Force of Nature- The Life of Linus Pauling

by Thomas Hager

  In July 1955, the British philosopher, mathematician, and pacifist Bertrand Russell, spurred to action by the release of radioactivity in the Bikini test, released a resolution against nuclear war signed by himself, Albert Einstein—it was the last public document Einstein signed before dying—and eight other prominent scientists. Pauling, who had been away when Russell's letter arrived seeking his help, cabled his endorsement a few days later, becoming the eleventh signatory of what was to become known as the Russell-Einstein Manifesto.

  "It is feared that if many H-bombs are used there will be universal death—sudden only for a minority, but for the majority a slow torture of disease and disintegration," the manifesto read. "There lies before us, if we choose, continual progress in happiness, knowledge and wisdom. Shall we, instead, choose death, because we cannot forget our quarrels? We appeal, as human beings, to human beings: Remember your humanity and forget the rest. If you can do so, the way lies open to a new paradise; if you cannot, there lies before you the risk of universal death."

  The rhetoric was reminiscent of the early days of the Emergency Committee of Atomic Scientists, with the same impetus of a vastly powerful new weapon, the same sense of urgency, the renewed feeling that if scientists could only get the word out to the public, the resulting distaste for nuclear war would bring about a new world order. Einstein's death created a vacuum in moral leadership among scientists dedicated to peace. Russell would take his place in Britain. In the United States, Pauling would pick up the banner.

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  By 1956, Pauling was spending, he estimated, half of his time reading and giving talks about bombs and fallout, poring over government reports, books on nuclear war, scientific studies on genetic effects, and popular accounts of bomb tests, spending hour after hour trying to find the truth.

  Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) spokespersons were trying to calm public fears by pointing out that natural radiation surrounded everyone, every day, in the form of natural radioactive isotopes in the ground from solar radiation and cosmic rays. An increase of 1 percent in this "background radiation"—the increase due to bomb tests—was negligible for any one person, they said. In any case, hard data on any direct link between low-level radiation and human disease did not exist. In June, AEC commissioner Lewis Strauss assured a convention of physicians that the total fallout released by all nuclear tests to date had not increased any individual's exposure by as much as a single chest x-ray. Those who were claiming that the tests poisoned the atmosphere and produced future generations of monsters were committing, he said, "an act of irresponsibility."

  Pauling realized that the AEC's interpretation of the data sounded innocuous because it focused on individuals rather than groups. The effects of low-level radiation exposure were small—so small that they were invisible unless measured over an entire population. If, Pauling said, you assume that all of the 1.5 million birth defects around the world each year are caused by natural background radiation—a major assumption but one arguable given the genetic evidence—then an increase in background radiation of only 1 percent from bomb tests would cause another fifteen thousand defective children to be born every year. The individual risk was small, but the cumulative picture of fifteen thousand defective babies was compelling. These were the kind of population-based numbers Pauling and others began using.

  The more that became known about fallout—despite the AEC's reluctance to release definitive data, researchers around the world were now busy analyzing the radioactive dust—the more unsettled the public became. The U-bomb created a riot of weird post-explosion radioactive products. One that quickly caught the attention of the American public was strontium 90, a long-lived isotope that had never been seen on earth before the atomic tests. Strontium 90 was especially dangerous because of its unfortunate resemblance to calcium. Researchers quickly showed that when rain fell through a fallout cloud, strontium 90 was deposited on grass, where it could be eaten by cattle and passed through their milk to humans, where it could be deposited in bones, especially in the growing bones of children. Once there, it decayed, exposing the tissue around it to a steady, low dose of radiation. Through 1956, Pauling and a number of other activists sharply etched the image of tainted milk in the world media, and in the minds of mothers and fathers. A bomb test thousands of miles away suddenly seemed immediate and threatening, the mushroom clouds spreading poison in the wind, killing children.

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  Pauling's renewed political activism went beyond antibomb statements. He joined the Society of Social Responsibility in Science, a pacifist, leftist organization of scientists, and renewed his activism in the area of civil rights, signing a petition urging Congress to declare the Internal Security Act of 1950 unconstitutional, and pitching in as a sponsor of the Citizens Committee to Preserve American Freedoms. In November 1955 he was called to Washington, D.C., this time as a friendly witness, to testify about his passport difficulties before a congressional subcommittee on First Amendment rights headed by longtime McCarthy opponent Thomas Hennings.

  The Hennings committee hearings brought his name back into the press ("Pauling Says 'Something Rotten' in State Dept.," blared the Pasadena paper) and engendered the usual reaction. Fulton Lewis, Jr., a conservative newspaper columnist who worked closely with the FBI, attacked Pauling's testimony as biased because of his Communist-front activities, which were enumerated in numbing detail. The next month, the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee (SISS), HUAC's counterpart on the other side of the Capitol, issued "The Communist Party of the United States of America: What It Is, How It Works, A Handbook for Americans," listing eighty-two "most active and typical sponsors of Communist Fronts." One of them was Pauling. The Nobel Prize, it seemed, was no defense against anti-Communists.

