by Thomas Hager
Kennedy, Oslo, and Brain Ice
The nation's new president did not escape Pauling's critical eye. Pauling had been a longtime Stevenson supporter, and his enthusiasm for the dashing young senator from Massachusetts had never risen above lukewarm. There had even been some talk in 1960 about running Pauling as a peace candidate (in a straw vote of Stanford University students, he had received 152 write-in votes out of 3,000 votes cast), but he recognized the idea as laughable, telling his supporters—some of whom later proposed that he run for senator or mayor of Los Angeles—that he was no politician.
Kennedy at least offered the right sentiments about trying to push forward the long-stalled Geneva test-ban negotiations and early in his term created the U.S. Arms Control and Disarmament Agency. "I myself have a high opinion of our new President's wish to achieve disarmament," Pauling wrote soon after the election. And Kennedy had style, inviting Pauling and 166 other "creative Americans" to the inaugural festivities in Washington, D.C., in early 1961. Previous engagements made it impossible for Pauling to attend, but he was impressed by the gesture after twelve years of being cold-shouldered by the White House. He sent his RSVP with a personal note: "I am happy to join in welcoming you and congratulating you. You are our great hope for peace in the world."
His hope seemed borne out by Kennedy's September 1961 address to the United Nations in which the president challenged the Soviet Union "not to an arms race but to a peace race," starting with a ban on atmospheric bomb tests. At the same time, JFK reenergized the U.S. peace team in Geneva, providing what his chief negotiator, Arthur Dean, called "a new drive and sense of determination."
Despite the positive signs, Pauling believed that he would have to keep applying pressure. Kennedy was talking about a test ban, but his people were also talking about supplying nuclear weapons to NATO as a further reminder to the Soviets that they could not win a land war in Europe. Reports were surfacing that the Chinese were developing atomic bombs. These potential expansions of nuclear technology represented a new and, Pauling thought, distinctly dangerous trend. The greater the number of nations that had nuclear arms or the means to produce them, the greater the chance that an accident, thievery, or a madman might set off a holocaust.
So, assured that Kennedy was effectively pushing on the test-ban front, in early 1961 Pauling turned his efforts toward a new goal: stopping the proliferation of nuclear weapons.
The best method, the Paulings decided, would be a new petition. With the help of a small group of activist friends, the Paulings drafted a call for a halt in the nuclear arming of NATO, a move toward universal disarmament, and the strengthening of the United Nations as a force for world peace. The "Appeal to Stop the Spread of Nuclear Weapons," as they called it, was sent out immediately to two thousand scientists who had signed their earlier petition, with the Paulings stuffing envelopes at their kitchen table.
Within a month Pauling had collected more than seven hundred signatures from around the world, including those of thirty-eight Nobelists and 110 members of the NAS. That was good for a start. On February 16, Pauling presented the petition to Dag Hammarskjold at the United Nations, careful to hand out on the same day a press release detailing how the petition had been initiated and paid for.
In a clever move, Pauling then used the publicity of the UN presentation to solicit support from people throughout the world, asking them via the press to send in several hundred thousand more signatures by mid-April, just before NATO representatives were scheduled to meet in Oslo to discuss the nuclear-arms issue. A petition effort on this scale had never before been mounted.
But even history's largest petition was not enough for Pauling. In order to focus world attention on the issue, he decided to hold his own international peace meeting in Oslo on the eve of the NATO meeting. It would be a return to the spirit of the first Pugwash meetings, with respected scientists from both sides of the Iron Curtain demonstrating that militarism was not the only answer to international tensions. The conference could be set up from Pasadena, using his group of activist friends as organizers. They hoped, they wrote in the minutes of an organizational meeting held at Pauling's house, to raise "a great roar of protest" from the people of the world.
