Linus Pauling

Linus Pauling was born on 28 February 1901 in Portland, Oregon, and died on 19 August 1994 in Big Sur, California. He earned a bachelor's degree in chemical engineering from Oregon State College in 1922 and a PhD from Caltech in 1925, then applied the new quantum mechanics of the late 1920s to chemical bonding through the 1930s, developing orbital hybridization, resonance, and his own electronegativity scale. He collected this work in The Nature of the Chemical Bond, first published in 1939, which extended Gilbert Lewis's 1916 shared electron pair into a full quantum-mechanical account of bonding and became the standard chemistry reference for decades; he was awarded the 1954 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for it. He also applied structural chemistry to biology, working out the alpha-helix structure common in proteins in 1951, though an incorrect triple-helix model he proposed for DNA in early 1953 was superseded weeks later by Watson and Crick's double helix. From the 1950s he became a prominent campaigner against atmospheric nuclear weapons testing, and in 1962 was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, making him the only person to have won two individual, unshared Nobel Prizes. From the 1970s, in Vitamin C and the Common Cold (1970) and, with Ewan Cameron, Cancer and Vitamin C (1979), he argued that very large doses of vitamin C could prevent colds and prolong the lives of cancer patients. Randomized controlled trials at the Mayo Clinic led by Charles Moertel, published in 1979 and 1985, found no benefit from oral vitamin C in cancer patients, and neither claim, for the common cold or for cancer, has been adopted by mainstream medicine; the episode is widely cited as an instance of a scientist of great authority in one field pressing conclusions in another beyond what the evidence supported.