  The Caltech board of trustees' murmurs of complaint once again rose to a howl. Two members, Reese Taylor and Herbert Hoover, Jr., had already resigned because of Pauling; now John McCone, an important figure in Southern California's burgeoning defense industry, led a new charge to oust the controversial scientist. DuBridge held firm to his usual policy: publicly supporting Pauling's right to speak out—especially about bomb tests, which DuBridge agreed were of doubtful military value—while privately pressuring his recalcitrant division head to tone it down.

  And once more Pauling's friends rallied to his defense. On NBC television, Harold Urey revealed that Pauling, whom he called "exceedingly brilliant and upright," had been stripped of his U.S. Public Health Service grant for political reasons. George Beadle published an unusual defense of Pauling in the Caltech alumni magazine, praising Pauling's independence, excoriating the security and loyalty system, then noting pointedly, "I am proud that Caltech has a President who knows the true meaning of academic freedom. ... I am grateful for a board of trustees that has not succumbed to the disease of mistrust and suspicion."

  Even Pauling's secretaries came to his defense. When making a purchase at a local department store, one of them chatted with a clerk. After learning that she worked for Linus Pauling, the clerk said, "You work for that Commie?"

  "Well, he isn't a Communist," his secretary answered. "If anyone should know, I should know, because I've had access to his private files for a number of years, and I have never seen anything in his correspondence that would indicate that he was a Communist." She threw her purchase down and left.

  Pauling was used to all this by now, and accustomed, too, to the stern talks by DuBridge about academic responsibility. He made it very clear, both privately and in a public speeches, that he was not advocating political activism or spreading leftist ideas among young, impressionable Caltech students. Instead, he advised his students to listen to the words of Aristotle: "Young men should be mathematicians, old men should be politicians."

  Then he continued his work for peace and an end to bomb tests.

  Mongols and Idiots

  Despite his increased political work, Pauling still found some time for science. He oversaw his research group's work on prot
ein structures, tinkered a bit with nucleic acids—eventually making, with Corey, his own small contribution to Watson's and Crick's double helix: the addition of one more hydrogen bond between a base pair—and finishing the furnishing of the Church laboratory.

  For years he had talked about the dazzling discoveries that might be made by better applying chemistry to medicine, using the model of molecular disease that he had devised to explain sickle-cell anemia. He had heard talk in Stockholm about how that research might have merited another Nobel Prize. There were likely to be more diseases traceable to the level of molecules. Harvey Itano had recently left Pasadena to work for the National Institutes of Health, taking the abnormal hemoglobin project with him. Pauling broadened this thinking, briefly considering a molecular approach to cancer, then thinking about muscular dystrophy. He wanted a project where results would be dramatic and relatively quick.

  In the summer of 1955 he found what he was looking for. He had been reading about the physiology of the brain, focusing especially on the way in which specific molecules might be involved in mental functions. He had come across a discussion of a rare biochemical defect in which an inability to metabolize the amino-acid phenylalanine led to a buildup of that substance and its by-products in the blood and urine. Somehow this biochemical imbalance caused mental deficiency. The condition eventually became known as phenylketonuria (PKU).

  What he read immediately suggested to Pauling that the condition might be caused by a defect in an enzyme specific for metabolizing phenylalanine. PKU was, in other words, a molecular disease. It was the opening he was looking for. Perhaps he could verify that the cause was an enzyme deficiency, then isolate the defective enzyme and study it. "It is, of course, not to be expected that a study of this sort would lead immediately to a therapy for the disease—we would be interested primarily in obtaining basic information about the nature of mental disease, which would later be useful in the effort to develop new therapeutic methods," he wrote his cousin Richard Morgan, a statistician with the state mental health division.

  PKU, with its suggestion of a link between a specific enzyme and severe cognitive problems, opened the door to a vast new area of inquiry: the molecular basis of mental disease. Pauling asked Morgan's help in laying the groundwork, and his cousin responded by getting him into contact with mental health experts who might be able to provide leads to similar biochemical abnormalities. Mental diseases, Pauling found, constituted perhaps 10 percent of all hospitalizations in the United States, yet very little had been done along the lines he proposed. There were some exciting recent findings about new drugs for treating psychosis, but no one yet knew how they worked. Using his model of molecular disease, there was the chance for sudden, important discoveries about the workings of the brain.

  Morgan set up a meeting between Pauling and some psychiatrists at the Pacific State Hospital, a Los Angeles-area facility for mental defectives. The visit was a sobering one for Pauling. He toured ward after ward of retarded and mentally defective children, kids suffering from PKU, gargoylism, and retardations of unknown origin. He saw deformities in speech and reasoning, distorted motion, minds that would never reach normal functioning. The ability to think had been something Pauling always had taken for granted; seeing the effects of a loss of that ability struck a chord inside him. He thought of his own children, of what their lives might have been like if they had suffered a similar debility. He believed that this tragic loss of human intelligence was rooted in a damaged double helix or malfunctioning enzyme, the result of misbuilt molecules. He could help find out what was happening here. He might be able to cure or prevent at least some of this suffering.

