Force of Nature- The Life of Linus Pauling

by Thomas Hager

  A compromise was finally reached: The leadership of the chemistry division would be split. Pauling would be chair in name, but his power would be shared with a new chemistry division council, a group of five faculty members who would become the final authority on appointments, promotions, salary, and budget. Tolman would deal with the trustees by serving as the chemistry division's representative to the Caltech Executive Council.

  That was the plan in July, but by the time it was formally approved in November, Pauling's role was further diminished. Perhaps Noyes could not bring himself to retire; perhaps there was too much resistance to the plan from the chemistry faculty. In any case, the final version listed Noyes as chairman of the chemistry division council and Pauling as a member. The chairman's role was downgraded as well, limited to those of an ex officio member of the council, able to bring matters before the group but not to vote. This mechanism would ensure that Noyes's cooperative, faculty-driven model would survive his death, that no one person could run the division. Thus stripped of all meaning, the position of chairman of the chemistry division council was ready to hand to Pauling when the time came.

  Pauling got the message. Just after Christmas, he wrote Conant saying that he was interested in coming to Harvard. But things had changed since the courting of Pauling seven years earlier. There were now many more young chemists trained in quantum mechanics to choose from—-just the year before Harvard had hired one of Pauling's most gifted students, E. Bright Wilson—and transferring Pauling's large research group east would require a good deal of money. After two weeks of reviewing his Depression-strapped budget, Conant wrote back, "I regret to say there does not seem to be any possibility now of providing you with the opportunities here at Harvard which you would need."

  - - -

  Crestfallen after this double blow to his ego, Pauling threw himself back into research. Noyes helped salve his wounds by involving him in plans for a last great project he wanted to bring to fruition, a school of bio-organic chemistry, a new interdisciplinary research group that would reshape biology by using the tools of modern chemistry. Pauling, he said, would be the school's intellectual leader and would get an entire floor of a new building for his group. Other faculty, the best in the world, would be hired later. The promise of more space and a higher-profile research role helped Pauling deal with his discouragement and focus on his work.

  When Warren Weaver visited Caltech in March 1936, he was delighted to learn about Pauling's progress with hemoglobin and even more happy when Pauling told him over dinner at his home about his new zeal for research on other proteins, work that might lead even to an attack on cancer.

  Weaver also met with Noyes, now visibly weakened, who marshaled his failing energy to lobby for money to expand, equip, and staff his school of bio-organic chemistry. Weaver was excited about the idea—it represented, after all, a physical realization of the approach to biology that Weaver had long endorsed—and he told Noyes that he was interested in following up the idea with his board.

  Feeling confident about the project and eager to put things in order before he died, Noyes asked Pauling to make a thorough study of personnel possibilities for the new school. But now it was Pauling who counseled restraint, writing Noyes that it might be better to wait to prepare a detailed plan for the Rockefeller Foundation, one that could be organized around the progress of Pauling's own research. Noyes was in no mood to wait. He had changed his mind and decided that he would go to the Mayo Clinic for a colon operation, his last chance for a cure, and he quickly sent Weaver a six-page outline of proposed developments in organic chemistry, with details about the planned building, for which a private donor had already pledged funds. Then Pauling was sent on a talent-scouting trip to the East Coast, where he continued to drag his feet. He cautioned Weaver in New York that he thought Noyes "a little bit apt, in his present condition, to hurry ... in order to assure the development during his own remaining term." Pauling still assumed that he would become chairman, in whatever emasculated form it was offered to him, and could see no sense in being bound by the last acts of a mortally ill man. He intended to make his own decisions when his time came.

  He did not have long to wait. The Mayo operation was unsuccessful, and in May, Noyes returned to Pasadena. He set himself up in the bed of his house on San Pasqual Street, attended by his maid and a longtime assistant. Pauling, busy putting the finishing touches on his denaturation paper with Mirsky, visited him twice during these last weeks; on neither occasion was any mention made of his assuming the chairmanship.

