LINUS PAULING / For the Nobel Laureate who championed the use of Vitamin C, nature was a marvellous contrivance composed of molecules assembled by the Great Mechanic.

Force of Nature. The Life of Linus Pauling
By Thomas Hager, Simon & Shuster, 721 pages, $47

Review by John. C. Polanyi

The thing that made Linus Pauling most famous was his champion of Vitamin C, but it was the topic least likely to come up in conversation. His colleagues admired him despite Vitamin C, which they regarded as the low point of his career. They continue to stand in awe of him today, and remember him often, particularly when sneaking off to take their vitamins. Pauling did, after all, live to be 93 (he died in 1994).

U.S. medical journalist Thomas Hager's view of Pauling is respectful but clear-eyed. Faced with a huge slice of 20th-century scientific accomplishment, he is undaunted. The book is evocative, accurate and fun. Understandably, one needs Pauling's stamina to finish it.

Pauling, the publisher states, was the most important American scientist of the 20th century. This is a more telling comment than it may seem. He was, beyond question, an important scientist, even in a century that produced more important scientists than any in the world's history. But additionally, Pauling was an American scientist, in the way that Copland was an American composer and Steinbeck an American author. American in style.

His extraordinary intellect and energy were devoted to what he regarded as practical pursuits. Though subtle, he cared little for subtlety. Nature was, for him, a marvellous contrivance composed of molecules assembled by the Great Mechanic, and susceptible to being laid bare by the most capable of human mechanics, among whom he soon came to number himself.

His was a courageous vision with the appeal of simplicity, and the everpresent hazard of over-simplification. It was a world view that closed the door on philosophy, but left it open to humanity and decency.

Pauling's father, Herman, was a chemist of an even more down-to-earth sort. He had a drugstore that sold home-made medicines under the slogan No Cure, No Pay. The store was in a Wild West town in Oregon consisting of "a few hundred cowboys, mule skinners and hired hands." The family moved there, in 1905, by stagecoach, when Pauling was four.

I had expected to see a reference in Hager's book to the postcards Pauling said were on sale in the store, showing the tall pharmacist Herman with his small son, Linus, beside him, both decked out in full cowboy regalia. Instead there is another of Pauling's recollections that also reflects on his Americanness.

When he was seven he and his cousin were caught by a workman while trespassing on a half-finished house. Linus tried to escape, but was roundly walloped. He ran home, crying, to his father who found the workman in a crowded restaurant, inquired whether he had beaten his son, and getting an affirmative reply, knocked him to the ground.

Herman, Pauling recalled, was subsequently arrested and tried for assault. The police records show that he was indeed arrested and tried, but for boot-legging whisky (a charge of which he was acquitted). The incident, however misremembered, left Linus with a sense of pride in his manly legacy.

His heroic tenacity and ambition can surely never be explained, but biographers will try. Had his family been scholarly, his would have been a case of emulation; since it was not, it is a reaction, heightened by the traumas of childhood.

The traumas were real. Pauling's father died at the age of 33, while Linus was still a child. Pauling's mother kept a boarding house that gave shelter to her young family, but brought in a negligible income. Linus, the only boy, was the breadwinner from the age of 13 at a succession of jobs he despised. His escape was into reading, through which he discovered that he had an excellent mind.

At school he was top of his class. But, as he explained to Hager, his ambition was to give answers that were not merely good, but perfect. In mathematics he found it was possible to do so. It became his life's ambition to unite his pleasures by bringing mathematics to chemistry.

As an aspiring scientist the young Pauling made the obligatory pilgrimage to Germany. There, in 1926, he found himself in at the birth of a new mechanics that, unlike Newton's mechanics, was able to describe the behaviour of electrons in atoms. He succeeded in using this new picture, in which the electron figures as a wave, to arrive at an approximate description of chemical bonding. The "wave-electron," Pauling said, is smeared out to form a negatively charged cloud that cements together the positive atomic nuclei. This was, the principal achievement for which he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1954 - almost 30 years later.

In the interim Pauling had done other historic work. He gave the first explanation of a disease as being due to a defective molecule. The disease is sickle-cell anemia. Most significantly, he played a leading part in establishing the concept of a spiral staircase, the so-called "molecular helix," as being the key to the structure of numerous proteins — the building blocks of living cells.

Along the path to these discoveries, as Hager explains, Pauling discovered a new protean persona. His lectures became celebrations of science and self. His ambitions grew, culminating in the cause of the common cold. Or, failing that (and he did fail), why not the cure for cancer? The clue, he believed, lay in Vitamin C. But to most scientific observers the evidence appeared embarrassingly shaky.

Happily, as his ambitions grew his interests broadened. He discovered the world. The delay in doing so was understandable. Scientists, in the pre-Atomic Age, were not supposed to involve themselves in debate on social issues. This, they were assured, would bring science into disrepute. They were only too happy to oblige by locking themselves in their laboratories, since science is hugely demanding.

The price of even slight inattention to one's science is likely to be high. Pauling's political battles undoubtedly contributed to the careless thinking that cost him the crowning achievement of his career, which would have been the application of his concept of the helix to the most important molecule in nature, DNA. It was cold comfort that he had contributed to the triumph of Watson and Crick in 1953.

He had by then been dodging to and fro between science and politics for quite a while. Then, following his Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1954, he allowed politics to take him over for the decade that led to his Nobel Peace Prize in 1963 (awarded, confusingly, for the previous year, 1962).

His style as peace activist mirrored his style in science: optimistic, principled and fearless. But to claim that he was fearless is to comment only on the outward appearance. He feared for his reputation, his research grants, his job, and above all for the peace of mind necessary to do ambitious science. Courageously, he lived with those fears.

It is good to see him so well remembered in Hager's account. It would be still better to see him more widely emulated.

John Polanyi, who won a Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1986, is a professor of chemistry at the University of Toronto.