The 21 years that I spent in Oregon made a very great impression on me.

NARRATOR: In the spring of 1991, Dr. Linus Pauling paid a visit to his alma mater, Oregon State University.

Linus Pauling always enjoyed a party.

No matter what age, he really enjoyed life.

He enjoyed having a good time.

NARRATOR: A crowd of old friends and young students gathered around, eager to honor a great man on his 90th birthday.

Pauling was a genius.

He was certainly the most significant chemist that the United States has ever produced.

Perhaps the most significant chemist of the 20th century worldwide.

NARRATOR: By his early 20s, Pauling was unlocking the mysteries of the atom and the forces that bind them together.

From the time he was late adolescent, until the last few years of his life, he was a man who was learning new things, who really cared about science, who cared about people, who cared about students and made major, even revolutionary, developments in chemistry, in molecular biology.

[foreboding music] [explosion booming] NARRATOR: But the horrors of war would change Pauling's priorities forever.

Now is the time to fight for your lives and the lives of your children and grandchildren and great grandchildren too.

He thought that the worst thing that could happen was suffering, and so he felt that humans should do all they could to ameliorate suffering.

NARRATOR: During the height of the Cold War, Pauling and his wife, Ava Helen, challenged the world to stop the spread of nuclear weapons.

He was condemned by different governmental agencies here who thought that he was acting on behest of the communists and doing something in their best interest rather than our best interest.

He lost his passport three times.

He had research grants revoked.

He had his name dragged through the mud.

He had death threats.

NARRATOR: And he became the only person in history to win two unshared Nobel Prizes, but controversy would shadow Pauling the rest of his life.

And on the vitamin C stuff, he was labeled a crank and a kook and I think many people still consider him to be a crank and a kook.

He felt so convinced that orthomolecular medicine would be a means of improving public health, that he was willing to suffer the consequences for making public statements.

NARRATOR: Through a century filled with the harshest criticism and the highest acclaim, Pauling held fast to his beliefs as a scientist, humanitarian and citizen of the world.

[gentle music] [uplifting music] ANNOUNCER: Funding for "Oregon Experience" is provided by the James F. & Marion L. Miller Foundation, the Oregon Cultural Trust, and viewers like you.

Additional support provided by Kay Kitagawa and Andy Johnson-Laird.

Thank you.

I take great pleasure in thinking about a difficult scientific problem and trying to find the solution to it, and especially great pleasure when I do find the solution to it.

NARRATOR: As Linus Pauling neared the end of a long career, he faced a final decision.

With whom could he entrust his life's work, and that of his wife, Ava Helen?

[machine beeps] So we're now in the aisle with all of the correspondence that Pauling did for all of his life and really is the heart of the collection- NARRATOR: Courted by many institutions, Pauling chose Oregon State University.

Yeah, so this is a pretty remarkable box right here.

We've got letters from all the Kennedy's.

There's a file here on Kennedy's counterpart in the Soviet Union, Nikita Khrushchev.

So, just as Pauling was writing letters to Kennedy protesting their use of testing of nuclear weapons, he was also writing letters to Khrushchev and this is just one box from all the boxes we have.

One of about 500.

He bequeathed to us almost everything that he had.

That's hugely significant.

It's one of the largest collections of its kind in the world.

It's documenting a person who was in the middle of all kinds of important conversations, essentially the entire breadth of the 20th century.

[gentle music] NARRATOR: Linus Carl Pauling was born in Portland in 1901.

His father, Herman, was a hard-working self-taught pharmacist.

His mother, Belle, descended from an Eastern Oregon pioneer family.

When Linus was four, the family moved to the Wild West town of Condon, where Herman opened his own drugstore.

THOMAS: Linus loved Condon.

There were cowboys in the street.

There were these hard scrabbled Scottish farmers out in the hills.

There was a lot of open space and Linus was free to explore.

He learned to be self-reliant in Condon.

He learned to be independent.

He could function on his own.

He could think for himself.

NARRATOR: His insatiable curiosity pulled him indoors too, revealing an intriguing new world.

Linus would tell stories about going into his father's drugstore.

So there are these rows of glass jars along the walls that are filled with chemical substances and herbal substances, all with Latin names on them and his father would mix and measure and pulverize and create medicines, actually help people feel better.

That had a terrific effect on Linus.

NARRATOR: In 1910, a fire destroyed Herman's store.

The Paulings moved back to Portland to start over.

By then, nine-year-old Linus was devouring one book after another.

His father was delighted and took a keen interest in his son's education.

He wrote a letter to the Morning Oregonian, the newspaper in Portland, saying that he had a son who read a great deal and was writing to ask for advice as to what books he should get for me.

My father died a few months after writing that letter.

So, my mother was left with three small children, including a boy whom she didn't understand very well.

It was a terrific blow to Linus, a terrific blow to the family.

