Cliff Mead: We have one final speaker, and the topic is “Linus Pauling as Evangelical Chemist,” and our speaker is Professor Dudley Herschbach. Professor Herschbach received his BS in mathematics in 1954 and his MS in chemistry in 1955 at Stanford University, followed by an AM degree in physics in 1956 and a PhD in chemical physics in 1958 at Harvard. After a term as junior fellow in the Society of Fellows at Harvard, ‘57-‘59, he was a member of the chemical faculty at the University of California, Berkeley, from ‘59-‘63 before returning to Harvard as professor of chemistry, where he is now Beard Professor of Science since 1976. His teaching includes graduate courses in quantum mechanics, chemical kinetics, molecular spectroscopy, and collision theory, as well as undergraduate courses in physical chemistry and general chemistry for freshmen. His most challenging assignment: he is engaged in several efforts to improve K-12 science education and public understanding of science. He is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the National Academy of Sciences, the American Philosophical Society, and the Royal Chemical Society of Great Britain. His awards include the Pure Chemistry Prize of the American Chemical Society in 1965, the Linus Pauling Medal in 1978, the Michael Polanyi Medal in 1981, the Irving Langmuir Prize of the American Physical Society, 1983, the Nobel Prize in Chemistry, 1986, the National Medal of Science 1991, the Jaroslav Heyrovsky Medal in 1992, the Sierra Nevada Distinguished Chemists Award in 1993, the Kosolapoff Award of the ACS in1994, the William Walker Prize in1994, and he was named by the Chemical Engineering News among the 75 leading contributors to chemical enterprise in the past 75 years in 1998. Professor Dudley Herschbach. [Applause] [2:12]

Dudley Herschbach: Thank you. It's a joy to be at OSU. Partly, of course, because this was Linus Pauling’s alma mater, and I’ve long relished the fact that he’s my scientific grandfather, through Bright Wilson, my PhD mentor. Let’s start with a picture of Linus among a host of thousands of such pictures I’ve seen, but this is a particularly nice one, and here is my mentor, one of his early graduate students, Bright Wilson, my favorite picture of Bright. His personality is totally different than his scientific mentor, Linus Pauling, but an equally marvelous guy. From him I learned a great many stories about Linus. I thought that on this occasion, I would try to pass on a few of those stories, because I presume that not all that many people here had the experience of actually getting much acquainted with Linus Pauling. I know one exception is Linus Pauling Jr. right here in the front row, but I wonder how many people met, or heard in person. Quite a few, and you would expect here, maybe, more than some places. But, at any rate, you all know then that he was a marvelously charismatic, evangelical speaker. I heard him about six or seven times in full scale speeches. Each one totally different in character, and I got some other special experience in person with him, in addition to the second-hand stories that I heard. I thought that by telling you a few of these stories, I can summarize some things I think we can all try to emulate. It’ll be a faint emulation of Pauling, because he was Pauling. Nonetheless, I think they’re valuable lessons along the direction that Steve has told us about. That’s the general notion I have here. [5:24]

Now, I met Linus before I ever met him because my undergraduate advisor, Harold Johnston, had been to Caltech, and of course he told me stories about Linus. In 1947, as you all know, Linus published his book, General Chemistry, and I was at Stanford as a freshman in 1950. I had already had interest in majoring in chemistry because of a wonderful high school course, but I was rather disheartened by the freshman course at Stanford. It was awfully dull, in particular the textbook was unbelievably dull. My advisor, Harold Johnston, said “Oh, you should get Pauling’s book.” So I did, and this is the autograph I got at his 90th birthday because I got a chance to take part in the symposium in his honor at Caltech in 1991. You see, he was fairly elderly there. I already, in earlier occasions, had him autograph Pauling and Wilson. Wilson, my mentor, was his graduate student. They’d written this classic text, Introduction to Quantum Mechanics, but I had to wait a long time, and also Nature of the Chemical Bond, but I waited for this until I myself had taught freshman chemistry for ten years. I didn’t feel I was entitled yet. This is the last book of his I got, but it’s just such a wonderful book. The illustrations by Roger Hayward, of course, enriched it enormously. I’ll just give a little tiny bit about it. Look at the first page.