  On June 3, 1936, the news spread across campus: The King is dead.

  - - -

  It was the passing of an era.

  Noyes's reserve, gentility, and generosity were rooted in the nineteenth century; his generation, with its slower, more cultured, less grasping approach to life, was disappearing. There would be no more student-chauffeured expeditions in Old Mossie, no more cocoa at seminars, no more of what Millikan in his eulogy called Noyes's "sweetness of character." There would be no more poetry. The future now belonged to less romantic, more pragmatic, faster-moving men like Pauling—men of the twentieth century.

  The moderating influence that Noyes had exerted over his division became apparent by its absence after his death. The rancor that had been festering among the faculty for the past year was now made public. Some faculty members believed Pauling had pushed Noyes too hard while he was ill, one telling Weaver that Pauling had "worried and pestered [Noyes] in an unwarranted and even unforgivable way, trying to force him into an intolerable activity of leadership for chemistry," even, perhaps, hastening Noyes's death. The senior faculty, Tolman, Dickinson, and Lacey, echoed the feeling in a frank letter to Millikan in which they "suggested" Pauling's temporary elevation to chairman—as recently redefined and rendered powerless—only because of his research importance to Caltech and "in spite of misgivings as to the complete suitability of Professor Pauling for this position. . . . We mistrust to some extent his judgment as to matters of policy and his generosity and sincerity in personal dealings."

  The breadth of the anti-Pauling feeling became public at Noyes's funeral, where the honorary pallbearers included every member of the Caltech Executive Council and every member of the Division of Chemistry and Chemical Engineering—except Pauling. Embarrassed by being singled out in this way, Pauling went to Millikan demanding to know why he had been omitted. Millikan pleaded ignorance, saying that the list had been prepared by the chemistry division.

  There were more insults to come. After the funeral the offer of the chairmanship was made—but to Tolman, not Pauling. This may have been a simple formality recognizing seniority, since Tolman had already made it clear that he did not want the position and quickly declined, but it had the effect of another slap in Pauling's face.

  Humiliated and angry by the time the chairmanship was finally offered to him, Pauling turned it down. Without carefully considering the consequences, he dashed off a brief and blunt letter of refusal to Millikan and the Caltech Executive Council. The new chemistry division structure, he wrote, meant that he would carry responsibility without commensurate authority. The proposed salary of $7,500 was too small. He wanted more information regarding the future institutional support of chemistry. And he expected to be offered not only the title of chairman but Noyes's second title of director of the Gates Laboratory. After handing in the letter on August 10, he packed up his family and left on a vacation trip to Oregon.

  When he returned two weeks later he found, he wrote a friend, that "Our Chemistry Department is still in an unorganized state, and I am afraid that we are in for a good bit of trouble before things are straightened out." Millikan had expected that Pauling, perhaps chastened by Noyes's death, would give him a gracious reply to the offer of the chairmanship; he had been so taken aback by the tone of Pauling's letter that he refused to show it to the Executive Council. Here was proof of what he had thought all along: Pauling was too young and inexperienced to be a chairman
, too apt to be "dictatorial" in his dealings. Millikan refused to respond in any way.

  Pauling and Millikan continued trying to silently stare each other down for more than two months before Pauling blinked. In November he again requested that Millikan tell him what was going to happen.

  Millikan replied frostily that he was waiting for Pauling to suggest organizational changes that would make his continued association "satisfactory."

  If there were negotiations, they went nowhere. New Year's Day 1937 came and went, and the division still had no chairman.

  Impatiently monitoring the situation from his office in New York City, Warren Weaver decided it was time to do something. Noyes's large bio-organic grant was in process; Weaver thought that Pauling could do great things in tandem with a top organic chemist, and he wanted that grant to go through. The bad blood at Caltech was making everything more difficult. Despite his appreciation of Pauling's shortcomings as a team player—Weaver thought Millikan should have given Pauling a "spanking" when his letter of refusal was first delivered back in August—he still considered Pauling the linchpin in his plans for Caltech.