They lost most of their savings.

Linus's mother was mentally unstable and suffered from pernicious anemia, which was a blood disease that made her fretful and often unable to get out of bed.

NARRATOR: To make ends meet, Belle sold her husband's business and opened a boarding house on Southeast Hawthorne.

Linus and his sisters were expected to work and help support the family.

Linus's childhood was difficult.

After his father's death, he began to look for ways to make sense of the world and one way that he could make sense of the world was through the study of science.

LINUS: I began collecting minerals, reading books about minerals and making notes about the various properties of color and hardness.

There was a definite right and a definite wrong.

He liked that.

He was attracted to that, and I think that he was in part because he was taking a disorganized, uncertain world and trying to make it organized and certain.

When I was 13, a friend of mine, Lloyd A. Jeffress, got me interested in chemistry by showing me some chemical experiments.

NARRATOR: In his bedroom lab, Lloyd mixed a couple of chemicals.

Then dropped some acid on top.

As he saw that fire light, Linus said that his mind lit up at the same time.

Things happen with chemistry, he thought that was so exciting.

So I think it was then that I decided to become a chemist.

[upbeat music] NARRATOR: Young Pauling wanted his own laboratory.

So we built one in the basement of the boarding house.

Linus had built a little laboratory that he could lock the door, so, but he had showed us one day or he was showing someone else and the door was open, of the butterflies and insects he had pinned, you know, and he was studying them.

His sisters remembered these terrible odors coming up from the basement into the house, driving their mother crazy because, of course, it's a boarding house and you're not supposed to offend the borders in any way.

NARRATOR: Linus had to find his own chemicals and he knew where to look.

In the nearby town of Oswego, his grandfather worked as a night watchman at an abandoned iron smelter.

And he was allowed to go and explore the iron foundry.

In the foundry was a chemical laboratory and the chemical laboratory, it still had a lot of chemicals in it, acids and jars of chemicals and a lot of glassware.

And Linus borrowed a lot of that stuff and took it back to his house.

As a young man, you could find him on a Portland street car with his huge carboy of sulfuric acid between his legs sloshing around.

One time, he took a canoe from Hawthorne Street with a friend of his and they paddled the canoe to Lake Oswego, went to the foundry and pulled out an entire electric furnace.

The two of them got it into the boat, paddled it back on the Willamette River to Hawthorne Street, then got a wheelbarrow, took it up to his house on 39th and put it in his laboratory.

Linus started fires down there.

His clothes were full of little holes from acids eating through the fabric.

Even when acids spilled and ate away the broom that he used to sweep up, he still wouldn't allow anyone in there.

It was his private space and it was where he was allowed, I think at that age, to express who he really was.

NARRATOR: Belle Pauling wanted her teenage son to keep his steady job at a local machine shop.

Pauling had grander plans.

And in 1917, just shy of a high school diploma, he left home for Oregon Agricultural College in Corvallis.

Tuition for Oregon residents was free.

At OAC, Linus inhaled his new freedom.

He joined a fraternity and had what he called lots of beaver pep.

He was what we would today call a geek.

He was kind of a nerd.

He was not socially adept.

He was very interested in being socially adept, he wanted to study how to be socially adept, but he didn't have a lot of experience with it.

NARRATOR: He signed up for ROTC, attempted sports, but excelled at chemistry.

He was a brilliant student.

By the time he was a senior at Oregon State, he really was thinking hard by then about what made chemistry happen.

What made atoms interact with each other?

What happened when they interacted with each other?

He often could outthink or out study his own professors and he found out within a year or two, that he was smarter than they were.

NARRATOR: As a boy, Linus had always worked a variety of summer jobs.

And he got a job with Western Union delivering telegrams.

Then mother had to buy him a new bicycle, which he had to pay for out of his earnings.

But he'd ride all over town all day long, you know, delivering telegrams.

NARRATOR: During his college years, he inspected pavement on an Oregon road crew, sending his money home to Belle for safekeeping, but she spent it on household bills.

With no money for books and expenses, Pauling prepared to leave school until his professors offered him a job teaching introductory chemistry.

The boy professor would gain much more than teaching experience when he shyly walked into a class for home economics majors.

I was a little taken aback to see 25 young women but I opened the class book, I knew that they had been studying the properties of compounds of nitrogen.

So I asked a question, tell me what you know about ammonium hydroxide, miss...

I looked at the list of names and said, Miller, Miss Miller.

So she turned out to know quite a lot about ammonium hydroxide and as I became better acquainted with her, I realized that she knew quite a lot about many things.

Oh, it was an immediate attraction.

She was petite, she was charismatic.

She was extremely intelligent.

She grew up in Beaver Creek, Oregon in a farm house with, she was the 10th of 12 children and her father, by all reports, encouraged political talk around the dinner table.

