Linus Pauling Interview, October 14, 1992

THOMAS HAGER: Interview with Linus Pauling, October 14th, 1992 at the Pauling Institute.

LINUS PAULING: ...course they contained an error saying that I had requested an audience with the Emperor, which I hadn't. I didn't even know that I might have an audience with the Emperor. Possibly the professor, the advisor to the Emperor, who had made the recommendation - a member of the committee who had made the recommendation that the second son come to work with me in Pasadena. Possibly he had said to me that I might have an audience with the emperor, but I'd forgotten - if he did say that, I'd forgotten it. But the ambassador knew 00:01:00that. This may be the reason that the ambassador asked me to come to talk with him. True, I had a pleasant hour with the ambassador in Tokyo.

TH: Now did the State Department.... Was the letter to the ambassador asking that he not grant, that the ambassador not grant you an audience or the emperor not grant you an audience?

LP: The Emperor.

TH: Oh the Emperor, okay.

LP: Yes, it was the Emperor.

TH: And you did not go to see the Emperor?

LP: No. The letter said that the policy of the Emperor was to grant an audience to citizens of a foreign country only if requested by the foreign country. So the Secretary of State told the ambassador not to request it.

TH: I see. The most interesting thing in that correspondence, to me, were the memos from Ruth Shipley to her bosses after they had decided to give you your passport, protesting.

LP: Her statement that she is convinced that I am a communist. That interested me. In the local internal correspondence she just came out flat footedly.

TH: Yes, and somewhere I had in my notes that she was a relative of Hoover, of J. Edgar Hoover.

LP: Oh, yes. Well, she couldn't have been sister-in-law, because Hoover wasn't married. If she had married his brother her name would have been Hoover rather 00:03:00than Shipley. But close relatives, something like that, perhaps cousins or something like that.

TH: Well they seem to think alike, in any case. Now would you like to talk about old things or new things at this time?

LP: Oh, anything is fine. I'm not sure what....

TH: Okay, well let me start with a couple of backup questions from early on. The first have to do with science fiction, and I just want to touch base about Jules Verne very quickly. You had in your diary something written in Jules Verne's cryptogram, which must've been from one of his books - a coded message.

LP: Well, I don't remember...I can't remember when I first read Jules Verne, and 00:04:00I don't remember Jules Verne's cryptogram. Of course I remember Edgar Allan Poe's The Gold-Bug cryptogram, Gold-Bug. I read all of Poe's stuff when I was high school, grammar school, high school, probably when I was in high school, and I took books from the public library down on West Park Street, down on 8th Street in Portland. I got lots of books off of the public library there. Well, I don't remember now a cryptogram in any of Jules Verne's writing.

TH: But you did read Verne?

LP: Yes.

TH: And did you also read H. G. Wells? Do you remember that at all?

LP: Well, yes, but I guess I don't remember what stage in my youthful career I 00:05:00read H. G. Wells. It may not have been till I was at OAC. At OAC I remember reading Maupassant, of course I was taking French the first two years and German the second two years.

TH: And you mentioned also at OAC reading George Bernard Shaw.

LP: Yes, all of his plays I kept reading, getting them out of the library.

TH: Do you continue to have an interest in science fiction now?

LP: Yes, I subscribe to two of the science fiction journals. Argosy and Science Fiction and Science Fact, the two principal science fiction journals I subscribe to, and I usually read them. The serials sometimes are just too long, I don't 00:06:00bother to read them. And of course the problem is first the characters have been changing recently. Instead of being adventure science fiction stories, they are sort of sexual relations science fiction stories - the way with novels, too. I don't read novels anymore either except for old ones that I re-read. And then the science fiction stories, the plots all seem to me to be old ones that I have read before. Sometimes it seems to me that the stories aren't so interesting as they were in the old days.

TH: Well, that's probably true. You've been reading them long enough, they repeat.

LP: Yes, for years I thought I would write a science fiction story based upon the idea that one can have life essentially identical with life on earth which is based on DNA and proteins and amino acids, but with other handedness. In my General Chemistry or College Chemistry, freshman chemistry text I have a footnote about Alice in Wonderland, or I have a page or two about right-handed and left-handed molecules. And I quote Alice in Wonderland saying, 'But would looking glass milk be good for me?' And I said of course it wouldn't be. It would be made of D-amino acids. And someone who had been converted to the 00:08:00dextral form would not be able to eat anything unless he could get food made of D-amino acids. He couldn't and so on, carbohydrates and everything else, chirality almost. And couldn't get married and have children unless he could find a wife who had also been. Well I was going to have a catastrophe in the ship going through space. Some sort of catastrophe that changed everything from left-handed to right-handed.

TH: Now do you remember what sort of catastrophe it would've been?

LP: No. Well, it's pretty hard for a scientist to invent a catastrophe that 00:09:00would do that. It had to be a catastrophe somehow involving multiple worlds, not just a shockwave. Because you would have to have angular momentum chirality, and it's very hard even to convert L-alanine to D-alanine, for example.

TH: If you lifted an L-being out of the third dimension into the fourth dimension and turned them over and put them back, would that...?

LP: Oh yes. Surely that's exactly what people who have written about multi-dimensional space had said or the man who wrote Flatland. You could to that in three dimensions and go back to two dimensions.

TH: I wonder, but I'm trying to think, would that result in that sort of 00:10:00inversion in that...? But any case....

LP: Oh yes, well, if you had a scalene triangle, three edges unequal to one another, three edges all different, and turn it over, it goes from being a right-handed to a left-handed.

TH: Sure, so in any case, that's an interesting idea. It is too bad you never finished that.

LP: Yes, well of course, one complaint about some science fiction writers is that they're handling of interpersonal relationships is poor. This is a complaint I had of E. T. Bell's science fiction books. He wrote two or three science fiction books under the pseudonym John Taine. And they were mildly 00:11:00interesting from the science sort of, not more interesting than books by many science fiction or stories by many science fiction writers. Mildly interesting, but the handling of personal, interpersonal relationships was very poor. Of course, good science fiction stories depend to a considerable extent on the personal relationships, just as good novels do.

