Linus Pauling

Linus Pauling is the only person to have won two unshared Nobel Prizes, in chemistry in 1954 and for peace in 1962, and the second was awarded while the United States government was refusing him a passport. He applied quantum mechanics to chemical bonding in the late 1920s and 1930s, and The Nature of the Chemical Bond became one of the most cited works in the history of science. He worked out the alpha helix in protein structure in 1948, reportedly while ill in bed folding paper, and was the first to identify a molecular disease when he showed in 1949 that sickle-cell anaemia comes from an abnormal haemoglobin. He published a three-chain model of DNA in early 1953 that was wrong, and Watson and Crick were explicitly racing him when they got the double helix right a few weeks later. His political turn came from the fallout of atmospheric nuclear testing: he calculated the number of birth defects and cancers it would cause, presented a petition signed by more than eleven thousand scientists to the United Nations in 1958, and was called before a Senate subcommittee that demanded the names of the collectors, which he refused to give. The Partial Test Ban Treaty took effect on the day he received the peace prize. Many colleagues, and Caltech itself, treated the second prize as an embarrassment, and he left the institution he had spent forty years at. His last campaign was for large doses of vitamin C against colds and cancer, which he pursued for more than twenty years and which controlled trials did not support. He is therefore an unusually clear case of a scientist being right beyond his field, then wrong within it. He wrote textbooks that taught chemistry to two generations of students. His passport was restored in 1954 only when the Nobel award made the refusal impossible to sustain.

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