February 28 is not a public holiday, but many people feel it should be. It’s the birthday of Linus Pauling, one of the world’s greatest scientists. He was awarded the Nobel Prize twice.

Linus Carl Pauling was born February 28, 1901 in Portland, Oregon. His parents were Herman Henry William Pauling and Lucy Isabelle (known as Belle) Pauling. Linus’s father owned a drugstore. As a young boy, Linus would watch his father mixing various powders and liquids to make medicines to sell in his shop. This sparked the boy’s interest.

Linus loved to read. By the time he was eight, he had read the entire Bible, Darwin’s book On the Origin of Species, and many other books.

When Linus was nine, his father died suddenly. Belle Pauling and her three children (Linus and two younger sisters, Pauline and Lucile) had no way to earn a living. Belle turned their home into a boarding house (sort of like a small hotel where people could pay to live and be fed meals), and Linus worked many jobs to help earn money for the family.

When Linus was 14, he visited a friend who had a toy chemistry set. The experiments that came with the set excited Linus so much, he set up a home-made chemistry laboratory in a corner of his basement. In high school, a chemistry teacher, William Greene, recognized Linus’s interest and talent, and gave him special instruction and help.

In 1916, at the age of 15, Linus had earned enough high school credits to be accepted into college. However, to graduate from high school, he still needed to complete two American history classes. He wanted to take the two classes in the same term, but the school wouldn’t let him. So Linus dropped out of high school at age 16 and enrolled in Oregon Agricultural College (now Oregon State University) to study chemical engineering.

It soon became clear that Linus knew more about chemistry than some of the college professors did, so even though he was a student, he was asked to teach some of the classes. In one of those classes, Linus met a young woman named Ava Helen Miller, whom he would later marry.

When he graduated college at age 22, he continued his education at the California Institute of Technology (known as Caltech). There, he earned his PhD in physical chemistry and mathematical physics.

Linus wanted to find the answer to a question that was, at that time, a very big one in chemistry: how do atoms bond together to form molecules?

An example of a molecule is water. A water molecule has three atoms: two hydrogen (H) atoms and one oxygen (O) atom. That’s why water is sometimes referred to as H2O. A single drop of water contains billions of water molecules. But how, scientists wanted to know, do the atoms bond or stick together to make a molecule?

Water, of course, is not the only molecule. There are thousands of different molecules made up from many different atoms. Linus did important work in discovering how atoms bond into molecules. In 1939, he published a book called The Nature of the Chemical Bond, which became a famous and important work.

Linus Pauling made so many discoveries that in 1954, the Nobel Prize committee did something it had never done. Up till then, the Prize for Chemistry had always been awarded for a particular discovery. For Linus Pauling, they awarded it for a body of work. That is, for a lot of discoveries and advances. The Award reads, “for his research into the nature of the chemical bond and its application to the elucidation of the structure of complex substances.”

Elucidation  (ee-loo-suh-DAY-shun) means explaining something or making it easier to understand. So the Nobel was for his research into how chemical bonds work and for how his research helped make the structure of  molecules easier to understand.

Eventually, his focus changed from inorganic chemistry (inorganic means things that are not living) to the study of biomolecules (molecules in the body, such as carbohydrates, lipids, proteins, and nucleic acids). He identified the genetic defect that causes sickle-cell anemia.

It was Linus’s belief that vitamin C is important for good health. Go to the vitamin section of a store and you will see many bottles of vitamin C tablets. That’s because, in great part, of Linus Pauling’s research and teaching.

Linus wrote more than 850 scientific papers and books, and all his discoveries can’t be listed here. Just know that he was one of history’s most brilliant scientists.

But what about his second Nobel Prize? It wasn’t for Chemistry, it was for Peace.

At the end of World War II, the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in Japan were destroyed by atomic bombs. This marked the beginning of the nuclear age.

The United States, Great Britain, and the Soviet Union conducted tests to develop more powerful nuclear weapons. Sometimes these tests would be far out in the ocean on some small, uninhabited island. Sometimes they would be far out in a desert.

Linus Pauling and other leading scientists, such as Albert Einstein and Bertrand Russell, worked to stop above-ground nuclear testing. They showed that dangerous radioactive particles are blown high into the air and then, moved about by winds, fall to earth far from the test sites, endangering nature and people’s health. The scientist helped bring about a test ban treaty that stopped above-ground testing.

For his efforts in this and for his work to stop wars, Linus Pauling received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1962.

Linus Pauling died in 1994 at the age of  93.

Fun Facts

•  Linus Pauling and Ava Helen Miller married in 1923. They had three sons and a daughter.

•  Linus was an avid stamp collector. In 2008 (well after his death, unfortunately), the Post Office issued a 41-cent Linus Pauling stamp.

•  In 1962, Washington High School issued Linus an honorary high school diploma, 45 years after refusing to let him take the two American History classes in the same term.

•  Linus Torvalds, who developed the Linux operating system for computers, is named after Linus Pauling.