TH: Do you feel that would have been a weakness if you had tried writing one?

LP: Well I thought, I recognized the need for including a good story of this sort inside of the story, but I'm not sure that I could do it. But the main thing is I never have had time. There are always scientific problems that I am 00:12:00trying to solve and that interest me more.

TH: Who were your favorite, some of your favorite writers in science fiction?

LP: Let's see. You know I'm not interested enough to remember the names. They are mainly of an earlier generation, too. One of them was something like Weinbaum, but Weinbaum isn't right. So I just can't remember the names of the writers. When I see them I recognize them as the ones whose stories, but when I see the names, I know which ones. But they are not the sort of thing that I put 00:13:00in my memory bank.

TH: The one that came to mind when you said you liked the adventure type stories was a fellow - I can't remember his first name, but his last name is P-O-H-L, Pohl.

LP: That's right.

TH: He wrote in the 50s and 60s

LP: Yes, I remember his stories, too.

TH: I used to get Arg-

LP: Of course I started reading the early form of science fiction in Argosy magazine. Well I can remember reading Argosy in 1917, so my interest goes back pretty far.

TH: You know, I saw in a biography of another scientist, that scientist's interest in Jules Verne was seen as evidence of a belief in scientific progress - that Jules Verne's science fiction was a science fiction that showed the 00:14:00progressive nature of technology and science and how benefits and dangers, too, could accrue from this forward momentum. And the vision of seeing a progression laid out that could be followed scientifically was important to that fellow. And I don't think it was Teller; I seem to think it was Teller, but it was one of the physicists. Do you think that science fiction might have had any of that kind of influence on you?

LP: I doubt it. I think I read it because it was entertaining. Rather recently I read some of H. G. Wells' early stories around 1900. One was the war in the sky 00:15:00where Germany perhaps was attacking England from airships, and in it he says that they came over at the immense height of 400 feet above the ground. H. G. Wells was very imaginative, of course, in those early stories he had loud speakers on the streets yelling at people to come in and take advantage of our unusual bargains, we're reducing prices on everything, and shopping.

TH: Well he was so correct about his vision of modern warfare, the evolution of warfare - especially the idea of aerial bombardment, tanks, and all of that stuff, too. What's your favorite thing to do for leisure now? Do you...I know 00:16:00you watch some movies on videotape. Is that correct?

LP: Well I have only one movie on videotape, which is Lover Come Back with Doris Day. I watch it once in a while. I tried to get a videotape of one of the My Fair Lady movies. There have been several, perhaps three different ones. But there is one in particular that has a marvelous scene at the races at Ascot with women of fashion with great big hats and umbrellas and bright colors walking back and forth sort of on parade in Ascot. Marvelous scene. And of course there are other scenes, there are other versions of My Fair Lady, too, that don't have 00:17:00that particular scene.

TH: I think what you are thinking of the Audrey Hepburn musical version because it was in beautiful color, and the costumes were fantastic.

LP: Well, I have seen another version on television which is very good with that English actor.

TH: Well Leslie Howard made one in the 30s.

LP: Maybe. And of course I enjoy reading the play Pygmalion. Just as I'd enjoyed reading essentially every one of Shaw's plays. So what do I do to fill in the 00:18:00time when I have decided that I should stop working? I have a routine which I try to follow, but four o'clock is a cocktail hour. And where I was usually out at work late at night, now I stop work at four o'clock and for a couple of hours I look at television. Well it depends, here probably for only one hour, at the ranch for two hours. At four o'clock while I'm having my vodka I can look at People's Court, and then at the Santa Barbara News from five to five thirty. Well there is something else comes in between four thirty and five, but sometimes I just skip that. The local news and then the national news five thirty to six. And then often I go to bed, and I may spend the rest of the 00:19:00evening reading the science journals, but I don't have enough to fill in three hours of late-night reading the science journals. Peter sends me Private Eye, which is an exposé of politics and everything else in Britain, Private Eye. And I spend three hours perhaps reading Private Eye each week, and of course, often I don't know what's going on. They may not use the full name of the politicians, but they have accounts and sometimes going to extremes of having several 00:20:00articles about one politician in the same issue.

TH: Is it a satirical, humorous approach to politics?

LP: Yes, it's satirical and humorous. And what do you call it? The Jungle....

TH: Oh, muckraking.

LP: Muckraking, yes. Well one page is the muckraker. It's about agriculture and funny things that go on in agriculture government regulations. And one page is about irresponsibility of the local government, immorality in Birmingham or 00:21:00somewhere else.

TH: And what about.... Pauline mentioned Louis L'Amour novels, westerns, adventures?

LP: Oh yes, for a while I was reading Louis L'Amour. I must have read 20 different ones, perhaps. I met him too, at an affair. We were together in Salt Lake City, I think. Well that's about my style, life, entertaining, fiction, without the sort of modern relationships between the sexes emphasized the way most novels, even the science fiction stories are like that.

TH: What is it that you don't like about the modern attitude toward relationships?

LP: Well just because I am old fashioned, I guess. Just like Quayle or Bush. I think a lot of the family. You know when I am asked do you have advice for young people, I say, 'Look around carefully, you young people. Pick out someone and get married young and stay married.' Well the other advice I give young people is decide what you like to do and then see if you can't prepare yourself to make a living doing it.

TH: Well so the family values platform...?

LP: Yes.

TH: Did you watch the debate last night?

LP: Oh for about ten minutes. That was enough.

TH: I think any ten minutes would've been, anywhere through the debate you would've gotten the same information.

LP: Yes, pretty much. I watched the President's debate for the first hour. I was going out for cocktails at five o'clock. That was more interesting. And especially Perot, coming through pretty well.

TH: Yeah, he was a big surprise.

LP: ...with his one-liners. And well he had to admit he hadn't had any experience in building up a 4 trillion dollar debt.

TH: That was very good. I'd almost be tempted to vote for Perot simply because 00:24:00he's not 'business as usual.'

LP: It's a protest vote.

TH: Of course.