  Weaver took the train to Pasadena in January 1937 to smooth things over. He found the situation worse than he had feared. Pauling and Millikan had cut off all communication. Millikan himself had taken on management of the bio-organic grant even though he had little grasp of what it was all about. Pauling was staying proudly aloof.

  Weaver sat down with Pauling first, and, happy to have a sympathetic ear, Pauling opened up. He was worried about balancing his time between research and administration, Pauling said. Look at what happened to Noyes—he ended up doing everything for the institute and little of value in the laboratory. This new division council setup, with the chairman's role reduced to that of a figurehead likely to be blamed for decisions he had no power to control, would require wasting hours of time on minor decisions that the chairman should be able to make on his own. Pauling also said that he resented the refusal to give him Noyes's title of director of laboratories, which, while it might seem trivial to the uninitiated, actually held significance for other scientists in his field. The salary issue was important, too, because his current pay was far below that of other division chairmen.

  Pauling's concerns were justified and presented reasonably, Weaver thought, and he began to develop a new respect for the young researcher. Then Pauling showed him his August 10 letter of refusal and asked for Weaver's frank opinion. Weaver read it over and found the note "amazingly curt and even impudent." He told Pauling to remember that compared to the men on the Executive Council, he was very young; that the trustees had shown great confidence in him and done him a great honor by offering him the title of chairman. His reply not only did not acknowledge the honor but gave none of the reasons behind his decision to refuse. It looked as if Pauling were simply throwing the chairmanship back in their teeth. It was insulting. It was no wonder they were making him wait. Pauling for the first time began to see things from the other side. That night, Weaver noted in his diary, "P. seems genuinely to appreciate WW's criticisms and very soberly remarks that he has made a bad mistake."

  Having chastened one side, Weaver reasoned with the other, telling Millikan of Pauling's concerns about and plans for the chemistry division, of the impressive way the young man had kept a cool head during his long wait, and especially about Pauling's importance to the Rockefeller Foundation. He asked for understanding.

  After Weaver returned to New York, Millikan and Pauling began talking, working out a system that would satisfy them both. In April, almost a year after Noyes's death, Pauling wrote Weaver with good news. "After talking with you I went to Professor Millikan determined to straighten out our misunderstandings. We reached an agreement with very little difficulty and I am sure that everyone is pleased." Pauling certainly was. He would retain the title of director as well as chairman, and his salary would be raised to $9,000.

  - - -

  Despite everyone else's fears, Pauling moved smoothly into the role of chairman, due in great part to his decision to adopt Noyes's administrative structure and concentrate his energy on his own research. As chairman he would be the big-picture man, the fellow who traveled and spoke, increasing the fame of the school, and attracting big grants. Everything else was delegated. "As an administrator," he said, "I, for some reason, developed the habit of trying to get other people to do almost everything." He made his former graduate student Holmes Sturdivant his administrative right hand, a good pick because Sturdivant—practical, efficient, mechanically inclined (he ran the chemistry division instrument shop, designing and building precise and efficient instruments in addition to his administrative duties)— was simply "one of the most competent persons I have ever known," as one professor remembered.

  Most other routine decisions were handled by the division's standing committees. Even the new division council structure, such a sticking point in negotiations, was easy to solve: Pauling ignored it, calling a meeting instead of all faculty to vote on any new hires or major decisions. And here he proved adept as well: Before any vote, Pauling would test the waters and reach consensus through informal discussions, thus avoiding most public arguments. Faculty meetings were short and efficient, the way most professors liked them.

  "Many thanks for your letter about my new position," Pauling wrote a friend a few weeks after being named chairman. "I do not know how it is going to work out, but so far the change has not been for the worse since I have successfully avoided taking on any duties except a few of the simplest."