Her dad was a Democrat leaning towards socialism and she really grew up with those kinds of beliefs.

Probably leaning very much towards social justice because that's where her passions came out.

Ava Helen was politically much more sophisticated than Linus Pauling was.

When they got together, she taught him about how the world works from her perspective and he listened very carefully.

NARRATOR: Within a few months, Linus and Ava Helen were engaged, but then miserably separated.

Linus left for graduate studies at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena.

Their daily correspondence helped bridge the distance, but fanned their desire.

In 1923, they were married in Salem and made their first home near Caltech.

LINUS: She had a great influence on my life, all the rest of my life.

NARRATOR: Deeply in love with his wife and his first love chemistry, Pauling was on top of the world.

He was about to start changing it too.

Pauling arrived in Caltech in the early 1920s and people at that time didn't really know much compared to what we know now.

They didn't know much about the structure of substances.

Pauling wanted to know how they were all built because he believed that the way the atoms related to each other, the structure that they created, this molecular structure was the key to how molecules behaved the way they behaved.

NARRATOR: As a graduate student, Pauling had mastered a new research tool called x-ray crystallography that allowed scientists to see inside and analyze the structure of molecules.

But there was still a missing piece to the puzzle.

The forces that held the atoms together was the key to understanding the whole show.

Nobody knew what those forces were.

Pauling wanted to get to the root of the mystery.

NARRATOR: The answer lied in a revolutionary new theory called quantum mechanics.

So armed with a PhD in chemistry and a Guggenheim Fellowship, Pauling traveled to Germany to learn it.

He came back to Caltech, all fired up with ideas that were being developed literally while he was there in '26, '27.

And he now had a system in which he could run calculations that would tell him, say how far apart two atoms might be.

And the practical payoff from all of this came in all kinds of areas that have to do with being able to predict what chemical reactions can occur and don't occur.

NARRATOR: In the late 1920s, Pauling emerged as one of the few scientists worldwide who understood the new mathematical theories.

Even the great Albert Einstein admitted, he was a bit confused.

I gave a seminar talk on the quantum theory of molecular structure, which he attended.

A reporter asked him what he thought of my talk and he said it was too complicated for him.

NARRATOR: Happily ahead of his time, Pauling unraveled the structure of one molecule after another, publishing paper after paper.

At the time he was 30, he was a full professor at Caltech and chair of the chemistry department at 36.

Well, for this chlorine atom, as here again, by forming the bond, chlorine- THOMAS: He would bounce into rooms and launch into these beautiful lectures and these amazing calculations.

1.76 angstrom and 1.98 angstrom in chlorine, plus 1.54 angstrom in ethane.

That is 3.52, half of that is 1.76.

His students used to go into class with slide rules and double check him as he spoke, 'cause they couldn't believe that his numbers could be right, but they always were.

He just had this ability to put on a show in front of a crowd and students loved it.

We can understand too why diamond is so hard.

Here are these chemical bonds, strong bonds- One of the things that was unusual about him was the extent to which he used molecular models in research, not just as demonstrations for students.

And he made models outta many different substances, including metal, plastic, balloons and marbles.

[upbeat instrumental music] By manipulating these atoms in models, he was able to visualize how they were put together to form molecules.

MARY JO: They were meant to be realistic in a way that molecules had not previously been.

[upbeat instrumental music] Pauling's brilliance, I think, was marked by the ability to cross boundaries between disciplines.

You weren't a physicist and a biologist in the 1920s.

You were a physicist or a biologist.

Pauling didn't see the sense of those kind of fences between disciplines.

He leaped over them.

If he saw something in physics that he thought might have an application in chemistry, he would study the physics.

He worked all the time.

NARRATOR: Ken Hedberg was a graduate student at Caltech when he first met Linus Pauling.

You know, he was a thinker.

He was always thinking about things and he was an extremely facile writer.

So he could think about things and actually begin to write the paper before the thoughts were complete.

You were extremely respectful of this distinguished man.

He was kind of an old world gentleman.

He had impeccable manners, dressed very well and was very funny.

Some people over time, I noticed had accused him of being arrogant, but I never saw that as someone who worked with him and discussed things with him quite often.

I think that he had a great deal of well deserved confidence in his own knowledge and abilities.

He was asked one time later in life, how he had so many good ideas and he said, if you wanna have good ideas, you have to have a lot of ideas and throw away the bad ones.

And that's how he operated, he had a lot of ideas all the time.

NARRATOR: From the time they were first married, Ava Helen believed her role was to help Linus be the best scientist possible.

During graduate school, she helped him run experiments and kept notes, logging a few personal ones along the way.

They had one son and he was under one-year-old when Linus received the Guggenheim.

And she told Linus that they should leave Linus Junior with her mother, that she would accompany him to Europe, to Germany, and initially he was quite surprised.