LP: I feel the same way. Many people I think are so fed up with the Democrats and the Republicans that they are grasping at any straw.

TH: Even a Texas business man.

LP: Yes. I haven't heard him say he had his ear to the ground, but he said something about he was all ears.

TH: And I don't think he practiced that, I think that came out...he got it after he said it.

LP: Yes.

TH: When you.... During the time when your children were growing up and you and Ava Helen would go out in the evening, did you go to movies a lot or plays or 00:25:00that sort of entertainment?

LP: Well for a while we went to ballet. There was a ballet company called Ballet Russes. Not a Soviet company but an American company called Ballet Russes which would come to Los Angeles for a couple of weeks, and we would go every night to ballet. In the 1930s, perhaps it was, I've forgotten, or perhaps the 1940s. And in the 1930s perhaps we were in New York a few times and would stay for several days to go to musical comedies. Of course, they didn't cost very much, the tickets, you know, not that much. There were a lot of these musical comedies, 00:26:00"You're the Top" and many different...

TH: What a great time to go - all the George Gershwin and Rodgers and Hart musicals.

LP: So occasionally we went to a movie, not very often. Before we had any children, I can't remember. I remember I went along with Ava Helen and the kids to see Snow White. Took the children to see Snow White. I remember we took them to the circus when the circus was in the Rose Bowl in Pasadena.

TH: But you didn't belong to say symphony or opera groups that support the arts, 00:27:00those sorts of high culture...?

LP: No.

TH: The other thing in terms of entertainment was automobiles and the relationship with a local Lincoln dealer who would tell you about new models, and there's some correspondence related to that.

LP: Oh, I don't remember.

TH: For some reason you have a reputation of liking nice cars.

LP: Well we had a Lincoln Zephyr for a while. I think that was during the Second World War that we had the Lincoln-Zephyr and had a Lincoln, too. The 00:28:00Lincoln-Zephyr worn out, we had trouble during the Second World War. It got older and older, and then we had the Lincoln for a while. We had started out with Fords. The 1916 Ford first, the Model-T.

TH: That was Dickenson's car?

LP: Yes.

TH: The Nobel Prizes have just been announced again, and the prize is now up to $1.2 million.

LP: Yes. I was just thinking that it has gone up 40-fold since my prize in Chemistry, which was $35,000. The Peace Prize was $50,000, so it's gone up.

TH: What did you do when that lump sum came in? What did you do with the money? Because I mean, you know, it was a significant chunk at the time.

LP: Well, the Chemistry Prize, that enabled us to buy the ranch. See the Chemistry Prize was $35,000. We bought the ranch the next year for $35,000. Well our financial situation was already reasonably good because of the success of General Chemistry in 1947.

TH: The book that Linda said put a pool in your backyard.

LP: The front yard, in fact.

TH: And the Peace Prize award. Do you remember, the $50,000 for the Peace Prize, where that went?

LP: No, I don't remember. I wonder where it went, too. We had the Oslo, see we financed pretty much the Oslo conference. I don't know, it may have cost us $10,000. We financed the appeal to stop the testing of nuclear weapons. Well 00:31:00before the senate sub-committee, I said that we had paid for getting these signatures, sending out letters and so on. We paid the postage and for the envelopes and had mainly volunteer workers. And the thirteen thousand, well Budenz, the former communist who was advisor to the committee had said, 'Who put up the money to get those signatures?' The twelve thousand signatures. Experience had shown that it cost about $10 per signature to collect signatures 00:32:00on a petition. And I said in this case it didn't. My wife and I put up the money, and my memory is that the main cost was for postage and stationery and so on and was perhaps something like $600. I don't remember exactly what I said, but my memory now is that I said something like $600. So instead of $10 per signature, it was less than ten cents per signature.

TH: But that would have been a drain, nonetheless, on your resources just prior to the time when you would've won that prize.

LP: Yes. Well as I say, we were not in bad shape financially. We were in good 00:33:00shape because of the income from my books plus my salary. My salary wasn't as important to Linda as it might have been because of the policy of the Institute. Linda said two or three years, a few years ago that she was shocked when she learned that Barclay had come, my student, had come into the Geology Department as a young assistant professor at a salary higher than they were paying me as the Head of Chemistry and Chemical Engineering. There was one episode, see they were paying me about $15,000 or $17,000 when I was Head of the divisions. Dropping to $15,000, dropping $2000 when I resigned and went back to being 00:34:00Professor of Chemistry. There was one episode after the war in perhaps 19...well I've forgotten how far, 1950 or long about then. When the Institute announced that because of the more favorable financial situation in the country and for the Institute, everyone, every employee at CIT was given an increase in salary - an average of 10% or 15%, something like that. So my salary went up from $15,000 to $15,200. They gave me a $200 a year increase in salary.

TH: Yeah, there's obviously an agenda at work there.

LP: There's one member of the board, the president of Union Oil, who gave an ultimatum to DuBridge, you remember, that either I was fired as a professor or he would leave the board. And fortunately DuBridge wasn't able to fire me. They couldn't find a reason to fire me.

TH: I think I told you there were actually three board members who quit because of you.

LP: Well I didn't know that.

TH: The fellow from Union Oil was one, and Herbert Hoover, Jr. was another. And I didn't bring my notes about that, but the third one was - who was the fellow? McKown? Was McKown the head of Union Oil? I can't remember, but McKown was another.

LP: Well McKown may have been head of Union Oil later. He wasn't at that time.

TH: Yeah, well then that would have been the third. McKown was another conservative who called DuBridge at six thirty in the morning one morning complaining about you. Woke him up, complaining about you and your activities. Why was it that you were never called up before the House Un-American Activities Committee, do you think?

LP: I don't know. They may have had a more sensible group of staff people.

TH: Of course their chief investigator was the same fellow who investigated later for the Senate committee that brought you up.

LP: Budenz?

TH: No, Budenz was an informer basically, but their investigator was a fellow 00:37:00named Mandel. Benjamin Mandel.

LP: Well, yes, I don't remember.