Planning the meeting, finding attendees, arranging their travel, and finding ways to pay for it all took a great deal of Pauling's time through the remainder of the spring. He first wrote Gunnar Jahn, head of the Norwegian Nobel Committee, and persuaded him to open the Norwegian Nobel Institute for his meeting. He convinced Albert Schweitzer, Bertrand Russell, and twenty other notables to act as sponsors of what he called the "Conference to Study the Problem of the Possible Spread of Nuclear Weapons to More Nations or Groups of Nations"—but which everybody else called the Oslo Conference—and began searching for $30,000 to pay for it. The Paulings would end up paying for a great deal of the conference themselves.
In the middle of it all, Pauling celebrated his sixtieth birthday at a party Ava Helen arranged. He had a wonderful evening, surrounded by old friends, colleagues, and former students from all over, many of whom he had not seen in years. One especially welcome partygoer was David Harker, Pauling's student in the 1930s and later a competitor in protein studies. Harker and Pauling had had their ups and downs, but now the crowd laughed as Harker told anecdotes about his student days. One that stuck in everyone's mind later became a signature quote of Pauling's. "Dr. Pauling, how do you have so many good ideas?" Harker remembered asking his mentor. Pauling thought a moment and said, "Well, David, I have a lot of ideas and throw away the bad ones."
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It was still true. Although his peace efforts alone constituted enough work for most committees, Pauling still found some time to devote to science.
He revised a new edition of his College Chemistry text and told friends he was planning a new book on the molecular basis of civilization. His mental health project was nearing the end of its five-year Ford Foundation funding, and Pauling had little to show for it. The endless rounds of urinalysis and blood testing of mental defectives had turned up a few tantalizing leads, but nothing that represented as simple an answer as the PKU model had led him to believe might be operative. There were simply too many chemicals in urine and blood to analyze efficiently with available technology. What analyses were possible indicated that the chemical makeup of these complex biological solutions varied so widely from person to person that it was difficult to pinpoint any one factor related to a condition as ill defined as mental retardation.
The only significant new idea Pauling developed about brain function was tangential to the mental health project. For years he had wondered about something he had heard in a 1952 talk by a physician, who had said that xenon gas was a wonderful anesthetic agent. Pauling had pricked his ears because xenon, he knew from personal experience, was one of the most unreactive elements in nature. How could something that reacts with nothing have this profound biological effect?
Seven years passed before an answer came to him. He was scanning a paper on the crystal structure of a long-chain, alkyl-substituted ammonium-salt hydrate when he realized that the answer to his anesthesia question might be water. He had already shown that water molecules could organize themselves around other molecules of the right sizes and types to form hydrates, polygonal cages around the central molecule, with properties quite distinct from ordinary water. Hydrates behaved in some ways like crystals of ice. Hydrates, he suddenly realized, could form around and be stabilized by xenon. What if xenon acted as an anesthetic by stabilizing the formation of hydrates around the side chains of proteins in the brain? The formation of these water cages, these crystals in the brain, might impair the movement of nearby side chains and ions, lower the amplitude of electrical oscillations, and lead to unconsciousness. Xenon would, in a manner of speaking, freeze the mind.
By reading the literature during the following year, he saw not only that his theory was something completely new in the field of anesthesia but that it fit roughly with wha
t was known about the structures of many other hydrate-forming anesthetics like chloroform and nitrous oxide. It also was supported by the observation that lowering the temperature of the brain produced effects similar to anesthesia. In both cases, Pauling thought, the result might be linked to the formation of microcrystals. By the spring of 1960 he was drafting a paper—working on it at the Big Sur ranch during the visit when he was stranded on the cliff—and had started a new student, Frank Catchpool, Schweitzer's former medical chief, who had followed Pauling to Caltech, to work looking for evidence. Pauling was so encouraged by the reception his ideas received at a couple of meetings where he presented it in preliminary form—"intriguing and attractive," one leading anesthesiologist said—that despite Catchpool's failure to come up with any strongly corroborating evidence, Pauling decided to publish, anyway. His paper, "A Molecular Theory of General Anesthesia," appeared in Science in July 1961. He considered it one of his most important efforts since the protein-structure work a decade earlier, and he began putting more people in his laboratory to work proving that it was correct.