He had assumed that she would come and he had assumed that the baby would come too and she said essentially, no, that would mean that we couldn't travel.

It would be hard for the baby, but it would be very hard for us and he will be fine with my mother.

It's a strange action to us, but to understand it, I think there's a number of ways to go.

One is that, I think her marriage always came first.

NARRATOR: The Paulings wouldn't see their first born son again for a year and a half.

When they came back to the United States and they had three more children, her role was really keeping the children, raising the children, taking care of the family and keeping the children out of his work area.

And so, when he came home in the evening, maybe the kids would see him at dinner, but there would be hours of work in his study where the children were not supposed to interrupt him.

He may not have been the most brilliant father in the world, but he was a very loving husband and he really knew what he had in Ava Helen.

He really knew that she was a gem.

I attribute much of my own success in science to the fact that my wife arranged that I not be distracted by problems, household problems and other problems all of the time, permitting me to continue to think.

He listened to her all the time.

He did wanna be a great scientist.

He had a sense of destiny, but he always said, I wanna do the best I can for you.

NARRATOR: In 1939, Pauling published "The Nature of the Chemical Bond."

The book was an instant classic and still one of the most cited books in scientific literature.

Less than a decade later, his college textbook "General Chemistry" engaged students worldwide.

Just go to it.

I don't... Start reading it, just start reading the first chapter.

It is remarkably clear.

Part of it too was the novelty of some of the illustrations he was putting in these textbooks.

He wanted students to understand rather than to memorize and to be able to see and predict something they didn't know, something they hadn't memorized because they understood the process by which chemical reactions occur.

It's really quite extraordinary and of course, that's what a great teacher does.

NARRATOR: By the late 1930s, Pauling's focus on structure had begun to shift to the more complex and challenging biological molecules.

That interest got a tremendous boost in 1940 or 1941 when he came down with a very serious kidney disease, Bright's disease, which in those days, pre-dialysis, was almost universally fatal.

But fortunately, he was directed to a specialist, a kidney specialist at Stanford Medical School who put him on a rigid diet, a diet with very rigidly limited salt and proteins and my mother's job, of course, was to monitor this diet and make sure that he followed it.

She weighed and measured and listed every food item that he ate.

It turned out for the next 15 years, I think.

And slowly but surely, he improved.

So that convinced him that there was something too, treatment by diet.

NARRATOR: Eager to demonstrate that chemistry could solve medical problems and improve human health, Pauling had turned his attention to the mystery of a blood disease, sickle cell anemia.

At the time, its cause was unknown.

So Pauling asked, could something be wrong with the hemoglobin molecule?

Well, it was just a wild idea.

I mean, no one had ever considered anything like that.

NARRATOR: Excited about the possibility, Pauling and associate Dr. Harvey Itano, began applying the tools of chemistry to medical research.

And this led eventually to his discovery of the molecular cause of sickle cell anemia, which was the first disease to be described as a molecular disease.

So this was really the discovery that heralded the era of molecular medicine.

NARRATOR: It made Linus Pauling an international superstar, one of the most visible and respected scientists of his time.

But the basic structure of proteins had alluded him for years and he was determined to unravel the puzzle.

I caught a cold and after a day or two in bed, reading science fiction and detective stories, I got tired of that and I thought, why don't I discover the alpha helix or thought something like that.

I took a piece of paper, much like this piece and I drew on it a representation of an extended polypeptide chain.

Finally, I found a way by folding the paper, I could make this bond angle, which held the helical structure together and had just the right dimensions.

Pauling was really one of the first to crack the structure of proteins.

They're typically large molecules, so very difficult to study.

The way he did it was by combining model building and his knowledge of chemical structures and his understanding of how atoms join with each other from quantum mechanics.

NARRATOR: In 1951, Pauling and his team published their results.

They called their discovery the alpha helix.

They had a special model built.

No one else had seen this and he was going to give a lecture on this.

It was covered with a paper bag on the desk.

So you couldn't see it at all, everybody was focused on this, you see?

And he was talking about the alpha helix and then at one stage, he walked over and I thought he was ready to expose this, he lifted it up part way and then he put it down and he says, oh yes, and then he did this twice more and finally he took the paper bag off and everyone burst in a roars of laughter and applause.

The techniques for determining the structures of proteins are so advanced now that there are thousands of structures that have been determined, when in his day, it was a tour de force to determine the structure of one and he managed to do several.

NARRATOR: During the 1940s, Pauling had intertwined his intense scientific research with the challenges of war.

During World War II, he was quite a hawk.

He was a very antifascist, anti-Hitler.

He thought that Hitler and Hitlerism was antithetical to science and the free communication of science because Hitler's politics were to fire scientists if they were Jewish and to cut scientific communication.

So Pauling did everything he could during World War II to stop Hitler.

NARRATOR: Government funding poured into Caltech.