“Chemistry is the science of substances: their structure, their properties, and the reactions that change them into other substances.”

Bam! There it is. [Audience laughter] No fuss, no muss, really clear and clean. And that’s so characteristic of Linus. Then he goes right on. The next sentence:

“Chemistry is a great and complex subject and an engrossing one. It has two aspects: descriptive chemistry, the discovery, tabulation, and correlation of chemical facts; and theoretical chemistry, the formulation of theories that upon verification unify these facts and combine them into a system. Both of these aspects are presented side-by-side in this book.” [7:57]

That's completely lucid and just what it’s all about. You already have an intimation of how broad a universe it is. Then, he goes on to say that it hasn’t progressed as far as physics, for some parts of physics have now become essentially theoretical. That means it’s old stuff. Chemistry, that’s where the real action is. [Audience laughter] At any rate, the next page he goes on with advice to students. I mean, clearly he has in mind his audience, right off the bat. I won’t belabor that, but I thought I’d just give a picture too of Roger Hayward. Of course, later, Linus did other things with architect Roger Hayward, but this is ice, none of the glitzy stuff you get in modern textbooks, but I think it’s just so appealing. Here’s a very simple business, but its got the distances and it’s easy to get to. The contrast with the modern books, which are a threat to the health of the students, they’re so heavy, and they’re so disheartening when they’re looking through all this stuff. Linus’ book you hold in one hand.. Sadly, later, because it was so successful, I think it was not Freeman anymore, the original publisher of this, it grew bigger and bigger, but nowhere near the size of the monsters people contend with now. I’m not absolutely sure I would have continued with chemistry if it hadn’t been for Linus’s freshman book.

I wanted to acknowledge that, and should have maybe put some more things in earlier. There was some comment about thermodynamics, and how there’s conceptual problems with people understanding it and so on. Well, later in this book there’s a chapter on thermodynamics and he gets right to it in the following beautiful way. No equations and all this. Instead, Linus says "take a bulb with a rubber stopper and an eyedropper. Put some water in the eyedropper, the bulb is evacuated, squeeze the eyedropper, what happens?" You all know. A drop of water comes in and evaporates, fills the bulb. "Now squeeze it again, another drop, now another drop. What happens when you keep squeezing?" Eventually you have a puddle of water at the bottom, but still water in the vapor. And then he asks, "Well, which is the more stable phase, the vapor or the water?" Well we all know you have to heat water on a stove, so clearly the liquid is more stable. How come at first, when you dropped it in, the vapor spread all over? Well folks! That tells you about entropy, it tells you about energy, it tells you there’s a competition between the two, and that’s really all you need to know about chemical kinetics. It’s this competition of these things. [11:17]

I was mentioning to Mary Jo earlier, when there was this discussion that the students have trouble with concepts, that I had a phone call from a professor of physics who was a member of the National Academy of Sciences, doing an experiment to measure the fine-structure constant to ten significant figures, which he ultimately he did. He was worried about a little problem he had with his experiment. The basic reason was he didn’t appreciate that two sodium atoms can bind together, creating fair energy That actually that was not a problem for his experiment, because two sodium atoms allow much more entropy than two stuck together. If he had had Pauling’s freshman textbook, he would have understood this concept. Instead, I’m sure the guy saw all the equations of thermodynamics and whatnot and missed this. This is a true story.

So, that’s not in the book, it’s a digression. You’ll have to excuse me for such things. But there’s a moral to it! Okay, now I’ll jump on. As a senior, of course, I had a course in quantum mechanics.

