Linus Pauling
– Linus Pauling was a peace activist, scientist, author, and teacher. Pauling is regarded as one of the most influential chemists in history and was one of the most important scientists of all time. He was one of the pioneers to work in the study of molecular biology and quantum chemistry. He has been awarded more than 1 Nobel Prize and is one of only 2 individuals to receive them for different fields.
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Linus Carl Pauling (February 28, 1901 – August 19, 1994)[1] was an American chemist, biochemist, peace activist, author, and educator. He was one of the most influential chemists in history and ranks among the most important scientists of the 20th century.[2][3][4] Pauling was one of the founders of the fields of quantum chemistry and molecular biology.
Pauling is the only person to be awarded two unshared Nobel Prizes, one of only four individuals to have won more than one (Marie Curie, John Bardeen and Frederick Sanger are the others) and one of only two people awarded Nobel Prizes in different fields (the Chemistry and Peace prizes), the other being Marie Curie (the Chemistry and Physics prizes). [5]

Pauling was born in Portland, Oregon as the first-born child of Herman Henry William Pauling (1876–1910) and Lucy Isabelle "Belle" Darling (1881–1926).
He was named "Linus Carl," in honor of Lucy's father, Linus, and Herman's father, Carl.[9] Herman and Lucy – then 23 and 18 years old, respectively – had met at a dinner party in Condon. Six months later, the two were married.[10]
Herman Pauling was descended from Prussian farmers, who had immigrated to a German settlement in Concordia, Missouri. Carl Pauling moved his family to California, before settling in Oswego, Oregon. There he worked as an ironmonger at a foundry.[11] After completing grammar school, Herman Pauling served as an apprentice to a druggist. Upon completion of his services, he became a wholesale bread salesman.[12]
Pauling's mother, Lucy, of English/Scottish descent was the daughter of Linus Wilson Darling, who had served as a teacher, farmer, surveyor, postmaster and lawyer at different points of his life. Linus Darling was orphaned at the age of 11 and apprenticed under a baker before becoming a schoolteacher.
He fell in love with a young woman named Alice from Turner, Oregon, whom he eventually married.[13] On July 17, 1888, Alice gave birth to the couple's fifth child, but he was stillborn. Less than a month later, she died, leaving Darling to take care of their four young daughters.
Linus Pauling spent his first year living in a one-room apartment with his parents in Portland. In 1902, after his sister Pauline was born, Pauling's parents decided to move out of the city. They were crowded in their apartment, but couldn't afford more spacious living quarters in Portland. Lucy stayed with her husband's parents in Oswego, while Herman searched for new housing. Herman brought the family to Salem, where he took up a job as a traveling salesman for the Skidmore Drug Company. Within a year of Lucile's birth in 1904, Herman Pauling moved his family to Oswego, where he opened his own drugstore.[15] The business climate in Oswego was poor, so he moved his family to Condon in 1905.[16]
In 1909, Pauling's grandfather, Linus, divorced his second wife and married a young schoolteacher who was almost the same age as his daughter Lucy. A few months later, he died of a heart attack, brought on by complications from nephritis.[17] Meanwhile, Herman Pauling was suffering from poor health and had regular sharp pains in his abdomen. Lucy's sister, Abbie, saw that Herman was dying and immediately called the family physician. The doctor gave Herman a sedative to reduce the pain, but it only offered temporary relief.[18] His health worsened in the coming months and he finally died of a perforated ulcer on June 11, 1910, leaving Lucy to care for Linus, Lucile and Pauline.[19]
At age nine, Linus was a voracious reader. On May 12, 1910 his father wrote a letter to The Oregonian inviting suggestions of additional books to occupy his time.[1] Pauling first planned to become a chemist after being amazed by experiments conducted with a small chemistry lab kit by his friend, Lloyd A. Jeffress.[20] At high school, Pauling continued to conduct chemistry experiments, scavenging much of the equipment and material from an abandoned steel plant. With an older friend, Lloyd Simon, Pauling set up Palmon Laboratories. Operating from Simon's basement, the two approached local dairies to offer their services in performing butterfat samplings at cheap prices. Dairymen were wary of trusting two boys with the task, and as such, the business ended in failure.[21]
By the fall of 1916, Pauling was a 15-year-old high school senior with enough credits to enter Oregon State University (OSU), known then as Oregon Agricultural College.[22] He did not have enough credits for two required American history courses that would satisfy the requirements for earning a high school diploma. He asked the school principal if he could take these courses concurrently during the spring semester, but the principal denied his request, and Pauling decided to leave the school in June without a diploma.[23] His high school, Washington High School in Portland, awarded him the diploma 45 years later, after he had won two Nobel Prizes.[24][25] During the summer, Pauling worked part-time at a grocery store, earning eight US dollars a week. His mother set him up with an interview with a Mr. Schwietzerhoff, the owner of a number of manufacturing plants in Portland. Pauling was hired as an apprentice machinist with a salary of 40 dollars per month. Pauling excelled at his job, and saw his salary soon raised to 50 dollars per month.[26] In his spare time, he set up a photography laboratory with two friends and found business from a local photography company. He hoped that the business would earn him enough money to pay for his future college expenses.[27] Pauling received a letter of admission from OAC in September 1917 and immediately gave notice to his boss and told his mother of his plans.[28]

