Linus Pauling Facts
Linus Pauling Facts
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| Interesting Linus Pauling Facts: |
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| Linus Carl Pauling was born in Portland, Oregon to a poor family. |
| He fell in love with chemistry while in high school and, in 1916, decided to drop out of high school to earn the money to attend Oregon State University. |
| He worked as a machinist for a year to afford the tuition and in 1917 entered the University. |
| After his second year at the University he was offered a post teaching quantitative analysis which paid enough for him to continue his studies. |
| In 1922 he graduated with a degree in chemical engineering and entered graduate school at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena. |
| His graduate research was on the use of X-ray diffraction to determine the structure of crystals and he published seven papers on the crystal structure of minerals while at Caltech. |
| In 1925 he graduated summa cum laude with a PhD in physical chemistry and mathematical physics. |
| In 1926 Guggenheim Fellowship to study under Arnold Sommerfeld, Niels Bohr and Erwin Schrodinger and Pauling became interested in using quantum mechanics in the electronic structure of atoms. |
| In 1927 he accepted the post of assistant professor of theoretical chemistry at Caltech where he created Pauling's Rules on crystal structures. |
| In 1930 he was promoted to full professor and in 1931 he received the American Chemical Society's Langmuir Prize. |
| In 1932 he published a scale and numerical value for most of the elements using their various properties which became known as the Pauling Electronegativity Scale. |
| It is primarily for this work that he received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry and his book The Nature of the Chemical Bond is considered one of the most influential books ever written in the field. |
| By 1951 Pauling had turned his attention of the chemistry of proteins and he correctly predicted the helix structure of protein structure. |
| He was among the first to discover that antigen-antibody binding is due to a complementarity between their structures. |
| In 1949 he and his colleagues published "Sickle Cell Anemia, a Molecular Disease" which was the first proof that an abnormal protein could cause a disease. |
| They were also the first to prove that Mendelian inheritance influenced proteins which ushered in the field of molecular genetics. |
| After World War II he and his wife, Ann became peace activists and in 1955 he joined Albert Einstein, Bertrand Russell and eight other scientists in signing the Russell-Einstein Manifesto warning against the dangers of nuclear weapons. |
| Pauling made significant scientific contributions to several different fields and is considered the father of molecular biology. |
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