Here you see I have both autographs. I learned quantum mechanics from this without a course, and I think many, many people did. This book, published in 1935, is still in print. More than that, it’s been cloned over and over. Many other books have lifted out of it. Now, what is so striking about it is those of you who know Linus’s 1931 series, the Nature of the Chemical Bond, that it went on, and then culminated in this Nature of the Chemical Bond book in 1939 in several editions, you’ve heard about, you know that - and he writes about this. His triumph was, after learning quantum mechanics, winning a National Research Fellow, and he went over to Europe just at the crucial time and came back as the only chemist who understood it. Few physicists in this country did, either, and then he took on this evangelical task of educating everybody else. His triumph was to see that, without all the equations, to find very simple things, really nothing much more than algebra needed, instead of all differential equations and whatnot. That’s 1931. Here in 1935, this book is the opposite. It shows you, knowing just calculus - and not having a terribly good grip on that, because few chemists did in 1935 - that every step can be shown in this kind of stuff. No assumption that you’ve had a course in differential equations, none of that stuff. It is still perfectly dignified in all the rest, but it’s remarkable. [14:30]

Well, I had heard stories about this. Bright was the teaching assistant for Linus’s course in quantum mechanics. Bright told me that again and again, a student would ask a question, and Linus would say, “Oh, yeah, I hadn’t thought of that,” and he’d work it all out on the blackboard. Bright knew that Linus had worked it out very carefully beforehand. [Audience laughter] But, he wanted the students to have the experience of what it was like to do that. In his freshman course, which I heard about - I didn’t get to witness or anything - from Harold Johnston and others, Linus did a bit of showmanship. He loved to come in and tell students about a conversation he had with someone else about some issue in chemistry. It would seem a digression, but then he would lead it around to a way that was pertinent to the subject matter they were supposed to be studying. He’d do his demonstration in a way that you would enjoy. For example, there’s a classic one always done in freshman chemistry – you have a bowl of water, you throw a chunk of sodium in, with some phenolphthalein so it changes colors as things go around and it reacts to produce a base. Well, Linus would do that, and then he’d get very excited about it and say “Isn’t this wonderful, it’s giving off hydrogen,” and all this, and then he’d say “What if we did it with gasoline!” He’d run down here, and all the students would be moving out of the way because the guy looks crazy because he’s so excited. He pours some gasoline in, steps back, and throws off the sodium chunk. Nothing happens. It was his way of making sure they appreciated one of the wonders of chemistry, that is, the business how different things are.

I was thinking, when you were speaking up here, about how to make it dramatic. I want to propose something, I’ve given this title in various talks I’ve given: “Sex and the Single Methyl Group.” [Audience Laughter] This audience here looks old enough to me to know of a famous book, Sex and the Single Girl, by Helen Gurley Brown? Did anyone ever read that book? Oh, you wouldn’t want to admit it. [Audience laughter] It was a sensation bestseller in the 60’s. Anybody here alive in the 60’s? Say age twenty or so? Every young woman I know was reading that book. You know, it’s the pill and all that stuff. Okay. “Sex and the Single Methyl Group” goes like this. It’s fundamental. Every human fetus for the first 35 days of its life in the womb, whether it has two X chromosomes or an X and a Y, is of indeterminate sex. It already has some beginnings of male and female structures evolving. At the 35th, 36th day, if all works properly, if it’s an XY fetus, a DNA switch operates, and all goes normally. But, in one out of 50,000 to 100,000 cases the switch fails. Then what happens? It is a viable fetus, it’s born, XY chromosome, but in terms of anatomy, female. You remember some cases of Olympic athletes that seemed to be female, but what do they do? They’re XY. Okay, now think of the consequence. We know now, from NMR experiments, that it fails because of a lack of a methyl group - what should be an isopropyl side chain in a particular amino acid. One methyl. Think, ladies, if that happened more often, then this saying that you should tell your kids about the bees and the birds would mean something! Now it’s baloney! Because the birds do reproduce more or less like humans, but the bees do nothing like it! They lost that methyl group, or the equivalent thereof. You don’t tell your kids about that, I bet. I bet absolutely no one here told them about the bees. But think if it happened more often. Our society would be rather different, right? We’d have a worker class of XY people and all because of a methyl group – just carbon with three hydrogens. [19:20]