To test the idea that lower temperatures would ease the formation of crystals, thus lessening the need for anesthetic, a group of Pauling's researchers used goldfish as test animals in a series of experiments. Scores of goldfish were put in separate bowls equipped with sensitive temperature controls and anesthetic drips. The investigators would peer into bowl after bowl, checking the temperatures and debating whether a given goldfish was truly unconscious. The sight left the older chemists in the division shaking their heads.
Pauling's other scientific work was not going well. The third edition of The Nature of the Chemical Bond, rushed through to meet a deadline in the middle of his peace work and his SISS appearances, was published to less than enthusiastic reviews. Information about Mulliken's molecular-orbital theory was once again conspicuous by its absence despite growing acceptance among chemists. This time reviewers took Pauling to task for ignoring the obvious. He offered the defense that the MO approach was too math-heavy for his general treatment—"I am determined to keep my book unsophisticated," he wrote one critic—but after several correspondents provided him with examples of simple MO applications that did not need strenuous calculations, Pauling recanted and began talking of preparing a fourth edition that would pay more attention to molecular orbitals.
But by then the damage had been done. Pauling, the pioneer of chemical-bond theory, now appeared to be out of date. "In the third edition he basically didn't—or didn't want to—cover the subject at the stage that it was at the time. It's very much his views instead of an overview," said one of his former students. "My feeling, and I think the feeling of other people who are admirers of Pauling, is that it was a little bit sad."
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But the Oslo Conference that spring renewed Pauling's spirits. About thirty-five physical and biological scientists and twenty-five social scientists and others from fifteen nations participated in the meetings, including four representatives from the USSR. Gunnar Jahn and representatives of the Nobel Institute watched appreciatively as Pauling ran a smooth meeting, culminating in agreement on a public synopsis of goals. The "Oslo Statement" called for a ban on the transfer of nuclear weapons from existing nuclear powers to other groups or nations, a complete test ban, general and complete disarmament, and study of the transition from a militarized to a demilitarized economy. It was read aloud when the conference ended to a public meeting that drew five hundred people to the great Aula meeting hall of the University of Oslo. Thanks to Pauling's flair for public relations, the conference also received wide coverage in the U.S. press. "Everything has gone along almost perfectly," Pauling enthused when it was over. "The Aula meeting was grand." The capping event was a torchlight parade of Norwegian students and believers in peace that wound through Oslo in honor of Pauling and his meeting.
No Shelter
In September 1961, the Soviets started testing again. As soon as he heard the announcement on the news, Pauling telegrammed Khrushchev, asking "in the name of science" that the Soviets reconsider their decision.
Khrushchev did not, and Kennedy followed with his own announcement that the United States might be forced to resume tests as well—underground, he said, with no release of radiation. Pauling wrote anguished telegrams and letters to both leaders, pointing out the dangers of fallout, urging them in the name of humanity to stop. Khrushchev answered him with a rambling eight-page letter blaming everything on the West's apparent determination to rearm Germany. Kennedy did not respond.
Between September and the end of November, the Soviets indulged in the greatest orgy of nuclear testing the world has ever seen. One test alone measured an enormous fifty-eight megatons, the largest man-made explosion ever created, three thousand times more powerful than the Hiroshima blast.
By the time the testing frenzy ended in late November, the Soviet Union had tested fifty bombs—roughly one nuclear blast every two days. Pauling estimated that the resulting radiation would create 160,000 birth defects and that the increase in carbon 14 alone would cause 4 million aborted pregnancies, stillbirths, and birth defects over the next several score generations. "This is premeditated murder of millions of people," he told the press. "It compares with the consignment of Jews to the gas chambers."
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Then he made plans to visit the Soviet Union.
