Linus Pauling: Nobel Prize Scientist

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In recent years, Linus Pauling has become well-known — some would say notorious — for his outspoken views on nutrition, vitamin C, and the medical establishment. MOTHER editor Kas Thomas had a chance to "sample" some of thoseviews last October when he spoke with the two-time Nobel laureate at the Pauling ranch near Big Sur, California. What follows is an edited transcript of that conversation.

PLOWBOY: Dr. Pauling, most people — it seems — think of your name in connection with nutrition and medicine. Isn't it true, though, that you've had no formal training in these fields?

PAULING: Yes, that's true. I've never had a course in biology. No course in biochemistry, either.

PLOWBOY: You think of yourself as a physical chemist ... is that right?

PAULING: Yes. I was trained in chemistry, physics, and mathematics. My Ph.D. was with a major in chemistry and minors in physics and math. And my first two books —The Structure of Line Spectra and Introduction to Quantum Mechanics — were essentially physics, rather than chemistry.

PLOWBOY: When — and how — did you first become interested in problems of a biological nature?

PAULING: For many years — well, from 1922, when I began my graduate work, until about 1932 or 33 — I worked largely with inorganic substances ... mostly rather simple substances that had ten, twenty, or thirty atoms in each molecule. But thenabout 1934 — I began to wonder about the large molecules in living organisms ... protein molecules with thousands of atoms in them.

The first work in this area that I published was a study I had made of the combining power of hemoglobin for oxygen. As you know, the red cells in our blood pick up oxygen because they contain molecules of the protein hemoglobin. It turns out that the hemoglobin-oxygen equilibrium curve has a strange shape, and I worked out a theory to explain that.

Next, I decided to study the interactions of hemoglobin molecules with magnetic fields, which I did. C.D. Coryell — one of my students — and I had made a surprising discovery: namely, that arterial blood is repelled by a magnet, while venous blood is attracted. Coryell and I published several papers on this in the 1930's.

In 1936, I was invited to come to New York to lecture at the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research about this work on hemoglobin. At that time, Karl Landsteiner — the man who discovered the major blood groups, A, B, AB, and O, and who subsequently received the Nobel Prize for this discovery-was a member of the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research, and he attended my lecture. Afterwards, he asked me if I would come to his laboratory and talk with him about immunology ... an area in which he had been doing a lot of work.

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