The reason I thought of it is that my first encounter with Linus Pauling, in person, had to do with methyl groups. I was doing my PhD with Bright Wilson, working on microwave spectroscopy about methyl groups twisting on molecules, doing what’s called internal rotation - it’s rather important in various chemical processes. In particular, in the alpha-helix, the protein structure that you’ve heard about that Linus elucidated. He really established the paradigm that Watson and Crick then emulated in solving the DNA structure. But, Linus had to make some assumptions about the angles of rotation about carbon-hydrogen, carbon-carbon bonds, and one of them is equivalent to knowing what happens to a methyl group turning around. Bright students were using this new method where you could achieve with microwave spectroscopy to get this information. Linus had looked at all this data, and addressed the major question, but it was still not clear: How do you understand the preferred orientation of the methyl group with respect to the rest of the molecule, and how much energy it takes to turn it from one position to another? How do you understand it in terms of electronic structure? He wrote a paper, and his former student, Bright Wilson, was a little shook-up when the master published his paper. This was 1957. I remember there was excitement about this. I was called to have an audience with Robert Burns Woodward, the famous organic chemist, to explain this to him. There was great interest in this paper.

In November or December 1957, I get a two page letter from Pauling. I hadn’t turned in my PhD thesis yet. It invites me to come and give two seminars at Caltech. It doesn’t say why. Just one on the work you’ve done, and one on the work you’d like to do in the future. I asked Bright about it, he said, “Oh, yes, they’re looking for a faculty member.” But, there was no hint of that in the letter from Linus. I visited in February. I can see him now. I am taken to his office, he comes out, he puts his arm around my shoulders immediately as if I were one of his grandsons, ushers me into his office. It seems to me his office was about from here all the way to the back. It was a long, long office. I would say almost half of it was filled with molecular models. Some of them were so huge, that the atoms were the size of basketballs, and the bonds were big, thick sticks. They were all sizes and all very complicated things, but there was a methyl group there, among others. We talked about all that, and not about sex because I didn’t know anything about that aspect yet. Pauling was so charming. In came a secretary with a pile of things, and said “Would you like to sign some of these,” offering them to me. Things like that. I’ll never forget. Then, that evening, I gave a seminar and I only learned later that they were looking to hire a theoretical chemist. Well, I’d done some theory, but I was mostly doing experimental work. I gave this talk about all of them, and these lines we measured, and how you get out this information about the methyl groups. And Linus asked, “Did you measure all those lines?” I said, “Oh yeah, sure,” and he looked so surprised. The next day I was to talk about what I wanted to do. Of course, I talked about all these experiments I wanted to do with what’s called molecular beams that nobody was doing in chemistry. It was regarded as silly thing to even think about doing because you had to have a vacuum system and the collisions were such that you couldn’t expect to get more than a [monoly?] or month of product, which is ridiculous in chemical terms, and so on. Anyway it did work out all right because it wasn’t obvious that it would have sounded silly, and it was certainly very experimental. [23:44]

The idea for it went back to Otto Stern, who had done great stuff in the 20’s and the 30’s. Many of you have heard of the Otto Stern-Gerlach experiment, that first shows, the textbooks say, electron spin, but they didn’t know that’s what they were seeing. They were looking for something else in that experiment. At any rate, I mentioned Otto Stern as the inspiration to try to do this, and I ignorantly referred to him as a physicist, and Linus said “Otto Stern was a physical chemist!” Of course, it was true, but I didn’t know that. Now I’ve written papers about Otto Stern, and so on. He’s another one of my ancestors. It turned out he was retired and living at Berkeley. When five years later I was on the faculty at Berkeley starting these experiments, and the physics department invited me to give a talk, and I saw some professors and when I wrote Otto Stern’s name on the board, someone asked “Did you know Otto Stern was in the audience?” I had no idea.