He had been invited before the new round of tests to come to Moscow to celebrate the 250th anniversary of the founding of Russian science by the chemist Lomonosov. Instead of protesting the Soviet tests by declining, Pauling decided that it would be better to use the opportunity to keep lines of communication open, to lecture the Soviets about peace, and to remind Soviet chemists that his view of the chemical bond was correct. The timing might have been bad, but Pauling always felt that the way to handle international problems was through increased, rational discussion; 1961 may have been the year of the Bay of Pigs and the building of the Berlin Wall, but Pauling would demonstrate through his visit that there was an alternative to bluster and threats when it came to international relations. He would carry on his own kind of diplomacy.
When he arrived at the Russian embassy in Paris to secure his visa, however, the staff, without explanation, turned him down. His trip in jeopardy, he traveled on as planned to a scientific meeting in Yugoslavia, where a Russian scientist told him why: "In Paris, when you went to the Embassy, you said that you were Leenus Pauling [a pronunciation Pauling was in the habit of using in Europe]. Leenus Pauling is the idealistic representative of the capitalistic West who has developed theories in chemistry that are incompatible with dialectical materialism such that no patriotic Soviet scientist will use them. You should have said that you were Linus Pauling. Linus Pauling is a great friend of the Soviet Union and a worker for World Peace." He corrected his pronunciation and got his visa.
The Paulings arrived in Moscow in late November in time to attend the grand Lomonosov celebration, then stayed in the country nearly a month to sightsee and give lectures. Pauling gave about a dozen scientific talks—two specifically on the advantages of his "corrupt" theory of resonance—and addressed about a thousand Muscovites who gathered to hear him give a public lecture about peace. He and Ava Helen both spoke against the resumption of tests. The Russian press made much of them—especially Ava Helen, portrayed in magazines as an exemplar of peace-loving American womanhood— and they had a wonderful time, seeing the Bolshoi Ballet, visiting churches and schools, talking with peace activists, and sharing feasts. The only disappointment was that despite repeated requests, they did not see Khrushchev, although they had tea with Madame Khrushchev and shared the stage with her at one event.
In the United States, Pauling was often accused of being "soft" on the USSR, an impression buttressed by the American press, which ignored the protests Pauling made to Khrushchev but trumpeted his similar protests to Kennedy. And in a way, especially compared to mainstream American opinion, Pauling was soft. He certainly di
d not feel that communism was any worse than capitalism; he saw the two systems as the political-economic equivalents of matrix and wave mechanics or of the valence-bond and molecular-orbital approaches to chemistry: concepts that seemed radically different on the surface but when fully developed would become much the same. Eventually, he believed, both would end up looking very much like Swedish-style socialism.
Although he could be harshly critical of the Soviet government— pointing publicly to the mistreatment of Jews, the suppression of the Hungarian revolt, Stalin's purges, the restriction of science by political dogma, the use of the death penalty to punish "economic crimes," examples, he said, "of the immorality of action of a great power"—he found that he liked the Russian people, their friendliness and down-to-earth manner, their apparently sincere desire for peace. And he and Ava Helen were impressed by the reasons they heard from the Soviets about their need to engage in an arms race: the United States, they were told, was constantly leaping ahead with new weapons—first with the A-bomb, first with the H-bomb, first with the U-bomb—forcing the USSR to play catch-up as a matter of national survival. This analysis of the United States as the primary reason for the arms race became part of Pauling's thinking in the early 1960s.
And there was a commonsense reason for Pauling to concentrate his attention on U.S. policies. "While I am critical of the Soviet government," he said, "I feel that I should be especially critical of the American government because I am an American. . . .Just as I think it is proper for me to be more critical of myself and of my wife and my children than I am of some other person and his wife and children, so I think it is proper for me to be more critical of the American government than the Soviet government." Besides, he added, "I have little expectation of having influence on the Soviet government through criticism."
