Force of Nature- The Life of Linus Pauling

by Thomas Hager

  On the other side, proponents of a strong defense accelerated their campaign to reassure the public that fallout was safe. AEC head Lewis Strauss and his chief scientific adviser, the respected radiochemist Willard Libby, spoke widely about the infinitesimal addition to background radiation caused by bomb tests and downplayed the effects of strontium 90. They framed the issue as a choice between unproven and probably negligible health effects on a tiny minority of the human race and the Communist domination that would result if bomb testing were stopped and the United States lost the arms race. Adding weight to their arguments was the Cold War emphasis on national security: Russian ground forces were much stronger than the Western powers; only American and British atomic weapons held them in check. If tests were stopped, the West would lose this critical military advantage. The Red tide would rise.

  It was an effective public relations campaign that succeeded in equating anti-nuclear activists like Pauling with anti-Americanism and pro-communism. to the strategy helped to derail the presidential candidacy of Adlai Stevenson, who advocated a test ban as part of his campaign strategy in the fall of 1956, and it caused most antibomb scientists to remain mute. "There is a surprising popular lack of interest in some of the suppressive actions of the government," Pauling told a television interviewer in 1956. "I have estimated that of ten scientists who, ten years ago, were talking over problems, about the problems of the atomic bomb and war and peace, only one remains nowadays. The others have become silent."

  In their absence, Pauling became the nation's leading anti-test advocate, speaking widely, publishing his ideas about the effects of low-level radiation in as many outlets as possible, and continuing to make newsworthy estimates of damage to human health, which he now dramatized by extrapolating over several generations. Despite the renewed attacks on his credibility by politicians and journalists, he felt terrific about fighting the good fight once again. No one had yet shown that his statistical analyses of the danger to human health were wrong, and until they did, he would stick with them.

  Ava Helen, Linda, and Deer Flat Ranch

  With the children grown and out of the house—the youngest, Crellin, now in college—Ava Helen's influence on Pauling increased. She was at his side constantly, traveling with him everywhere, assessing every speech, emphasizing his growing importance as a national figure. Ava Helen was Pauling's cheerleader, closest friend and political mentor. Her opinion was more important to him than those of a thousand politicians, administrators, and commentators. The problems and successes they had faced together seemed only to bring them closer.

  Ava Helen gradually increased her own political profile, speaking more, taking a more prominent public role. Pauling was still the main spokesman for the pair, but Ava Helen helped inspire and guide what he said. She was quiet about it, however, taking credit only in later years when she said simply, "I think I've introduced him to a number of things that he may not have been aware of."

  After the Nobel Prize, the two of them began searching for a country place, perhaps near the sea, where they could be alone and escape the smog and pressures of Pasadena. While driving the coast highway between Los Angeles and San Francisco, through a gorgeous and isolated stretch of rugged seashore called Big Sur, they found what they wanted. Stopping to rest at a place where the highway clung high on the mountainside above the ocean, they looked down and saw a large, beautiful emerald-green triangle of level land jutting out into the water. There was a creek and a small cabin sitting near the shore. "Something like this would be perfect," Pauling said to his wife.

  They found that former cattle ranch, all 122 acres of it, was for sale. They drove down the rutted, bone-jarring access road with a real estate agent, looked the place over, and fell in love with it. The turn-of-the-century cabin was furnished with a big wood cookstove and some well-used furniture; there was a weatherbeaten barn, cattle roaming, and a couple of horses. Pauling's Nobel Prize money was used to buy it, lock, stock, and cookstove. They called it Deer Flat Ranch. Soon they were spending as much time as they could there. It was a refuge, a place where they could escape the phone and avoid seeing another human for a week at a time. Here, perched on a ledge over the sea, with nothing but the muffled sound of the surf, the wind, and birdcalls to distract him, Pauling could concentrate on problems without interruption. Ava Helen baked bread and enjoyed having Pauling all to herself. Together they took long walks, held hands, and talked endlessly.

  - - -

  The children may have been grown, but they could still be cause for concern. In the summer of 1956, after the usual delays, Pauling was granted a passport to go to Europe, ostensibly to give the keynote speech at ceremonies in Rome surrounding the hundredth anniversary of the death of the great Italian chemist Amadeo Avogadro. But Pauling also needed to check on his children.

  Peter, newly married to a woman his parents had never seen, was having difficulty finishing his doctorate at the Cavendish Laboratory. Pauling's first stop was England, where he talked the situation over with Kendrew. It appeared clear after their discussion that his second son was not succeeding in the field of protein studies, and Peter ended up switching to inorganic chemistry at the University of London.

