Linus Pauling

2 Pages 596 Words

"I wanted to understand the world!" replied Linus Pauling, a two-time Nobel laureate, when asked why he became a scientist. To him, the only way to understand the world was to understand the structures of the simplest molecules. This mind-set eventually led to the elucidation of chemical bonding, amino acid and protein structures, and the molecular basis of sickle-cell anemia, among a variety of other achievements. He is generally considered among the greatest chemists of the twentieth century.
As the oldest child of Lucy Isabelle Darling and Herman W. Pauling, Linus Pauling grew up in a small town in Oregon with little but a surplus of curiosity and imagination. Throughout his childhood, he speculated about the physical world around him. Pauling paid his way through school at Oregon Agricultural College by teaching courses he had taken himself only the year before.
Pauling earned his Ph.D. in chemistry from the California Institute of Technology in 1925. During his years at Caltech, he associated with some of the greatest minds of the century, such as Noyes, Millikan, Hale, and Dickinson. Using Dickinson's method of X-ray diffraction, Pauling invented an ingenious way of elucidating the structure of crystals. As a graduate student, he was one of the people who utilized the methods of X-ray crystallography to determine the structures of organic molecules.
Pauling's success depended partly on his persistent probing of the unknown, as well as on his ability to cross-scientific boundaries, both of which were necessary in his quest to elucidate the nature of chemical bonding. Applying the recently elucidated laws of quantum mechanics, he was the first to describe how atoms bonded to form a molecule. While the physicists regarded the new quantum theory as a solution to understanding physical events on an atomic scale, Pauling had a novel perspective, which used quantum mechanics to describe the structure of the electron orbitals, bond ...