TH: Yeah, and he worked for McCarthy and then went to work for the Dodd committee.

LP: Well, they must just have had better advice.

TH: I guess so because they certainly didn't have any trouble bringing up people like Ed Condon and scientists of that stature, as well. I want to switch gears a little bit and talk about DNA quickly. According to the documents that I've been looking at, the earliest work that I saw you and Corey doing on the structure of DNA was in 1951. I had a letter that said you worked on this structure intensively during November, December of 1951, and that was the work that led to 00:38:00the three-stranded structure. Do you remember having any interest in nucleic acids prior to that?

LP: Well, see I was at the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research in 1936. My memory is that I learned about what the professor, that little fellow who studied polysaccharides on pneumococcus....

TH: Oh, Avery.

LP: Avery. I met Avery and Maclyn, I guess it was, who had been working on transfer of types. But my closest associate was Alfred Mirsky. And of course in 00:39:001936, well I got him to come to Pasadena. I went to the director, and the director assigned him to Pasadena and paid his salary. So they lived in Pasadena for two years. And we wrote our 1936 paper on the nature of native and denatured proteins and a very important paper, emphasized hydrogen bonds and the fact that native, or what we said, native proteins have a well-defined configuration and when you denature it you rupture some of these weak bonds and got a more random structure and so on. It was an important paper about proteins. So for two years I was in close contact with Alfred. He showed me how to oxygenate hemoglobin - 00:40:00put the blood in a cylinder with oxygen around it and rotate it so that you get changing surface, and well he was useful. I hadn't done any work on proteins at all until then. And we published many papers about the properties of proteins, especially hemoglobin and various derivatives. So Alfred had a bias against DNA. He kept saying to me that the genetic material must be protein. He didn't think that nucleic acid was important. He had some idea. Well, I think that the influence that he had on me caused me to overlook the possible significance of DNA.

TH: So Avery's work, of course, was overlooked - Avery's work on transformation of pneumococcus - was overlooked by most researchers after it came out. I think it came out in '46, and most people didn't pay much attention to it. The belief that protein was the central problem was in place up until the, almost until they found the structure of DNA. Do you remember when you first became aware of the importance of Avery's work?

LP: No I don't. See I just said that I knew Avery and Maclyn- that's Maclyn McCarty, Maclyn. McCarty, that's his principal collaborator. And whether I learned and what they were doing as early as 1936 I don't know, maybe it was later on. But I was in close contact with Alfred Mirsky. I had picked his name 00:42:00out of the literature. Hanson and Mirsky were the principle workers on hemoglobin, it seemed to me, on denaturation. And when I was at the Rockefeller Institute I talked with Mirsky. I said, 'I'm going to go and talk with Dr. Flexner.' Well he said, 'You can't do that. Nobody can talk with Dr....you have to arrange an appointment.' I just went up to his office and told the secretary I wanted to see him. Told him that I'd like to have Mirsky come to Pasadena for a year or two, and he said, 'Okay.' I asked that they would pay salary and help him out. So even after he came back to New York, I continued to be in close 00:43:00contact with Alfred. And I'm sure that he was influential in causing me not to pay much attention to DNA.

TH: And, in fact, most researchers interested in genetics were focusing on protein at the time. That was the time.

LP: Yes. But of course I was interested in structure primarily. Well, I had written a paper in 1948 especially saying that the gene consists of two mutually complementary structures or possibly just one molecule, one end of which is complementary to the other end. But and then that the process of duplication of the gene is two stages. The first you make a complementary structure, each 00:44:00strand makes the other strand and then that makes the original strand. So this was suggested in the little note by Delbrück to me in 1940, but also I amplified it later on. And of course Watson and Crick both knew what I had said. They had heard me lecture.

TH: Yeah. And of course, Crick has been very open in his crediting you for-

LP: Yes, and very generous. I just read a review of the book The Chemical Bond, the Zewail book.

TH: Oh, I hadn't seen any reviews of that yet.

LP: The review in Science, I think, in which the reviewer says that Crick is very generous in his statement of appreciation of my work.

TH: Yeah. Well I think he had just realized shortly before he gave that talk 00:45:00during the symposium about those early papers, the 1940 and the 1948 paper that I think he had gone back and reread and suddenly discovered that that material was there. What was it then that suddenly spurred your interest in the structure of DNA in 1951?

LP: Oh just we'd been working on proteins, why shouldn't we study DNA, too? But of course I was beginning to think of it as a genetic material by that time. And I've had to explain how could I publish a three-strand structure for DNA when I had written a paper earlier saying that the gene consists of two strands. And the answer of course is that I thought that the three-strand structure, this 00:46:00fiber, was an artifact - that the natural DNA had been if it were two strands had been disassociated and then the three-strand structure had been formed in the process of spinning and forming the fiber. And of course there is a three-strand DNA that has been reported now. So it's not an unreasonable idea.

TH: Yeah. But it doesn't have the phosphates on the insides.

LP: No. And I'd also written a paper about purines and pyrimidines, and I should have recognized that the purines and pyrimidines could have the.... I also knew about the equality in occurrence, numbers of adenine and thymine.

TH: So you were aware of Chargaff's work?

LP: I knew about that, but it hadn't impressed me enough. I should have thought more about it. The answer altogether is I just wasn't thinking hard enough about these problems. I've said I was distracted by having to defend myself twice before a government committee. The time when I applied for access to classified material and it was turned down and I felt I had to fight that.

TH: And of course the first passport problem happened close to that time.

LP: Yes. But the main thing is I just hadn't thought enough. I wasn't thinking hard enough....

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TH: A comparison of the publication of that structure to a comparison of how you worked on the alpha helix structure, and just from sort of a layman's viewpoint, there were so many years of preparatory work...

LP: Your pencil [?]....

TH: Oh. There were so many years of preparatory work that went into the protein structure, and there was this lag between 1948 when you first thought of the alpha helix and the publication of the paper during which time you built models, you checked all the information very carefully. It was a very, it seems to me, extremely careful, very, very thoroughly structured argument that went into the alpha helix. By comparison it seems as though the DNA structure was sort of ripped off in a couple of months. Does that sound right?