  Linda was a more perplexing puzzle. She had evolved from doting daughter to free spirit soon after she started attending Reed College, a small liberal arts university in Portland, in 1951, taking on new friends and new attitudes about social relationships. "I find that I have some difficulty understanding the younger generation," Pauling confessed to a friend. After graduation, Linda left on what her parents thought was going to be a short trip to visit Peter in England. But after being welcomed by Peter's group of friends—young, party-loving American students and postdocs, with a sprinkling of interesting young men from England—she ended up staying. At first, Pauling sent her one hundred dollars per month, but then, when he saw that she had no intention of coming home, he sent her a plane ticket and orders to return. She cashed in the ticket and stayed, taking a job as an au pair with Francis Crick and his wife, Odile, ironing Crick's shirts and taking care of children at their house, now known as the Golden Helix. At night, Linda, willowy, blond, and exotically Californian, became a hit of the Cambridge social scene. She was young and beautiful and on her own. She had many boyfriends and at least one fiancé. She ran off to Scotland for a few weeks with a professor of zoology, living with him and a friend in an attic flat in Edinburgh, then ended up in Florence in the spring of 1956, taking an occasional art class and enjoying the cafes and museums.

  It had been two years since Linda had seen her parents when they finally caught up with her in Rome in June 1956. "Confusion confounded," Ava Helen noted in her diary the day Linda arrived. The parents resolved not to let their disapproval of her recent actions ruin their relationship. Linda watched as Pauling received the Order of the Italian Republic in an elaborate ceremony during the Avogadro celebration, then accompanied her parents for a month as they toured Italy, staying in first-class hotels and dining at the finest restaurants. When they asked her to come back with them to Pasadena, however, Linda refused. She stayed in Italy for another month, until a combination of unwelcome poverty and a severe respiratory infection sent her home.

  After nursing her to health, the Paulings tried a different tack with their daughter. From the moment she arrived, they threw her together as often and as long as possible with a favorite graduate student of Pauling's, a handsome and brilliant young geologist named Barclay Kamb. By the summer of 1957, Linda had settled down: She was living at home, making money by assisting Corey at Caltech, and occasionally cooking dinner for Kamb, who was, Pauling was happy to note, "hanging around our house quite a bit." The matchmaking worked. On a beautiful day in September 1957, in front of two hundred guests, Pauling walked across the front lawn of his Pasadena home with Linda on his arm and delivered her to Barclay Kamb—now a Caltech assistant professor of geology—for the purpose of marriage.

  The Right to Petition

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p; Pauling's political work and well-publicized foray into mental disease left him busier than ever through 1957. His desk was covered with invitations from high school groups, women's associations, hospitals, universities, professional societies, and activist organizations to speak on chemical, medical, and nuclear issues. The teachers union of the city of New York gave him an award for outstanding service to the cause of freedom in education; the Roswell Park Memorial Institute invited him to be on their advisory board; the American Association of Clinical Chemists made him an honorary member; the National Science Foundation starred him in a series of color films for science teachers. At the same time, he was working on yet another edition of The Nature of the Chemical Bond and arranging another summer trip to Europe.

  Pauling's continued advocacy of a ban on bomb tests and his incessant reiteration of the health risks of fallout—coupled with similar efforts by Russell and others—appeared to be having an effect. In March the Japanese government sent an expert on radiation on a worldwide trip to urge a halt in tests. In April, alarmed by evidence of rising levels of strontium 90, the British Labor party moved in favor of a test ban. Nehru appealed to the world to support a ban, and the reclusive Albert Schweitzer, the saintly physician who devoted his life to treating people in the heart of Africa, made a worldwide radio appeal—"a great document," Pauling called it—asking the public to demand an end to tests. The World Council of Churches, the West German Bundestag, and the Pope all asked for an end to testing.

  Their sentiments were supported by a report from the British Atomic Scientists Association in which it was estimated that one thousand people would die of various diseases for every megaton tested. Pauling took that figure even further, telling a crowd in Chicago that his estimates of fallout damage led him to conclude that ten thousand people were dead or dying of leukemia because of bomb tests and that the current rate of testing would lead to a 1 percent increase in human genetic mutations. AEC scientific spokesman Bill Libby immediately wrote Pauling demanding to know where he got his estimates, adding, "I am most seriously charged with responsibility in connection with weapons tests, and I am most anxious to learn whether we have made any mistakes." Pauling replied that his comments had been made off the cuff in response to a question after his speech and referred Libby to public reports and a calculation he made based on new estimates of levels of strontium 90 in the food chain.

  All estimates of radiation damage were uncertain; they were all based on preliminary scientific evidence, and the data could be twisted different ways to suit specific political ends. "There is considerably uncertainty about estimated values in this field," Pauling wrote in 1957, "but I think that we should consider the worst possible case, rather than the best possible case." His worst-case pronouncements were made as dramatic as possible by extrapolating them to entire populations, often over many generations, and by repeating them as often as possible through whatever means would get them to the most people.

  The AEC used the same data, but emphasized on the other end of the margin of error, focusing on the increased risk to individuals with the purpose of reassuring the public that bomb tests were less dangerous than wearing a radium-dial watch.

  Both sides, as it turned out, were right. But Pauling's population-based statistical estimates—the idea that each bomb tested could lead to thousands of defective babies in the future—proved more compelling to the public. In the fall of 1956 polls showed that the majority of Americans opposed a test ban. By the spring of 1957 almost two-thirds approved the idea of a ban, if other nations joined in.