He was the guy sitting up there, he doesn’t look like you, but he looked like Charlie Chaplain, he had a little black suit and a homburg. He was a very shy guy. He had retired and was living there. The experiments I talked about he had done in 1922, and this was 1960 so, you know, I didn’t imagine he was still on the earth. I learned a lot of things from him that I have tried to pass on in other stories. I have always enjoyed telling people about when I realized that Otto Stern was actually a physical chemist. He started out his PhD in 1912, measuring the osmotic pressure of CO2 in various solvents. This guy was bubbling CO2 here earlier today and you should think of Otto Stern. At any rate, the key thing of this whole visit was, the last day, I was taken to see Linus again, he was chairman of the division of Chemistry there at Caltech, and he said “I have some errands to run, why don’t you come along with me?” We go out in the parking lot, and he took such joy showing me that he had this car, you could press these buttons, and the windows rolled up and down. That was the first thing. Then we went to the bank and the post office. All along he told me stories about Caltech, including one that Harvard had offered him a job in 1928, which he says no, and then they offered it to a colleague at Caltech, no, and then they, as a third choice, chose this guy Kistiakowsky, a young experimentalist from Princeton. Now those of you who know Kistiakowsky know that he and Linus had a few fun times together.

At any rate, we then showed up at a local newspaper. I had noticed, when I came into Linus’s office, he had piles of papers and press reports. It was early in his campaign to stop atmospheric testing of nuclear weapons. At the newspaper office, Linus hands one of these press reports to me and chats a little with the guy, and then he says “You might like this too.” He has a manila envelope and he pulls out this glossy print. It was wonderful. It was this great Linus Pauling smile that you always see, with a twinkle in the eye, and he hands it over. He looks exactly like the photograph that he handed over.

So, then we go on further, and after a little while we arrive at his house, and he says “Oh, I didn’t intend to come here. The car just habitually does it.” We went in, and on the way he pointed out the tetrahedral angles, which I’d heard about before.

We go by the famous swimming pool. We come near the back door and there’s some baroque-looking contraption. He explains, “Oh, it was so nice. The Caltech machine shop made this.” It was all metal and plastic. It was a Christmas tree version of the alpha helix. [Audience laughter] We go in, and he introduces me to your mother, Ava Helen, and your sister Linda, and the dog, and Linus disappears. He didn’t come back for 45 minutes. So I had a nice chat with Ava Helen and Linda about various things. In particular, she would reminisce about Bright Wilson when he was a graduate student of Linus, and she said, “You know, I don’t think Bright Wilson ever came to think we Westerners were quite civilized.” I remember that. I thought that was a little odd, because Bright was from Tennessee. [Audience Laughter] [28:48]

At any rate, I had those vivid memories of this trip. Two years later, Linus gave a fabulous talk at Asilomar. By that time, I was on the faculty at Berkeley and just got these experiments going that I mentioned earlier. He was the speaker at this meeting on spectroscopy. He gave a marvelous talk on aging, which I wasn’t thinking about too much at that point, but your cigarette demonstration reminded me. He pointed out that this data showed that smoking will shorten your life seven years, on the average. But then, it turns out that if you drink one cocktail every day, it will lengthen it by seven years. [Audience laughter] He pointed out things like that. He had all kinds of graphs and analyses. It was absolutely charming and intriguing.

But, the reason I mention it, is a very famous episode happened just a couple days later. He had gotten lost overnight and people thought he was a goner. He’d gone on a hike on his property near Big Sur, and got into a situation where he knew it was too dangerous to try to go downhill again, so he stayed in a place and recited the periodic table, and all sorts of other things overnight, and when he was found, he was fine.