Pauling researched rocket propellants and explosives, built oxygen meters for submarines and airplanes and engineered a synthetic form of blood plasma for emergency transfusions, a body of work that would earn him the Presidential Medal of Merit.

All the while, Ava Helen's interest in social issues and human rights had been growing.

By the late 1930s, she'd become active in the American Civil Liberties Union and she and Linus had joined Union Now, an anti-Nazi group that promoted a system of world government modeled on the United States.

Events near war's end would push Pauling's politics further left.

He and Ava Helen had hired a Japanese-American gardener, just released from an internment camp and Pauling's neighbors protested.

Some neighbors came around and painted epithets on their garage, calling them Jap lovers and, you know, impugning their patriotism.

Pauling felt outraged that this had happened in America.

It was a radicalizing experience for him.

It deepened his resolve to fight for human rights, equal rights for all humans and not necessarily to take the government line at face value, that sometimes it was necessary to protest government action.

NARRATOR: By and large, scientists, including Pauling, had shied away from public political debates, sticking to the impartial facts of research instead.

But then the bombs dropped on Japan.

[explosions booming] I think that Hiroshima and Nagasaki so stunned him, that he recognized that scientists had to be active in trying to shape how their discoveries were used and that didn't mean that they would be believed all the time, that they would be given carte blanche to make public policy, but at least they should be given a respectful hearing and have some possible influence on policy.

NARRATOR: Pauling believed that the only solution to the threat to nuclear war was to eliminate it by putting atomic energy under international control.

Ava Helen encouraged her husband to use his scientific knowledge and public popularity to speak out.

I think that she decided that the time had come when I should sacrifice some of my scientific work in order to contribute to the solution of this great problem, the existence of weapons that were so powerful that they might lead to the destruction of civilization if they were to be used.

He was initially very successful because he knew stuff.

Americans wanted to know stuff about the bombs and how they worked and what their effects were.

Ava Helen would go along and she told him finally, you know the technical stuff, but when it comes to the political, economic, military dimensions of what you're talking about, you sound as if you're not sure of yourself and you need to be sure of yourself.

And he never wanted to be demeaned in his wife's eyes and so, when she said that, he did learn it and he learned enough about it to be able to be an expert in that one particular subfield of nuclear radiation and radiation fallout, so much so that, you know, Albert Einstein entrusted him to work with him on various committees, dealing with nuclear non-proliferation.

NARRATOR: In 1946, Einstein asked Pauling to help form an elite group that would work to educate the public about the growing dangers of nuclear war.

This is the original petition for the Emergency Committee of Atomic Scientists and Pauling was put on as one of the committee members, the only non physicist that was on that group.

When the House Un-American Activities was investigating a lot of committees like this, they asked Einstein to appear before them and Einstein refused.

Rather than appear before them, he decided that he would just disband the group.

[upbeat music] NARRATOR: By the late 1940s, relations between the United States and the Soviet Union were growing increasingly tense.

Soviet aggression in Eastern Europe had fueled fierce anti-communist hysteria, and Senator Joseph McCarthy was fanning the flames.

This being part of the application for membership on the communist party.

The belief was that atomic weapons were all that stood between us and Red domination and we needed atomic weapons, we needed to keep them ours.

ANNOUNCER: Or this could be your house and your window.

[explosion booming] [upbeat suspenseful music] THOMAS: That was the only thing that stood between us and annihilation.

ANNOUNCER: All Americans must work together for the stronger our home front defenses, the less the chance an atomic attack will come.

Those like Pauling and Oppenheimer and other scientists who stood up against that and said, no, we need international cooperation, we need to stop the development of these weapons at this point and think about it before we develop worse ones, those people were seen as traitors too because they were speaking counter to American government policy.

NARRATOR: The FBI put Pauling under investigation for the next 20 years, trying to uncover his communist ties.

Pauling was never a communist, neither was he a coward.

During this period of time, a number of people stopped talking about their beliefs.

They stopped talking about world government or stopping the spread of atomic weapons because they were afraid that they'd lose their job or that they'd be put in jail.

Pauling never backed down and he saw no reason that he should be silent just because he was saying something that was unpopular.

NARRATOR: In 1952, the U.S. government attempted to muzzle Pauling further by denying him a passport to attend a scientific conference in London, stating it was not in the best interest of the United States for him to travel.

Pauling mounted a protest and was eventually issued a limited passport, but not before he'd missed his meeting and a chance to see one of the most famous x-ray photographs in scientific history.

This is the original photograph that Rosalind Franklin took of DNA that Watson and Crick used to develop their model.

NARRATOR: The search for the secret of life, the structure of DNA had been accelerating into the scientific race of the century.

Watson and Crick were hurrying to find the structure before Pauling, who was the world's most famous crystallographer and the person who most scientists thought was going to solve that structure.