LP: Yes. Well I can remember working on it and trying to find some 00:49:00interpretation of the rather poor x-ray diffraction photographs. And I can remember when I thought about the double helix and the structure and was making calculations. The reason that I got off on this three-strand binge is that I did not know how much water of hydration there was in those preparations. Crick told me that he had interpreted the x-ray data showing that there was a three-strand structure, too, but then they got over it and worked on the two-strand structure. There's enough water. I ignored the water of hydration. But more than 00:50:00a third of the material in the preparation was water so that only the other two thirds was protein. So the calculation that I made ignoring the water gave three strands, and if you correct for water, which I just hadn't realized there was so much hydration, then it turns out to be two strands. But I'm not trying to make excuses. I said well I've made enough discoveries. I don't need to discover everything.

TH: It seems to me that looking back at the record you were very quick to recognize Watson and Crick's structure as being the better structure of the two, and it looks almost as though from the moment you saw it that you sort of gave up on the idea of the three strand. Does that sound right?

LP: Oh yes.

TH: Crick has said that the minute he looked at your structure in the prepublication draft that Peter showed him, he recognized that it couldn't hold together, that the phosphates just didn't work that closely packed.

LP: Well I realized that this was a problem. It bothered me, too.

TH: Do you feel that you rushed into print with that paper?

LP: Well, people, especially Astbury, had been trying to interpret the x-ray diffraction data for years without success. I used Astbury's photographs, but we took some of our own. We made the preparation of DNA by the same method and made strands and took x-ray photographs, and they were the same. A big difference, of 00:52:00course, was the Rosalind preparation. Different kinds, two different that she separated the DNA into two more homogeneous structures and got much better diffraction photographs, which Watson and Crick recognized as, or Crick recognized as showing a helical structure with a triple, a double helix. That made the big difference.

TH: You think that Franklin's x-ray photos were critical?

LP: Yes.

TH: And you were working from Astbury's. You also, it seems to me, have some information - oh, there was a fellow doing work on thymus nucleic acids, and you 00:53:00had written him asking him for some distances, and I have that file here.

LP: Well I don't remember.

TH: Do you remember when you first became aware that Watson and Crick were attacking the same problem?

LP: No, I don't.

TH: Just going back to proteins for a second, there was one piece of information when you published the alpha helix that you ignored that apparently had bothered Bragg and other researchers which was this 5.1Å reflection along the meridian.

LP: Well I don't think it bothered Bragg, Kendrew, and Perutz. They just accepted it. And they published their paper - this was several months or a year 00:54:00after I had discovered the alpha helix. I had been careful not to talk to the people in Britain about it because I was troubled that it didn't fit the 5.1 angstroms distance. They published, Bragg, Kendrew, and Perutz published a paper describing something like 19 helical structures, all wrong. But I thought well, we better not delay any longer in publishing the alpha helix and the gamma helix. So we went ahead and published. So at one point I'm sure that I mentioned that I thought that perhaps Jerry Donohue should have been a co-author along with Watson and Crick. Haven't I mentioned that?

TH: Yes, I believe that you did early on.

LP: In that paper in Nature, they mention only one person as having helped them - Jerry Donohue. Well, he helped them alright. He pointed out that if they used 00:55:00the right structures for purines and pyrimidines, then you could form these adenines, thymines, and guanine, cytosine hydrogen bonds. So it was an extremely important contribution that Jerry made.

TH: Yeah, I remember, you know, Crick said in his book that he didn't really have a clear idea about what size the bases were until he got good data on the sizes, and they saw how things could fit. That was the critical moment there.

LP: Yeah. But they didn't fit, but Watson and Crick perhaps thought they ought to fit, but they didn't fit. And the reason was that the books on organic chemistry assigned the wrong structures to the purines and pyrimidines. And 00:56:00Jerry Donohue said well, you know, those structures may well be wrong. They're alternative structures. And they're these and then they will form hydrogen bonds like this.

TH: And did he get that information from having worked...?

LP: Oh, he was with me for two or three or four years in Pasadena.

TH: And you had worked on the structure of the purines and pyrimidines.

LP: Well, we didn't do any x-ray work on purines and pyrimidines but wrote a quantum mechanical paper about them. And the point I am making there is not that I knew what the right structures were of purines and pyrimidines but that I knew what they were, what their nature was - the resonating double bonds, and this is what permits the different arrangement of the hydrogen atoms.

TH: And of course you corrected them on the hydrogen bonding between one of the base pairs.

LP: Yes. They for some strange reason brought in one hydrogen bond that wasn't there. Well, it continues to astonish me that I had not had these ideas myself, but I had had some of the basic ideas but that I didn't do as I did with proteins. Go in a few hours from not understanding to understanding, which I might have done if I had been working harder on the problem.

TH: Did you ever build a model before you published the three-stranded structure, did you ever build a model?

LP: No.

TH: It's such a comparison - that process versus the protein process where things were so much more methodical, it seems to me, and carefully done.

LP: If I had, in the protein case, even before we had determined any amino acids or simple peptide structures, I had determined the structures of some simple molecules closely related to peptides so that as early as 1937, of course in the book in 1939, I was able to make statements about what the peptide bond would be like. And I was confident, too. But just to be sure we set up a program of x-ray diffraction of amino acids and peptides. And then eleven years later I realized 00:59:00that I'd better start working again, and I found the alpha helix. If it had happened that we also done some work on some purine or pyrimidine, I might well have had background information that would have pushed me in the right direction. But we didn't do any purine or pyrimidine work. In the spring of 1938 shortly after I discovered the alpha helix, I was in Cambridge. I talked with Perutz, but I didn't tell him about the alpha helix. I looked at what he was 01:00:00saying about hemoglobin, and I thought, it looks to me as though there are alpha helixes there, but I didn't say anything. But someone said that Taylor has determined the structure of an organic compound of purine. I guess it was adenine or thymine, I don't remember which one. And I was looking at some drawings, and I said, 'And where are the hydrogen bonds?' And the fellow said, 'Hydrogen bonds, what are they?' I said, 'Well, you ought to have some NHO or NHN hydrogen bonds across these purine molecules, and let's see. And here I can see where they are.' They didn't have the hydrogen atom. Here, two nitrogen atoms just the right distance apart, and here's a nitrogen and oxygen just the 01:01:00right distance apart. Well, that was 1948, that should have alerted me, too, but I didn't go on from that.