I remember some other special occasions. I received the Pauling award in ’78, and I arrived on a terribly rainy night in Seattle, where the thing was to be held, and Linus was going to be there, and Ava Helen too, the next day. I thought I was coming down with an awful cold, and that would be terrible, because of course Linus, at that point, was talking a lot about vitamin C. I asked at the desk, “Is there a drugstore here?” He says “Yeah.” So I went there, I got some vitamin C and took a lot. The next morning, there was no trace of any cold. That’s the one time it worked. [Audience laughter]

Now, since I mentioned vitamin C, at the 90th occasion, Linus gave two brilliant speeches. I don’t know, were you there at Caltech in ’91 for the 90th birthday?

Audience member: Yeah.

Dudley Herschbach: Yeah. So, he gave fantastic speeches. One, about how he got interested in the chemical bond from high school and then the next day, about his ideas on quasi-crystals and why he thought the physicists who were all excited about them had misinterpreted them. Turned out he wasn’t right about that, but still it was a wonderful talk.

My wife wanted to come, and she was there, and our younger daughter, who was a molecular biology graduate student at that point at UCSF was there too. We were in the athenaeum having breakfast the next morning and Linus comes down and joins us. He explains, among other things, that he was taking 18 grams of vitamin C. I later learned, I think from Ken Hedberg, that he had an older sister, and she never took any vitamins at all. She’s lived to 101, so she outdid Linus. [Audience laughter]

At any rate, Linus wasn’t quite perfect. Still, I remember other occasions. When I was back at Harvard, Linus came and gave a fabulous talk at the medical school. An enormous mob of people was there to hear him tell the whole story of molecular biology, particularly starting out with the sickle-cell. It would have been around ’66 when he came to talk about the Vietnam War, and there was such a huge crowd that the hotel that he was to give it in couldn’t deal with it, so it moved next door. That was particularly memorable. It was a big church next door and I got to hear Linus talking in the pulpit. It was wonderful. There, it was magic. [33:22]

The last occasion I got to see him was in ’93. I’d given what is now called the “Pauling Lecture” at Caltech, and there was a dinner afterwards. There, Linus told many stories too. I just want to mention one. Linda was there and confirmed this story. He said that he got a phone call a few minutes before he was to go teach his class. It was from his wife and she was terribly upset. She said “The woods are on fire, and the winds are blowing towards the house.” He said “But darling, I have to teach in a few minutes.” You see, he did send a post-doc, telling him to sprinkle the house with water. Fortunately the winds shifted, so there was no problem. But then Linus said, I can see his face now, in all innocence, “But you know, my wife wouldn’t speak to me for weeks.” Linda confirmed this, as if he had no clue. Now, he was a showman.

Those are a few things I wanted to pass on to you. An inkling about what I’ve been privileged to hear of Linus. I just want to finish with two points. First, just to sum up characteristics, and the things I think we can try to emulate from Linus’ public presentations and all, is first, he’s direct and focused, as illustrated here. It’s the same thing with Introduction to Quantum Mechanics. He gets to the main point right away. He gives you a picture of the scope of the thing, how it’s totally transformed. “The subject quantum mechanics constitutes the most recent step in the very old search for the general laws concerning motion and matter.” I wanted to mention at the Nobel Banquet these famous words warning young people that older people can make mistakes. That’s written in ’54 but he forgot about that a little I’m afraid in some of his later years, when he took a little too seriously some of his ideas about megavitamins. Unfortunately, he interpreted other people’s criticisms, saying “You don’t have enough experimental evidence yet,” in ways that weren’t really right. He attributed unworthy motives to them when they really were making a valid point. [36:12]

