Linus Pauling was one of the most curious of Nobel prize winners.  Along with Marie Curie he is one of only two people to have won Nobel prizes in two different categories - in Pauling’s case, these were Chemistry and Peace.  He is the only person, so far, to have won two unshared Nobel prizes.  In my opinion, he might have won a third or even a fourth Nobel.  In a short note to the Journal Nature, Jim Lake, whom I have published with in the past, wrote about Pauling’s thoughts on why he was not the person who discovered the structure of DNA. Also, I feel that he might have won a prize for his work on protein structures.

He was a pacifist, who campaigned tirelessly in his later years, against the development of nuclear technology.  When he was awarded his second Nobel prize, he was under such strong suspicion as a consequence of his political activism and the US government denied him a passport in 1952 when he wanted to go to speak at a meeting in London.  they were sort-of forced to give him one in 1954 when he wanted to…pick up his first Nobel prize.

His second Nobel prize was awarded in 1963 on the day that John F. Kennedy signed into law the partial ban on nuclear testing along with Nikita Krushchev.  This was a ban on above-ground testing of nuclear weapons because Pauling had been instrumental in showing that strontium got into children’s teeth as a consequence of nuclear testing.  The citation for his second Nobel prize contained the sentence: “Linus Carl Pauling, who ever since 1946 has campaigned ceaselessly, not only against nuclear weapons tests, not only against the spread of these armaments, not only against their very use, but against all warfare as a means of solving international conflicts.”

He had some kooky moments, like when he insisted that vitamin C could cure cancer and when he thought that people that carried a defective gene for sickle-cell disease should be tattoo’ed, but overall he tried to do good and in my area of research he was instrumental.  In 1965 he wrote a manuscript with Emile Zuckerkandl where they showed that we could reconstruct the evolutionary history of life on the planet by looking at the amino acid sequences of the proteins that these organisms contained.  In writing this manuscript they kick-started the field of molecular evolutionary studies.