TH: I am reminded...there was a movie in which an old Indian chief tries to make it rain, and it looks like it's going to start raining, and then it doesn't. Then the Indian chief looks over and says, 'Sometimes the magic works, and sometimes it doesn't.'

LP: Of course, in our three strands paper I'm pretty sure I mentioned that I decided to put the phosphates on the inside rather than the purines and pyrimidines because the purines and pyrimidines were so much different in size 01:02:00that there'd be difficulty in fitting them into the inside.

TH: Of course, sure.

LP: But in fact of course, the difference in size means you have to have one purine and one pyrimidine at each level.

TH: Sure, and there goes Chargaff's ratios.

LP: And the Chargaff's ratios support that, too. But structurally I could fit them into the middle by having one purine small ring and one bicyclic structure at the same level. So that in retrospect, well all of these things, almost all discoveries are easier to make after they've been made.

TH: Then it becomes clear. You mentioned in a letter to I think it might have been Olby when he was writing his book that you had extensive notes about the 1951 attack on DNA. And you said you were writing the letter from memory, but 01:03:00you did have extensive notes. Do you know where those might be? I haven't seen them in the papers at the Institute.

LP: No, I don't know. I think I've tried to find them, looked around at the ranch without success.

TH: You've mentioned at various times a diary you've kept. I've seen in various places notes and so forth that you kept at the ranch or wherever things occurred to you. Have those been gathered together anywhere?

LP: I don't think so. There may be something down there that will turn up in lots of time. I have a little notebook in which I've jotted down ideas, but it's 01:04:00hardly a diary. I looked through it not long ago. It mainly is just that I jotted down ideas about possible investigations.

TH: Okay. There is also the patent materials and the number of things in your safe down at Big Sur. And I'll ask just for the sake of completeness, if I ever came down there, would it be possible to see any of those materials?

LP: Well, maybe. In fact next week I'll go down on Tuesday, I have to look through the safe because Peter by telephone has been after me wanting to know 01:05:00what there is in the safe. And I said, well, there is some classified materials. He got in touch with the Office of Naval Research in Washington, and I had a call two days ago from a man in Monterey who works for ONR, and he said that he and one of his associates would like to come down to the ranch and look at the classified material that we have and give me advice. So I said I'm not sure I have anything that would interest ONR, but when I go down next week I am going to have to open the safe and look through to see what's in it.

TH: Well if there's anything in there, if you discover things in there of a general biographical nature, things that, you know...

LP: Oh I know there is correspondence with perhaps with Harvard in 1929 and....

TH: I picked up some of that from Harvard's own papers. They kept at least one side of the correspondence regarding your professorship there, the offer.

LP: Yes, I think they offered me an associate professorship, and when I turned that down, Conant said, well they could arrange a professorship for me. Whether that's in the documents or not, I'm not sure, but I turned that down, too.

TH: Well I'd be very interested in knowing, obviously, and if there are things that you feel comfortable with having me take a look at, I'm happy to take a trip down and see whatever it is. But I'll give you a call after you get a chance, I'll look.

LP: Well, the trouble is that I am so eager to get back to work on the problem I'm working on in nuclear physics. I keep putting off opening the safe and going 01:07:00through that stuff. There's one thing rather interesting I think, I may have told you about this. I have one folder that has, if my memory is, 80 letters relating to signing the bomb test petition, and they are letters from people saying they won't sign, for example Conant. 'Of course I won't sign your petition,' Conant wrote. That was all. And Hans Bethe said that he was a theoretical physicist who didn't know anything about biology, and he felt he couldn't sign a statement that talked about biological effects. Well that seems 01:08:00reasonable, but of course scientists are always accepting conclusions that other scientists have reached about matters. A scientist can't go into everything himself. He goes into certain sub-points carefully enough so he can say, 'Well I know that this is right.' But most of his knowledge and beliefs about science are obtained from other people. So it's a little extreme for Bethe to refuse to sign on that basis. Well, what the other 78 letter are about I don't know.

TH: But that would be interesting to see, too.

LP: And I thought I would hold those for a certain length of time, 15 years, and 01:09:00perhaps then write an article about them. But it may be time just to release them, to send them up to Oregon State.

TH: Yeah, well I know they'd be thrilled at the chance. See if I have this right: my thinking would be that the two or three year gap between the time in 1948 when you envisioned the alpha helix and the time in 1950-51 when you published it was a period in which you were checking your ideas against the x-ray data, building models, and generally confirming your intuition.

LP: That's right. I was trying to find why my models had 5.4 angstrom and the x-ray patterns said 5.1. And I still didn't understand in 1951 when I published. Well 1950 was the first paper by Dr. Corey and me and 1951 the longer papers. In 01:10:00the meantime when I got back to Pasadena, Herman Branson was there as a visiting professor with nothing to do, nothing to work on. So I gave him the job of checking the dimensions. We knew the dimensions, but checking ways of holding polypeptide chains to see if there were any that I had missed. And the conclusion he reached was that the alpha helix and the gamma helix are the helical structures. And of course I worked on the parallel chain and anti-parallel pleated sheets. And so a year and a half about went by before we 01:11:00published our first paper. And we were, I thought, forced into it by the Bragg, Kendrew, and Perutz group's paper, that we were lucky. When they were working so hard, we were lucky that they hadn't found the alpha helix themselves. You know the two stories about Bragg and Lord Todd.

TH: Talking about the planarity of the bonds?

LP: Yes.

TH: Tell me again just so I have it on tape.