In October 1917, Pauling lived in a boarding house on the Corvallis campus with his cousin Mervyn and another man, using the $200 he had saved from odd jobs to finance his education. In his first semester, Pauling registered for two courses in chemistry, two in mathematics, mechanical drawing, introduction to mining and use of explosives, modern English prose, gymnastics and military drill.[29] Pauling fell in love with a freshman girl named Irene early in the school year. By the end of October, he had used up $150 of his savings on her, taking her to shows and games. He soon got a job at the girls' dormitory, working 100 hours a month chopping wood for stoves, cutting up beef and mopping up the kitchen. Despite the salary of 25 cents per hour, Pauling was still having trouble managing his finances. He began eating one hot meal a day at a restaurant off campus to keep his expenses down.[29] Pauling was active in campus life and founded the school's chapter of the Delta Upsilon fraternity.[30] After his second year, he planned to take a job in Portland to help support his mother, but the college offered him a position teaching quantitative analysis, a course he had just finished taking himself. He worked forty hours a week in the laboratory and classroom and earned $100 a month.[31] This allowed him to continue his studies at the college.
In his last two years at school, Pauling became aware of the work of Gilbert N. Lewis and Irving Langmuir on the electronic structure of atoms and their bonding to form molecules.[31] He decided to focus his research on how the physical and chemical properties of substances are related to the structure of the atoms of which they are composed, becoming one of the founders of the new science of quantum chemistry. Pauling began to neglect his studies in humanities and social sciences. He had also exhausted the course offerings in the physics and mathematics departments. Professor Samuel Graf selected Pauling to be his teaching assistant in a high-level mathematics course.[32] During the winter of his senior year, Pauling was approached by the college to teach a chemistry course for home economics majors. It was in one of these classes that Pauling met his future wife, Ava Helen Miller.[33]
In 1922, Pauling graduated from Oregon State University (known then as Oregon Agricultural College) with a degree in chemical engineering and went on to graduate school at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) in Pasadena, California, under the guidance of Roscoe G. Dickinson. His graduate research involved the use of X-ray diffraction to determine the structure of crystals. He published seven papers on the crystal structure of minerals while he was at Caltech. He received his PhD in physical chemistry and mathematical physics, summa cum laude, in 1925.
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The Pauling family moved back to Portland just after Linus began school. When he was nine, his father died, leaving Linus, his two younger sisters and their mother to make their own way in the world. This began a stretch of more than 15 years when Pauling tried to pursue his education, while his mother tried to get him to quit school and become the support of the family. He did not quit school.
However, he did find many ingenious ways to make money and most of it went to help support his mother and sisters. By the time he was twelve he was a freshman at Washington High School in Portland. After four years of learning, with or without the help of his teachers, and of odd jobs (delivering milk, running film projectors, and even working in a shipyard, for example) he left high school. He did not graduate because the high school required their students to take a class in civics and Pauling saw no reason why he should since he could absorb any of that from his own reading. Later, after his Nobel Prize for Peace in 1962, the administration agreed that he had learned civics on his own by granting him his high school diploma. In the fall of 1917 Pauling enrolled in Oregon Agricultural College-now Oregon State University-in Corvallis, Oregon. He sailed through the freshman courses required of a chemical engineering major in spite of the fact that he was also working one hundred hours a month. He was not only supporting himself, but also providing the bulk of his family¹s support. This became more and more arduous after his mother became ill. In fact, he did not return to the college after his sophomore year because of the need for money. However, at the first of November of what would have been his junior year, he received an offer to become an instructor of quantitative analysis at Oregon Agricultural College, a course he had just taken as a sophomore! The offer included a salary of $100 a month and he gladly took it. He himself did not take any courses that year. He met his future wife, Ava Helen Miller, when she was a student in his quantitative analysis class.