2023-07-25 10:30:00
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The tradition of the Nobel prizes has only 5 scientists awarded one of these awards on more than one occasion. More than 1,200 articles, 850 of them academic, are what led to one of them, Linus Pauling, to deserve the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1954. His tireless political activism against nuclear tests would also be rewarded a few years later, in 1962, with the Nobel Peace Prize.
However, despite being considered one of the 20 most important scientists of the 20th century and one of the most influential chemists in history, many are today unaware of the figure of Linus Pauling.
Linus Carl Pauling was born on February 28, 1901 in Portland, Oregon, United States. He stood out for his activity as a chemical and biochemical engineer, although he also considered himself a molecular biologist, crystallographer and medical researcher, as we will explain a few lines later, in the latter case without much luck.
Pauling’s early childhood was marked by the work of his father, an unsuccessful pharmacist who kept little Linus touring the geography of the state of Oregon until his premature death, when our protagonist was only 9 years old. Perhaps it was his father’s job, coupled with the fact that one of his childhood friends had a small chemistry lab in his room, that sparked Pauling’s interest in chemistry.
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In 1917, Pauling entered the Oregon State University, where he graduated in chemical engineering 3 years later, in 1922. He would continue his studies at the California Institute of Technology -Caltech- where he received his doctorate in 1925 with research on employment of the X-ray diffraction for determining the structure of crystals.
After completing his doctoral studies, Pauling received a Guggenheim Foundation fellowship that enabled him to travel to Europe, where he collaborated with some of the leading scientists of his day, including, Niels Bohr o Erwin Schrödinger, and upon his return, in 1927, he would be appointed as an assistant professor at Caltech, where he would begin a long teaching and research career.
Nobel Foundation
Since then, the analysis of the chemical structure would become the central theme of his scientific work and his first 5 years at Caltech would be tremendously productive. It was during this period that the chemist published around 50 articles, also giving birth to the so-called Pauling’s rules to determine the molecular structure of complex crystals.
Some years later, in 1932, Pauling also conceived the notion of electronegativitythat is, the ability of an atom to attract electrons towards itself, and established the Pauling scale, a classification of the electronegativity of atoms. That same year he would also publish the article in which he developed the novel concept of orbital hybridization.
His constant investigations finally led him to edit his famous textbook The Nature of the Chemical Bondpublished in 1939, which, cited more than 16,000 times by other authors, is considered one of the most important works ever published in the field of chemistry.
His research on the nature of the chemical bond and its applications to the determination of the structure of complex substances earned Pauling the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1954. However, throughout his career, he made significant contributions in the most diverse scientific fields: for example, he investigated the structures of proteins and pioneered the use of X-ray diffraction to study their conformation.
His research also led him to formulate the concept of the secondary structure of proteins, such as alpha helices and beta sheets, laying the foundations for understanding biochemistry and molecular biology, and even suggest the helical structure of the DNA molecule.
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In 1949, he would also publish in the magazine Science the first evidence of the relationship between a human disease and a change in a specific protein, demonstrating that the sickle cell anemia It was caused by changes in the structure of hemoglobin. A year later, in 1950, he demonstrated along with other scientists that the main person responsible for the we arephotochemical g in cities were the result of automobile emissions, which led him to be one of the first scientists to try to develop an electric car.
But for all his remarkable scientific achievements, culminating in the Nobel Prize in Chemistry, what truly catapulted Linus Pauling to world fame was his second Nobel Prize, the Peace Prize, received for his efforts in combating the evidence. weapons and their defense of nuclear disarmament. His activist facet would not develop until after World War II. During this, in fact, he would contribute wisely to the development of explosives and fuel, and would even develop an oxygen level detector for submarines.
Smithsonian Institution Archives
Such was Pauling’s virtue, let us remember, one of the world’s leading experts in the field of chemical bonding, that even the director of the Manhattan Project, Robert Oppenheimer himself, would offer the researcher to head the project’s chemistry department to develop the atomic bomb.
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As a result of his contributions during the war, the United States government would award Pauling the Presidential Medal of Merit in 1948. However, a series of circumstances, such as the development of nuclear tests, the launch of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs and even, they say that Robert Oppenheimer’s insinuation on several occasions to his wife, motivated the chemist to take a position openly against nuclear weapons and tests.
Pauling’s position would not be ignored. Thus, on suspicion of collaborating with communism, his passport would be confiscated in 1952 by the American government before leaving for a congress in London. However, his continuous contributions for peace in consecutive years, materialized among other initiatives in the signing of the Manifiesto Russell-Einstein or a letter signed by more than 11,000 scientists requesting the suspension of nuclear tests that Pauling and his wife presented to the United Nations Organization, served so that, in 1962, Pauling became one of the few people to receive two awards Nobel upon receiving the Peace Prize.
Pauling’s excellent career, however, has a small stain on his resume, and that is that, during his stay at Stanford University, the chemist’s scientific interests would focus on one particular molecule: the ascorbic acid, better known as the vitamin C. On this he would end up defending with great controversy -and little empirical evidence- that large doses of it could result in an effective treatment against cancer, generating great skepticism in the last stages of his life towards several of his works.
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In an irony of fate, both Pauling and his wife, Ava Helen PaulingThey developed cancer. This would die of stomach cancer in 1981. Ten years later, it would be our protagonist who discovered that he had prostate cancer, and although he underwent several surgeries, treatments, and probably high doses of vitamin C, his life would end on his ranch in the Big Sur coast of California on August 19, 1994, at the age of 93.
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