  Feeling the tide turning, on May 15, Pauling gave a fiery antibomb speech to an honors day assembly at Washington University in St. Louis. He talked about the link between mutated genes and sickle-cell anemia and PKU, tied the increased risk of such mutations to fallout, cited the Schweitzer appeal, and got loud applause when he told his audience, "I believe that no human beings should be sacrificed to the project of perfecting nuclear weapons." He ended with one of his favorite quotations from Benjamin Franklin: '"The rapid progress true Science now makes occasions my regretting sometimes that I was born so soon. It is impossible to imagine the height to which may be carried, in a thousand years, the power of man over matter. O that Moral science were in as fair a way of improvement, that men would cease to be wolves to one another, and that human beings would at length learn what they now improperly call humanity."' The students and faculty rose to their feet in a prolonged ovation. He was swamped afterward with listeners eager to find out what they could do to help.

  Pauling got together later that day with two like-minded faculty members, the physicist Edward Condon and biologist Barry Commoner, and put together a plan. From his many talks around the nation, Pauling believed that there was a consensus on the dangers of testing among scientists but that it was muted by the government's stifling of dissent and distorted in the public mind by the AEC's tactic of downplaying risks.

  Pauling, with Condon's and Commoner's help, decided to give scientists a voice. The means would be the circulation of a petition to stop nuclear testing. Each of the three wrote a draft petition, then together decided that Pauling's brief and moderate "Appeal by American Scientists to the Governments and Peoples of the World" was the one to send.

  "We, the American scientists whose names are signed below, urge that an international agreement to stop the testing of nuclear bombs be made now," it began. In five short paragraphs, the appeal noted the long-term danger of an increase in the number of genetic mutations (avoiding any mention of more controversial effects, such as cancer); warned of the danger of nuclear proliferation; urged a test ban as a first step toward disarmament; and ended with: "We have in common with our fellow men a deep concern for the welfare of all human beings. As scientists we have knowledge of the dangers involved and therefore have a special responsibility to make those dangers known. We deem it imperative that an immediate action be taken to effect an international agreement to stop the testing of all nuclear weapons."

  That evening, they mimeographed and retyped some copies of the original and started mailing them to scientists they thought would sign. Within a week they had received more than two dozen signatures, including that of Hermann J. Muller, one of the nation's most respected geneticists and the discoverer of the mutagenic effects of radiation. Pauling took the project back to Pasadena, where, with the help of Ava Helen and some volunteers, he mailed hundreds more petitions to universities and scientific laboratories around the nation. Within a few weeks, two thousand researchers signed.

  Pauling was ecstatic. The signatories included more than fifty NAS members, a few Nobelists, and a heavy representation of leading geneticists. There were abstentions for various reasons, researchers who did not like one or another of the specific points in the appeal or who believed that scientists should stay out of politics in general, but overall the response was heartening proof that American scientists opposed nuclear testing. On June 3, Pauling released his petition to the press, sending copies as well to the United Nations and President Eisenhower.

  There had not been a mass outcry from scientists like this since the fight for civilian control of atomic energy ten years before, and the effect was electric. The sudden appearance of the Pauling petition made national headlines as government officials and media commentators struggled to make sense of this dramatic new turn in the test-ban debate. Pauling seized the moment to inject a bit more drama, telling an interviewer on an ABC television medical program that fallout would cause mental or physical defects in 200,000 children over the next twenty generations and that a million people would lose five to ten years of life apiece.

  There was an immediate attempt to downplay Pauling's petition and cast suspicion on its author. In a press conference a few days after its release, Eisenhower told reporters, "I noticed that in many instances scientists that seem to be out of their own field of competence are getting into this argument about bomb testing, and it looks almost like an organized affair." Cons
ervative columnists and editorial-page editors in the U.S. press quickly translated "organized affair" into "Communist inspired." Gen. Leslie Groves addressed the question of Pauling's expertise, saying, "I don't know what his goals are, other than that he has won a Nobel Prize. I would never ask a football coach how to run a major league baseball team."

  The next step was predictable. The head of HUAC blasted Pauling on the floor of the House of Representatives for spreading Soviet propaganda; a few days later, Pauling was subpoenaed by the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee, which wanted to know whether Communist organizations were behind his petition. "I would be pleased to have the opportunity to help educate some of our representatives in Washington on this matter," Pauling told reporters. Washington politics denied him the opportunity. Senators Clinton Anderson and Lyndon Johnson were setting up joint hearings on atomic energy at the same time and did not want SISS chair James Eastland horning in on their issue. Pauling's appearance in Congress was delayed indefinitely after Anderson "blew his top" with Eastland.

  There was also a negative response from a few scientists. Two respected Berkeley chemists, Ken Pitzer and Joel Hildebrand, publicly pointed out that not 1 percent of Pauling's signers had a specialist's knowledge of radiation effects, prompting Pauling to respond that practically all of his petitioners had specialized knowledge related in some way to the issue of bomb testing and all relied on the published studies of others who were radiation experts—as I myself, he reminded reporters, all rely on the judgment and experiments of professors Hildebrand and Pitzer. Bill Libby reminded a congressional panel a few days after the petition appeared that the risk from fallout was "very small" compared to everyday risks tolerated by humans—or the risk of annihilation if the United States surrendered its atomic superiority.