lippman support group, speaking louder and longer than anyone about the mistreatment of an idealistic young man whose career was being ruined by right-wing politics. But now he held his tongue. He pulled out of the group entirely when he saw that it was becoming dominated by Communist members of the NCASP, a group he had just quit. When the Lippman defense group invited him to a public protest meeting, Pauling declined, saying that he was too ill to attend.

  It was a failure of nerve, and it was hard on Pauling. He had now joined the mass of liberals who silently waited for the anti-Communist mania to pass, biding their time, biting their tongues, sympathetic to those who became casualties of the times but unwilling to do more than offer condolences. He vented some of his frustration indirectly, spending some time planning a nonprofit foundation "devoted to the discovery and development of outstanding young men, a haven of open-mindedness" that would encourage "independence of spirit, self-confidence, and freedom from restriction by convention." It was his way of honoring men like Lippman, but it never came to fruition.

  Then he engineered another, more direct way to provide support. Lippman found that the blacklist extended to New York, where he was dropped from a new job just as he was to start. He returned to California and came to Pauling in despair, asking for advice about positions. Pauling decided on direct action and found Lippman a staff position at Caltech as an assistant on one of his research projects. This was done quietly, with no public fanfare, and served to both assuage Pauling's conscience and keep Lippman working. Soon Pauling did the same for another talented political refugee with a medical degree, Thomas Perry. There was more low-key grumbling in the chemistry division about Pauling's taking on men whose qualifications for chemical research were at best questionable, but Pauling was not doing this strictly for science. It was his way of proving to himself that despite his silence on political issues, he was still honorable.

  His political restraint through 1952, however, did not seem to make his life any easier. He was called on the carpet by DuBridge, who had been contacted by the Cedars of Lebanon board chairman after Pauling attacked the board for firing Lippman. Pauling had to assuage him by reminding DuBridge that this was a private action, not a public political statement. Pauling remained on the FBI's Security Index, and Los Angeles agents tracked every appearance of his name in the Daily Worker, used its informers in the NCASP to monitor his activity in the Lippman case, and sent a full report every six month
s to J. Edgar Hoover. When his passport case blew open in the spring of 1952, an FBI informant reported that the Caltech board of trustees again discussed getting rid of Pauling, this time considering the possibility of buying out his contract by offering him four or five times his annual salary. The scheme was shelved when his passport was restored. Then, toward the end of the year, Budenz named him as a concealed Communist before the House committee investigating charitable foundations, and again—after a year of silence—his name was in the headlines.

  The pressure was never-ending. Pauling had stopped almost all of his political work, yet his reputation remained constantly under attack. What was the point in remaining mute?

  - - -

  Pauling broke his silence in a small way after Eisenhower's election. He wrote a private letter to outgoing president Harry Truman asking him to extend executive clemency to the Rosenbergs, whom Pauling believed had been singled out and tried unfairly in a hysterical search for atomic spies. He signed public letters advocating the repeal of the Internal Security Act of 1950 and the Smith Act. And in late November 1952 he gave a speech to a small gathering of the New Deal faithful at the local FDR Club, a restatement of his old left-wing idealism, a call for tolerance, a rekindling of some of his old fire. It felt wonderful to speak his heart again. And it was especially encouraging to receive a letter afterward from a housewife who was there. "May I express my deep admiration and gratitude for the way you can stand up and speak like a man," she wrote. "The courage of your actions and the honesty of your thinking—in public—is such a heartening thing. I believe the candle you keep burning casts its beams into far corners."