And his alpha helix structure, which he developed for the structure of proteins in the late 1940s was really sort of a template that they used in developing their own thinking about the structure of DNA.

And so, they started working just like Pauling.

They aped his approach.

They learned from the master.

NARRATOR: The stakes were high.

Whoever won, James Watson and Francis Crick, or Linus Pauling, would revolutionize molecular biology.

It was one of the few areas of research where Pauling's maverick intuition would fail him dramatically.

Pauling being Pauling thought he won the race.

He came to a structure first and he published his structure and it was completely wrong.

It was one of the most famous scientific blunders of his career.

He published his structure for DNA that was three strands instead of two, it was inside out.

It was just a complete misfire, but Pauling was so intent on winning the race that he jumped into it and put out his structure before he had it nailed down fully.

NARRATOR: A few months later, Watson and Crick published their findings on DNA, describing the now familiar double helix.

Some say Pauling would've won the prize if he'd been able to attend the critical meeting in England.

Others disagree.

In fact, Pauling was in England after he got his passport reinstated, still plenty of time to see the critical photographs, plenty of time to visit Rosalind Franklin and he chose not to.

And it wasn't politics that got in the way, it was Pauling's own thought, his own pride.

He believed that DNA was a simple structure and he could solve it, you know, boom.

So he didn't do his homework, that's why he lost the race.

I was involved to such a great extent in the development of the field of molecular biology, that it would have pleased me if I had discovered the double helix.

NARRATOR: Pauling would soon triumph another way.

In 1954, he won the Nobel Prize for Chemistry, not for a single discovery, but for his lifelong work on the chemical bond.

And according to one European newspaper, the cordial and cosmopolitan American captivated the world.

Once back home, Pauling continued his scientific research, but his peace work was about to ignite.

[explosion booming] In 1954, the United States tested a super hydrogen bomb in the Marshall Islands in the Pacific.

The explosion was far more violent than anyone imagined, sending radiation into the stratosphere and radioactive particles falling down like rain.

Fallout raised the stakes in the game for Pauling.

Pauling saw fallout, radioactive fallout, as a danger to the health of untold thousands of people around the world and a debate ensued about how dangerous fallout was and low level radiation and could it cause cancer.

NARRATOR: While the Atomic Energy Commission downplayed the danger, Pauling began connecting with the public.

He talked about babies drinking radiation with their milk.

He talked about thousands of cases of leukemia and the sacrifice of untold numbers of people around the world.

NARRATOR: No human being, he said, should be sacrificed to any nation's program of perfecting nuclear weapons.

Pauling also believed that many scientists silently shared his views.

So he decided to write and circulate a petition to stop the testing of nuclear weapons and sent it to scientists around the world.

Together, he and Ava Helen went to work.

MINA: She stuffed letters, she wrote to the scientists that she knew.

She was a wife who accompanied her husband and she knew many of these men and their wives and they liked her.

NARRATOR: In 1958, the Paulings presented their petition to the United Nations, with 13,000 signatures from 50 countries.

Albert Einstein, actually, he signed the petition twice and Richard Russell also signed twice.

And Dr. Schweitzer.

NARRATOR: But despite the petition, blasted by some members of Congress's communist propaganda, the testing of nuclear weapons continued.

ANNOUNCER: The bomb that Khrushchev announces will once again undergo testing- NARRATOR: Pauling kept protesting.

He wrote his first book for the general public, "No More War," debated the dangers of fallout with the father of the hydrogen bomb, Edward Teller, and was perpetually grilled by the media for his alleged communist ties.

Doctor, how do you explain this thing, for example, as House Un-American activities would set his whole record indicate that Dr. Linus Pauling is primarily engrossed in placing scientific attainments, the service of a host of organization, which have in common, complete subservient to the communist party of the United States of America.

Not one of which was on the Attorney General's list, by the way, and this House Un-American Activities Committee never accused me of anything, never called me in.

This is just an effort to keep the people from knowing what the truth is, to keep people like me from using their constitutional rights of free speech.

NARRATOR: With Ava Helen at his side, Linus Pauling became one of the most visible pro peace activists of the 1950s and 60s.

He inspired people across the nation, including his hometown of Portland to protest and march against the threat of nuclear war.

The time has come when we have to rid the world of the great immorality of war and I believe that we are going to do it.

And I believe that it is the duty of every human being to act on this conviction with words and deeds aimed against war, against the spread of nuclear weapons and toward disarmament and perpetual world peace.

Thank you.

[crowd applauds] THOMAS: He spoke so often to so many groups, he made so many headlines that he became known for his peace work more than he was for his scientific work.

He was a courageous man and he ran his life along the lines that he thought were proper and the more Pauling was pushed in any one direction, the more he would push back.

That was just his nature.

NARRATOR: His convictions would be tested fiercely.