LP: Well Todd told me that when the paper came out in 1950, Bragg rushed over to the Chemistry Department and said, 'Here, I came to talk with you about this problem a year or two years ago or a year and a half ago. Why didn't you tell me 01:12:00that peptide group is planar?' And Todd said, 'Well, I have a clear memory that I did. I distinctly remember that I told you that this carbon-nitrogen bond had some double-bond character.' So that just didn't mean anything to him, to Bragg. He didn't know that the double bond character meant planarity. There's a recent book on Bragg in which Todd has a short contribution, and in it he tells the same story but in somewhat different words. He doesn't say exactly that but essentially the same thing: 'But I did tell you that bond, that that should be planar.'

TH: And of course Perutz has said that Bragg - I can't remember exactly the 01:13:00words, but the idea was that he was chagrined that you had beaten him.

LP: Well since Bragg's death I've learned a good bit about Bragg, that he was unhappy about my entering into fields that he thought were his own. Here I got a major credit for the structure of silicate, and Bragg thought that that was his field and he had determined the structure of beryl and two or three other silicates and even had introduced a simple theory that the oxygen atoms are in a close packed arrangement. Well my theory is much more general in that it includes also structures where the oxygen atoms aren't in close packed 01:14:00arrangements. It's a much more comprehensive theory. Bragg said to me later that he couldn't understand why I - this is 15 or 20 years later - he couldn't understand why I hadn't gone ahead and applied my ideas to explain various properties of silicates and other minerals. And the answer is that I had, and the Journal of the American Chemical Society wouldn't publish it. This was 1929, I was still not experienced enough to realize that that didn't mean it shouldn't to be published. I should have sent that part off to the American Mineralogists. And I don't have a copy of what I had written. But I sent in a paper twice as 01:15:00long as the published paper, and the second half I just have a memory of it. I don't have a copy.

TH: But in subsequent papers you did apply the idea to other silicate structures, didn't you? It seems to me that-

LP: Well I worked out many silicate structures. Perhaps at some time I formulated some of these principles. But Bragg himself went ahead back about 1932 and published a paper in which he did apply my rules and reached general conclusions.

TH: Was there any occasions between the silicates and the alpha helix in which your paths crossed in that way?

LP: Well of course I thought of Bragg as a member of the older generation. I 01:16:00respected him, but I didn't think of him as a competitor. I didn't realize that he might be thinking of me as a competitor. He was only 11 or 12 years older than I.

TH: Oh but of course he had already won the Nobel Prize.

LP: So I didn't know that Bragg was unhappy about competing with me or my competing with him. And the answer is no, I don't think so. I was doing some work on metals and intermetallic compounds, and he too was doing work in that field. But we were doing somewhat different kinds of work. He was interested in plasticity and motion of defects and things of that sort. And I was interested 01:17:00in structures and interatomic distances and bonds.

TH: The last question about DNA is sort of an afterword to this whole thing. When Watson came out with the manuscript of his book Honest Jim, it circulated among a number of people involved with the DNA story, including yourself.

LP: Well Peter had a copy, I didn't have a copy. I saw Peter's copy.

TH: So Peter passed it on to you.

LP: Well we were in London. Peter let me read it in London.

TH: And what was your reaction?

LP: He didn't pass it on to me. Well I was irritated by the smart remarks that he made about Linda in the book, not so much about what he said about me. So Crick and I told the Harvard University Press that we might sue them if they 01:18:00published this book. So it was revised then by Watson. The published version was somewhat different.

TH: Was Wilkins involved in that, too? I have some correspondence-

LP: Yes, I think Wilkins and Crick and I threatened to sue.

TH: So did he excise the portions about Linda?

LP: I think so.

TH: Because I don't remember anything about her in the finished book.

LP: Well there was something about Ava Helen, too, some comment that he made that irritated me.

TH: How've your relations been with-

LP: Whether Peter still has that manuscript.... I told him 10 or 15 years ago that he ought to be able to get a lot of money for it.

TH: It would certainly be.... Well apparently Wilkins saw it, and Crick 01:19:00obviously saw it. Perhaps they have manuscripts of it, too. Well that would be something to see nowadays, the unexpurgated version.

LP: Yes. I don't know whether Peter still has his copy or not.

TH: Let me touch on one last thing, you've been generous with your time. And if I can, I just need to get the story of here at the Institute when Art Robinson left. He tells the story that out of the blue one day you came in and were very angry with him, that he had absolutely no idea that anything was brewing. That you approached him and said that you were upset with him because of some of the things he'd been saying about you and that this was the initial cause of the 01:20:00rift that led to his leaving the Institute and so forth. Does that correlate with your memory?

LP: Not exactly. By the way I have a letter from him a few months ago. I answered it. In his letter he mentioned that his wife had died two or three years ago and he is living with his five children and they don't...he teaches them. They don't go to school. I wrote to him that I thought there was something to be said against that, that it was good for children to have contact with other children. But he didn't reply. And I mentioned Bertrand Russell whose solution was to set up a school. Bertrand Russell and his wife then set up a school where the children would be taught the way they thought they should be 01:21:00taught. That if they wanted to take off their clothes and run around naked they could do so and stuff, but in the place where he was - Mountain View...not Mountain View, some place near Medford or Ashland - probably he couldn't find patrons for a private school.

TH: Yeah, I doubt it, not there.

LP: Well what happened was that I refused, someone sent me some material. A couple of people over in Santa Cruz had set up a company where they were going to treat cancer patients by the methods approved by the Linus Pauling Institute of Science and Medicine. Perhaps mentioned Dr. Robinson, too. So I called him in 01:22:00and said, 'You can't do this, connecting the Institute to people who are going to practice medicine in some unconventional way. You just can't do that, so you must withdraw your connection and the connection of the Institute with those two people.' And he was quite angry with my saying that. So that was the start of it.

TH: And then did you feel that he had been accusing you behind your back, or denigrating the work of the Institute?

LP: No, I don't think so. I think my feeling was that this wasn't good judgment 01:23:00on his part to get involved with some people who were exploiting our work and the Institute.

TH: You had a...

LP: One of my acquaintances, a young fellow who had worked for us on the ranch as a ranch hand had developed cancer and had signed up with these people, too. I learned about that perhaps at the same time.