  The worries about Pauling's "dictatorial" tendencies proved exaggerated. There might have been a shift in overall emphasis—instead of focusing on the sort of inorganic physical chemistry that Noyes had favored, Pauling concentrated his efforts on the new bio-organic chemistry program—but the faculty soon realized that nothing much would change. Life in the division went on smoothly and, at least on the surface, congenially.

  With a few exceptions. Tolman, a good friend of Noyes's, remained cool and distant with Pauling; their relationship would never warm beyond the formal. Don Yost, a highly opinionated, individualistic inorganic chemist, became "somewhat antagonistic to me," Pauling remembered, in part because of his unhappiness at the shift in emphasis away from his field and perhaps in part because of lingering bad feelings over a fiasco in which Yost failed to find the xenon compounds that Pauling had predicted should exist. Yost stayed at Caltech until he retired, often at loggerheads with Pauling, the sole dissenting vote in many divisional decisions, his rancor barely concealed and growing to the point where he and Pauling sometimes stopped speaking to each other entirely.

  Those incidents aside, the Caltech chemistry department not only survived but thrived under Pauling's leadership. Within two years of assuming the chairmanship, he proudly reported to Weaver that the number of chemistry graduate students had increased from twenty-five to forty-five and that the number of postdoctoral fellows had doubled. Students were flocking to Caltech not only because Noyes had built a strong program but because Pauling was now in charge, pushing chemistry forward, leading the way with his ideas about the chemical bond and molecular structure. "They would come, many of them, because they had heard of him. And he lived up to every expectation," said Verner Schomaker, a graduate student in the mid-1980s. "He was always producing miracles and minor miracles of understanding."

  Richard Noyes, the son of the chemistry department chair at Illinois, could have gone anywhere for graduate school in the late 1930s, but he came to Caltech because it was "just booming on up. . . . The best structural chemistry place anywhere in the world." Pauling's students, all of the students in the chemistry division, felt during that time that they were part of a highly select, privileged group.

  The feeling of being somewhere special came from both the force of Pauling's intelligence and his personal style. He did not sequester himself in his office, appearing only to address seminars or run meetings. Secure now in his new position, he ro
amed the halls, poked his head into labs, chatted and joked with anybody and everybody. New students who arrived expecting a distant and awe-inspiring Great Man found a friendly, relaxed, and surprisingly young fellow—barely ten years older than most of his graduate students—who asked about their interests, listened to their ideas, talked up his own, and, most surprisingly, treated them like equals. He invited students and postdoctoral fellows to his home to listen to records, eat waffle breakfasts, and join in Thanksgiving dinners. Occasionally, they served as baby-sitters. He took them on camping trips to the desert. Pauling's style was loose, jazzy, informal—Western—compared to other chemistry departments, where it was always Mister this and Professor that. At Caltech, in Pauling's orbit, real, inventive, cutting-edge chemistry could be exciting and fun.

  Becoming chairman did have a slight moderating effect on him. Conscious of his new position and equipped with his new salary, Ava Helen began dressing Pauling in ever-more expensive suits, making him a fashion plate of Caltech. He stopped reclining on tables when he lectured. He was more of an equal now when he visited G. N. Lewis, who was delighted with Pauling's elevation.

  Pauling still sparkled with enthusiasm. He had, at age thirty-six, achieved renown in his chosen field, ensured himself one of the highest salaries at Caltech, and assumed leadership of one of the most powerful and influential chemistry laboratories in the world. He had done it on his own terms. He was very happy.

  It showed in Pauling's face, in the way he walked. Home movies taken in the late 1930s by one of his assistants, Eddie Hughes, show Pauling at Mount Wilson with friends, walking with his head down and hands clasped behind him, deep in thought, probably working on a chemical problem. But there is no tension; he ambles, tall and loose limbed, in control and at ease. Scientists were generally expected to look serious or, at their most relaxed, faintly amused. But whenever a camera was pointed in Pauling's direction, he switched on an enormous, delighted, ear-to-ear grin of the sort found on schoolboys holding up big strings of fish. It would become a trademark.