In 1960, a Senate internal security subcommittee subpoenaed Pauling and demanded that he released the names of all who would help circulate his 1958 petitions, especially those behind the iron curtain.

Threatened with contempt charges in jail, Pauling declined.

My conscience does not allow me to protect myself by sacrificing these idealistic and fruitful people and I am not going to do it.

As a matter of conscience, as a matter of principle, as a matter of morality, I have decided that I shall not conform to the request of this subcommittee.

NARRATOR: The committee backed down and Pauling walked out a free man.

As long as he felt sure of his facts, he was unafraid of taking on the U.S. government or the head of the Atomic Energy Commission or the President or anyone else.

JOHN: Yesterday, a shaft of light cut into the darkness.

For the first time, an agreement has been reached on bringing the forces of nuclear destruction under international control.

NARRATOR: On October 10th, 1963, a partial test ban treaty signed by the United States, Great Britain and the Soviet union went into effect.

[upbeat music] That same day, the Norwegian Nobel Committee announced that Pauling had won the 1962 prize for peace, an award he would cherish perhaps more than his earlier prize for chemistry.

I received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry somewhat to my surprise because I had just been having a good time carrying on my researches in chemistry.

The Nobel Peace Prize I feel and felt was a recognition that I had been doing my duty to humanity, to my fellow human beings, by working for the goal of world peace.

NARRATOR: But unlike his prize for chemistry, public reaction to the Peace Prize was mixed.

Many remained disenchanted with Pauling's peacenik persona and Caltech had grown weary of his left wing political activities.

He had colleagues at Caltech who did not enjoy the notoriety he was bringing to the school and Caltech became less and less hospitable to Pauling.

He had won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in the 50s and for that, he was lauded and Caltech was delighted that one of their faculty members won the prize.

When he won the Peace Prize, it probably was a very slight congratulatory tap on the back and maybe a nice afternoon tea.

They basically ignored it and I think his feelings were hurt.

So he decided it was time to leave Caltech.

NARRATOR: After a four-decade career, Pauling resigned, but retirement was far from his mind.

He seized the opportunity to further promote world peace and to explore what he was calling orthomolecular medicine.

And he used that term to basically refer to the right molecules in the right concentration.

So the message there is that, by varying the concentration of molecules that normally appear in the body, like vitamins and minerals, we may be able to prevent disease, achieve optimum health and maybe treat disease with some of these compounds as well.

NARRATOR: Pauling had gained an appreciation for good nutrition early in life.

In 1926, his mother Belle had died from a type of anemia now known to be caused by a vitamin B deficiency.

And by following a strict diet, Pauling had fully recovered from his near fatal kidney disease.

In 1965, he turned his attention to vitamin C. Pauling was giving a lecture in New York, I believe when he was receiving an award and mentioned casually that he would like to live for a long time because there were so many exciting developments in the science of chemistry and he wanted to be around to see a lot of them and when he returned back to California, he received a letter from Irwin Stone who was a biochemist who had been in the audience of that award ceremony and Stone said, well, I think that you might be able to live perhaps 50 years or more and here's how, start taking vitamin C. Now, Pauling had always suffered from colds.

It was something that was a bane of his life.

He would get serious colds, the kind that put you in bed and he was tired of it.

And Stone had specifically mentioned that there was literature that provided evidence to support the idea that vitamin C might be valuable in both preventing and treating the common cold.

NARRATOR: Intrigued but unconvinced, Pauling read the reports himself and found the evidence compelling.

He started taking vitamin C, Eva Helen started taking it too.

His colds went away, the severity lessened, then the frequency lessened, and pretty soon, he was not getting colds anymore.

It wasn't a professional concern of his, it was just something he was doing and he mentioned it when he was giving a talk and that mention got picked up by the press and it was announced that the famous Dr. Pauling was in favor of vitamin C. I finally realized that what astonished me was the doses.

Here, vitamin C, a little pinch, five milligrams a day is enough to keep most people from developing scurvy.

So, that raises in my mind the question, with these remarkable substances of vitamins that are so lacking in toxicity and have a pronounced physiological effect at a very low dose, what is the intake that would put the person in the best of health?

NARRATOR: Pauling argued that the government had set the minimum daily requirement, the amount to prevent scurvy far too low.

And he thought, well, that's nonsense.

As a chemist, you know that, that is not necessarily the optimum amount.

The optimum amount could be considerably more than that.

So, Pauling was approaching this whole field of nutrition or micronutrition from a very unique perspective.

NARRATOR: In 1970, Pauling went public with his ideas and published "Vitamin C and the Common Cold."

It advocated taking up to four grams of the vitamin daily to help ward off colds and other illnesses.

The book was an international bestseller.

There were runs on vitamin stores.

The public went crazy for vitamin C. The medical community labeled him a kook and they said, there's no proof that does anything.