  The majority of the patients at the facility were Mongoloid idiots, as they were called at the time, a condition that the facility's medical director believed was due to a genetic defect inherited from their parents. Although such parents might seem normal, he told Pauling, they could be identified by certain signs—the shape of their ears, their hands, and so forth. This, too, he told Pauling, might be a fertile area for research, and there were hundreds of Mongoloid idiots at the facility, compared to only fourteen PKU cases.

  Pauling had seen all he needed to see. Less than a month after his visit to the mental hospital, he finished drafting a massive grant proposal requesting from the Ford Foundation more than $800,000 for a seven-year investigation into the molecular basis of mental disease. A portion of the money would go toward looking for the abnormal enzyme in PKU, with the ultimate aim of devising a simple diagnostic test for the condition. Part of the research would involve ongoing urinalysis to check the progress of the disease; part would be devoted to finding biochemical abnormalities underlying Mongoloidism and other mental deficiencies.

  Pauling's grant request was rewarded handsomely. While he did not get everything he asked for, he was informed the following spring that the Ford Foundation would provide him with $450,000 over five years. It was another massive award, another pioneering extension of Pauling's chemical viewpoint into a new field, another feather in Pauling’s cap.

  But the reaction around campus was strangely muted. The older members of the division of chemistry, those hired by Noyes, were derisive. What did collecting urine specimens from retarded children have to do with chemistry? This was medical research, and what business did the Caltech chemistry division have doing medical research? Noyes had created a temple to physical chemistry, and Pauling was letting it crumble while he devoted all of his time and effort as director to these ever-more tangential pursuits. Look at the way space was allocated in the Church laboratory, with large new suites given to immunochemistry and now this medical project, while the physical and analytic chemists were cooped up in the aging Gates and Crellin labs. In the minds of the older faculty, Pauling had upset the balance of the division. There was a question of quality as well. Many of Pauling's hires had been made to support his research goals, and, the thinking went, jobs had gone to men who might be good experimentalists but were certainly not Caltech material. Then there were the left-wing doctors he hired for his medical projects. The only really good recent hire, in the minds of the older faculty, had been Jack Roberts, a young rising star of organic chemistry, an expert in the uses of nuclear magnetic resonance. Roberts was one new man the older professors could get along with.

  The internal grumbling reached the office of Lee DuBridge, who listened sympathetically. He was not opposed to the mental research project, although he agreed it represented another move away from the basic core of chemistry. He was, however, very concerned about the overall performance of his chemistry chair. Pauling seemed not to care any more about his division. After winning the Nobel Prize, he seemed to spend more time traveling the country than doing research, now adding talks to various psychological and mental health associations to his already crowded speaking schedule. There was the chance, too, that Pauling was wrong about mental disease. This was the heyday of Freudianism and its offshoots, and many psychiatrists and psychologists were convinced that mental diseases were rooted in experience, not molecules. In May 1956, Pauling outraged much of the audience at a national conference of the American Psychiatric Association by stating, "I am sure that most mental disease is chemical in origin." He went on to assert that schizophrenia in particular was the result of a molecular imbalance. On questioning afterward, he admitted that he had no proof, but that he was working on a "hunch."

  DuBridge didn't know whether Pauling's speculations were off the mark or not. Far more important—and annoying—to him and his board were Pauling's continued left-wing activities. Some instances were minor. In 1956, for example, Pauling told the children of America via the television program Youth Wants to Know that his scientific work had caused him to doubt the existence of God. More important was his growing activism against the testing of nuclear weapons. By mid-1956 there was general scientific agreement with Pauling's view that boosting the radiation load in the atmosphere was undesirable. In June the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) rel
eased a report saying that "the concept of a safe rate of radiation simply does not make sense" and warning against the long-term genetic effects from the buildup of strontium 90 in the bones. But there was also general disagreement around the question of how dangerous this increased radiation was to health. The NAS panels found no proof of higher rates of leukemia or other illnesses from fallout, and although they concluded that a minor effect on average life spans could not be ruled out, the consensus was that there was more danger to human health from medical x-rays than fallout.

  Pauling restudied, refined, and stood by his statistical extrapolations. Averaged over the population, he came up with a figure that each roentgen of added exposure would shorten the average lifespan by two or three weeks, a figure that he began using in dozens of speeches and articles.

  He knew how to get headlines. Spurred by a telephone call he received from a woman in Tonopah, Nevada, who told him that she thought that heavy fallout there had led to the death from leukemia of her seven-year-old son and sore eyes among many people—observations that the local paper had refused to print—Pauling wrote the editor of the Tonopah Times-Bonanza with his estimate of the damage that local residents might have suffered. The added 5 roentgens of radiation deposited in that high-fallout area would shorten the average life by about three months, Pauling said. Multiply that by the population, he told the editor, and you can estimate that the tests have robbed Nevadans of one thousand years of life. That got headlines. Pauling then tipped an investigative journalist to the incidence of cancer in the Nevada fallout area, which led eventually to stories in the national press.

  The majority of scientists followed the NAS line: fallout radiation was not good, but it was not too bad. Pauling once again found himself marginalized as the leader of an unnecessarily noisy and somewhat hysterical minority that appeared to be using the fallout issue as a lever for political and pacifist ends. Only among committed antibomb activists was he viewed as a hero.