I felt I had to mention that in closing. Over all, it’s a fabulous, inspiring career that we can learn so much from. It’s clear, when you get to see him and read him, he thinks of the audience, what their background is, what their interest is, and how to say things in the most simple, clear, straightforward way. Such a luminous mind. Everything was pictures, stories, things you visualize, like the entropy example I mentioned. He puts the subject in some broad context, where you see how it all connects. He doesn’t go into great detail about history or anything but you see its place, such as the lines I just quoted. He does not avoid use of the first person. Stories are much more powerful in the first person, and he had lots of things in science to talk about. He clearly enjoyed so much what he was doing and conveyed his enthusiasm and love for science. Anybody hearing him just says, “Gee whiz.” People rightly called him the Pied Piper. He was an evangelist.

Now I mentioned in my abstract that you are almost forced to speculate what Linus would do today, having the cyber tools and so on. One thing he’d do is make movies. I’m absolutely sure of that. It’s not so expensive anymore. There’d be blogging and YouTubing. I’m sure he’d be right up there and it would be a great thing for science. So, we don’t have Linus, but we may have a lot of other people who can aspire to emulate Linus.

There are a few other lessons about what I think Linus would likely to talk about. Of course, he would talk very powerfully against the war. I think he would talk about the environment and our great energy challenge. I think he’d certainly talk about our situation with science education, what we need to do to bring in more students. He was very interested in encouraging young people all along. As you see, he was speaking to young people here. I’ve been involved for years, as you mentioned in the introduction, with the Science Talent Search and International Science Engineering fair - fairs for high school kids. It was Seaborg who recruited me to that. For about twenty years, I’ve been involved in that. I think these kids are the best ambassadors we can have for science. For some time, I’ve been trying to get them on TV in interstitials. Those are the little fill-ins that last thirty seconds, sixty seconds, maybe the longest is a minute and a half or so. ABC now is beginning to run our first batch of interstitials. They are interviews with kids at this high school fair describing their projects. They’re easy to film, easy to produce, a total of $10,000 got us 9 interstitials, and they can be run over and over again. You didn’t mention the best thing about my biography. I thought you asked for one, and I sent you a decent little one, not the one you read. [Audience laughter]

The only one significant is that I was a guest voice in the Simpsons. [Audience laughter] So, yeah. That’s my fourteen seconds of fame, you see. Now Linus would have been an even better guest voice.

I hope I’ve conveyed a little bit that might be interesting to you and pertinent to the purpose of this wonderful symposium. I’m very glad to have had a chance to be part of it. Thank you. [Applause] [41:02]

Cliff Mead: So, we do have a couple of minutes left to take some questions for Dudley Herschbach. Who would like to begin? [41:13]

Audience Member: I have one question: how do we get all of this information out into the general public’s hands?

Cliff Mead: I believe that’s the question you asked this morning.

Audience Member: Well it’s still my biggest concern.

Cliff Mead: How do we get all of this information into the public hands? Well, this particular symposium is being taped by OPB and we will try to work to make it available for a larger community than was able to attend today. Other questions? I will tell one last story that goes along with you being on the Simpsons. When Woody Allen was making his film Annie Hall, he decided to include a section of the film having Linus Pauling arguing about the Nature of the Chemical Bond. He was going to be in a movie, arguing with Diane Keaton about the nature of the chemical bond. He was going to walk over and say, “And here’s just the man to tell you I’m right.” When he was asked by Woody Allen to do this, Linus declined. He went home and said, “I’ve never heard of Woody Allen.” [Audience laughter] His daughter was very upset with him about that. [42:32]

Dudley Herschbach: Well, I was partnered in the guest voice thing with Jennifer Garner, and I’d never heard of her. [Audience laughter] I’m sure she hadn’t heard of me.

Cliff Mead: I guess the moral is, when Hollywood comes calling, you best answer.

Dudley Herschbach: I’m the grandson of Linus. I’m like him in that regard, at least.

Cliff Mead: Thank you all for coming today. I hope you come tomorrow morning for the third session, at 9 o’clock. Thank you.