Theoretically, the amount of vitamin C needed to saturate the tissues is approximately 120 milligrams per day.

This is the amount that's ordinarily found in about eight ounces of orange juice.

Anything more than that will simply be spilled over into the urine and completely wasted.

They thought Pauling was on a crusade for vitamin C and in a way, in my opinion, he was.

Pauling at the beginning, had not done much of his own research.

In essence, he was putting out a popular book before he had done anything in the scientific press.

I think it was justified that there was criticism of his work that way.

NARRATOR: Not all physicians dismissed Pauling's work.

In 1971, Scottish surgeon, Ewan Cameron, wrote Pauling about his own work with high dose vitamin C and a small number of terminally ill cancer patients.

When Linus Pauling and Ewan Cameron looked at the results of giving high dose intravenous vitamin C to cancer patients, many of these patients were living much longer than they were expected to live and they also reported increased sense of wellbeing.

And in many cases, they could reduce their reliance on narcotic drugs as painkillers.

Pauling never suggested that people abandon good, effective standard therapy in order to take vitamin C for instance, but he felt it would be a very important component of the therapeutic arsenal for cancer patients.

NARRATOR: But Pauling wanted proof.

At age 72, he decided to start his own private research institute near San Francisco, along with several colleagues and he finally convinced the National Cancer Institute to conduct its own clinical studies on vitamin C, but the results were disappointing.

Unfortunately, they did not read Cameron's papers and had few discussions with Cameron or Pauling about the protocol that Cameron used in treating cancer patients.

NARRATOR: Pauling argued that the findings were flawed, but to no avail.

I think the medical community believed we've given it a fair shake, it's failed, it's time to move on.

NARRATOR: But it wasn't the final word.

Shortly after, Pauling and Cameron published "Cancer and Vitamin C." Pauling's "How To Live Longer and Feel Better" followed 1986, another bestseller.

By now, Pauling was pleased to see growing scientific interest in vitamin C as an anti-cancer agent and more.

15 years ago, they were saying that vitamin C has no value against the common cold.

Now, the attitude of the establishment, the nutritional establishment is to say, well, it does seem to have some value.

It seems to control the symptoms to some extent.

INTERVIEWER: How much vitamin C are you taking a day?

LINUS: 18.

INTERVIEWER: 18?

18 grams, 18,000 milligrams.

My father, as he was nearing the end of his life, wanted this kind of research to continue because he believed in its value to all of us and was very happy with the idea that his institute become part of Oregon State University, where it is happily today.

And of course, most people are looking at these micronutrients now, not in relation to their deficiency disease, but in relationship to attaining optimum health.

So it's kind of a validation of Pauling's ideas in orthomolecular medicine.

[gentle music] NARRATOR: Linus Pauling died of prostate cancer at his ranch on the California coast in 1994.

He was 93, still engaged in scientific research and he'd never stopped working for world peace.

His life partner, Ava Helen, had passed away in 1981 after a long battle with stomach cancer.

Whenever asked what his greatest discovery was, Pauling always replied, my wife.

For him, immortality was essentially to have his life's work intertwined with his wife's and that was going to be sort of their eternal bond, I think, and it was very important for him to have both her and his papers together.

And so, the official name of the collection actually is the Ava Helen and Linus Pauling Papers and that was by decree of Linus Pauling.

Pauling wanted to make it as widely and freely available as possible.

So I think that's something that Oregon State University and the Special Collections has prided ourselves upon.

It's of enormous value, you know, science moves on, but the history of it is extremely important and I think the history of the peace movement will be very important also.

So, that's where I think his legacy will lie.

STEPHEN: Pauling was called one of the greatest thinkers and visionaries of the millennium and ranked with Galileo, DaVinci, Darwin and Einstein.

NARRATOR: Today, the collection contains more than 500,000 items, journals, letters, notebooks and artifacts from a brilliant career.

CHRIS: Probably the most striking of those materials is the chalkboard that he had in his office at the old Linus Pauling Institute in the Bay Area.

They built a custom crate for that and had very specific instructions on how it was going to be shipped, a very rich collection.

NARRATOR: How do you calculate the value of one man's life?

The joy of discovery and unwavering belief in the human spirit.

Perhaps I'm just an optimist, born an optimist that human beings are wonderful.

They have the opportunity to make the world a far better place than it is now, to eliminate much of the human suffering that is the result of war and of calamities and of disease.

So, I'm an optimist.

ANNOUNCER: There's more about Linus Pauling on "Oregon Experience" online.

To learn more or to order a DVD of the show, visit opb.org.

[uplifting music] Funding for "Oregon Experience" is provided by the James F. & Marion L. Miller Foundation, the Oregon Cultural Trust, and viewers like you.

Additional support provided by Kay Kitagawa and Andy Johnson-Laird.

Thank you.