TH: So it was the unhappiness with him using the Institute's name as an imprimatur, as sort of a sign of good, I guess treatment, you know, that was the base of the problem.

LP: Yes, and without consultation with me.

TH: Just following up on the question of cancer treatment, tell me what you're 01:24:00doing for yourself now.

LP: I'm of course about ... Art Robinson for years has been saying that I had suppressed information that vitamin C increased the chance of cancer formation in mice. This is something that we understand now. We've studied it now so that we understand it. But as to why mice are different from human beings, if you give a little vitamin C to mice, they stop manufacturing their own vitamin C, and the level of vitamin C in the organs becomes lower than when they're not given supplementary vitamin C. We've shown that.

TH: So his study, the one that he was so concerned about, the one that showed that low doses of vitamin C actually increased the progression of cancer, that's the study that you're talking about?

LP: Yes. And he refused to be a co-author when we published this work.

TH: So that....

LP: I found it. I'll ask Mrs. Munro.

TH: For that paper?

LP: Well I have the paper, but I have a couple of charts.

[LP talks to someone else and asks about the charts.]

LP: So I've avoided getting into arguments with him. There's a proverb about conditions under which you'd better avoid getting in arguments. Involves a skunk, you know. Do you know that?

TH: No, go ahead, tell me.

LP: Don't get in a pissing contest with a skunk.

[Laughter]

TH: That sounds like something from Oregon.

[LP talks to someone else and is handed something.]

TH: So this was using data from his initial study and then your subsequent work, as well?

LP: Yes. Well you know it may be that just for the purposes of these slides, I left out the curve for the mice with no extra vitamin C, and that curve lies just above the lowest curve.

TH: I see. So there's actually a sort of a trough effect in terms of dosage.

LP: Yes, and Dr. Tsao carried out studies in which he took mice, repeating ordinary mice chow, mouse chow, with no vitamin C and determined the level of 01:28:00vitamin C in different organs and then gave them the smallest amount of vitamin C and determined the level, and the levels of vitamin C in the organs were lower than when the mice didn't get any in their diet. And then as you give them more, the levels go up to much higher values, and you get protection.

TH: And Robinson-

LP: And this, I call it the mouse effect. You see, you don't have any human beings who manufacture their own vitamin C, so there's no analog to the mouse effect in human beings.

TH: Robinson's work also involved diet, in addition. It was a sort of vegetarian diet.

LP: That's right. The history there, you know we were pretty worried about what 01:29:00Robinson might do, and so we'd better be cautious. History is that I wrote up the paper and submitted it to PNAS which included all of work that we had done. Robinson called it his investigation, but it was my investigation. I'd ask if he would supervise the work day by day, keep track of what the animal man was doing and be sure that the mice were irradiated and things like that on the first mouse experiment. And it included giving vitamin C in various amounts to different groups of mice, usually 50 mice. And also some of the mice, instead of being on standard mouse chow were given extra vegetables and fruits, and they 01:30:00were protected, too. All of this was written up in the paper that I sent in to PNAS. And with Art Robinson as the, I've forgotten, perhaps the second name, I may have had my name first then Art's name. And Art raised a big fuss and said he didn't want to have his name attached. So I wrote and said well, I'll publish the parts about the vitamin C added to the standard diet, and you can publish the parts about the fruits and vegetables. Actually the referees on the paper had raised the fuss about the fruits and vegetables. They said that you just, 01:31:00you didn't have a standard fruit and vegetable diet, you just gave the mice what fruits and vegetables were on the market and at the lowest prices. So they objected to that part of the study. So that's never been published, that part. I wrote to Art saying he was free to publish that under his own name without me, the fruit and vegetable part.

TH: Right. You know, I think he's still thinking about doing it at some point, but of course he's not doing any science anymore.

LP: No.

TH: That makes [?]. From what I've heard, you and Art were close during the time before this all happened, while you were working together.

LP: Oh yes.

TH: That you had had him to the ranch and that-

LP: Yes, well I thought he wasn't the smartest student I had ever had, but he 01:32:00was one of the most effective ones, vigorous and-

TH: And you liked him.

LP: Oh yes. I was astonished that he reacted so antagonistically to my statement that I thought he had to break loose from this connection, that these people were exploiting the Institute.

TH: What would be the word for what you felt by his response? Since you felt close to him, did you feel betrayed that he reacted so strongly and by this whole lawsuit business and the court case and all of that stuff?

LP: Well, no, I don't think that I would use that word. I was unhappy, disappointed. I hadn't thought of it as a matter of loyalty to me. I was just 01:33:00pointing out what sort of behavior was proper and what was improper.

TH: Why was the decision made to settle out of court instead of carrying it through? I know it dragged on a long time, and it was costing a lot of money.

LP: Well the usual one. The lawyers come around and say that if you continue this fight you are going to have more and more legal expenses. So it's cheaper to settle out of court than to keep fighting. And of course there is also the point that if there's a significant scientific aspect to the dispute, you are apt to lose because the jurors just don't understand well enough what, and the 01:34:00lawyers, too, in part don't understand well enough. So that if there's a scientific question involved, it's much better to settle out of court than to go to a jury trial.

TH: Okay. Well listen, I won't keep you. Oh, I know what the last question was. I asked before, and I forgot. Tell me what you're doing for your treatment now for the cancer. Have you put yourself on a new regimen?

LP: Well, first my policy has been not to be candid with people who might write or talk about what I am doing, so there's a question of whether I should tell you.

TH: Okay, well why is that? Just about the vitamin C doses and that sort of 01:35:00stuff. What's the reason?

LP: Well first, I don't like to say, 'Well, I'll tell you if you promise that you won't talk about it' or 'I'll....'

TH: Oh, I see. Okay.

LP: When the reporters, the first time that I had to say something, I told them only part of the story, and so I never have. It's never been in print about what's been happening to me.

TH: Of course. And of course obviously this is not for a news story or that sort of thing, it's obviously for biographical reasons.

LP: Well, after I die-