by Thomas Hager
The committee broke for a short recess to ponder strategy. Pauling had made a choice faced by many witnesses in front of congressional panels of the day: whether to answer the question; to invoke the Fifth Amendment, the constitutional protection against self-incrimination; or to maintain that the question was outside the committee's charge and refuse to answer. Pauling had no intention of answering a question that had sent his friends to jail or internal exile. At the time he faced the committee there was a risk in taking the Fifth, too, which was widely seen as an admission of guilt and often resulted in the witness's being fired. So he took the last course, the course that Dalton Trumbo and the Hollywood Ten had taken. This, however, carried a risk as well: Refusal to answer a legislative committee's question could lead to a contempt citation.
When the committee reconvened, the counsel tried bullying Pauling, reminding him of legal decisions that appeared to show it was in his best interest to answer the question. Pauling had read too widely to be taken in. He stuck with his refusal. If the committee wanted anything more, it would have to cite him. The counsel backed off, and the grilling continued. Pauling answered every question coolly, logically, and clearly.
They were getting nowhere. Finally, one frustrated committee member brought the discussion back around:
Senator Donnelly: Well, Doctor, at the present time we are engaged in a war, whether it is a declared war on Russia or not, our country is fighting the Communists, we will have to recognize that, and that American boys are giving up their lives on a foreign soil. What is all this to avail us if we permit Communists to infiltrate into our universities and colleges and teach our youths the Communist doctrine? . . . You continually refer to political pressure and to politics when any one mentions communism or asks whether you are a member of the Communist Party ... I don't believe you are fair in calling the Communist Party a political organization, or if you have any allegiance to the Communist Party, I don't believe that it is fair to call that political views. I think that is subversive and it is traitorous, especially at a time when we are engaged in war.
Pauling: Well, I am interested to know what you think, but I don't believe that it is determinative. Here again, I would say that if I am guilty of some illegal act, I should be called to justice for it.
Senator Donnelly: Well, don't you think it is an illegal act to refuse to state whether or not you are a Communist and be considered in contempt of the senate of the state of California? . . .
Pauling: It seems to me, and I must say that I am speaking without knowledge of the law or benefit of legal advice, that it is not justifiable for an inquiry to be made into my political beliefs and affiliations and that this principle is important enough . . . even though I put myself in jeopardy, I should adhere to it. . . .
Senator Donnelly: If you are a member of the Communist Party and if you are paying dues, if you are a part and parcel of an organization that advocates the overthrow of the United States government by force and violence, now, all the pretty words you say do not change the complexion of that at all.
The inquiry ended in Catch-22 fashion:
Senator Weybret: Where would we land if every one of us went over and supported these Communists, knowing that they were here under the supervision, or whatever you might call it, of a foreign country? Where would we land if we all took the same attitude?
Pauling: You mean all of the people in the nation?
Senator Weybret: Yes, where would we be?
Pauling: Well, then, we would presumably have a different form of government as a result of the choice of the people.
Outmaneuvered, disgusted, and tired, the panel finally dismissed him.
An FBI agent in the audience closed his notebook. Later that week, he would send a complete report to J. Edgar Hoover.
- - -
Despite his composure before the committee, Pauling was deeply shaken by the inquisition and especially by the threat of a contempt citation. He had seen first-hand the effect that tangling with a congressional committee had had on Dalton Trumbo's life—a wife and three children left in limbo while the screenwriter served a year in the penitentiary as a result of a conviction for contempt of Congress. At the state level, he was not sure what the penalties would be except for one: A conviction for contempt of an official state committee would certainly get him fired from Caltech.
The next day, Pauling's refusal to answer the question was all over the papers and all over campus. Unsure of what to do, Pauling turned for advice to the liberal and well-connected Caltech physics professor Charlie Lauritsen, who came up with a simple idea: It was against Pauling's principles to tell the committee about his politics under duress, but nothing prevented him from voluntarily telling his friends and colleagues. The Caltech internal investigation had already shown that Pauling was not a member of the Communist Party, and everyone knew it. Write DuBridge a note, Lauritsen suggested, make the statement that you are not a party member. Then let DuBridge figure a way around the committee.
Pauling thought about it, then drafted a long statement and sent it to DuBridge that same day with a cover note, "Dear Lee: I enclose this statement about my political beliefs. You are free to use it in any way." In the three-page document he restated his reasons for not testifying about his political beliefs before the committee, offered a critique of the loyalty-oath program, and concluded, "I believe that a citizen has the right to announce his political beliefs if he desires, and that he also has a right to keep them to himself if he desires. I may say that I am not personally sympathetic to the extremes of belief and policy that I understand some Communists to hold; but I feel that we must staunchly support the basic principles of our Democracy, including the right of people to hold even extreme political beliefs."
The key phrases were buried in the middle, where Pauling had written, "I am not a Communist. I have never been a Communist. I have never been involved with the Communist Party." This was what DuBridge needed to hear. He was already getting another round of complaints from his trustees about the latest Pauling flap, and he was happy to see his chemistry head make this statement. He suggested a few edits to Pauling—a section was added saying, "I am not opposed to loyalty oaths in general. I have voluntarily taken many loyalty oaths in connection with my services to the Nation"—and then told Pauling he would take care of things. DuBridge contacted the education committee and arranged for Pauling to appear when it convened for more hearings in Pasadena in two days. When the panel was gaveled to order, Pauling walked in, read under oath the document he had prepared for DuBridge, turned, and began walking out as the legislators buzzed. On his way out the door Pauling thought he heard somebody say, "All I know is that he's made a monkey out of this committee." It might have been Senator Donnelly, whose staff had been busy preparing Pauling's contempt citation.
Press coverage of the hearings kicked off the usual flurry of anti-Pauling mail to DuBridge's office, but he was now able to counter with an incontrovertible fact: Pauling had testified under oath that he was not a Communist. In Pauling's case, he could write disgruntled alumni that even though there may be violent disagreement on Pauling's opinions, as long as he acted within the law and kept politics out of the classroom, "our best course is to try to convince him of his errors rather than to take more radical steps."
CHAPTER 16
The Secret of life
Off the Deep End
Pauling's attention switched rapidly between politics and science now, with research becoming a refuge from the attacks and pressure brought about by his political activities. At the urging of his publisher, in 1949 he finished a simpler version of General Chemistry, one more suited for the wider audience of college freshmen who were not of Caltech caliber, extemporizing entire chapters into his dictaphone and letting his secretary rough out the drafts for minor corrections. College Chemistry, as it was called when it appeared in 1950, became another big seller. For her birthday in 1950, Pauling bought Ava Helen a brand-new, British-racing-green, two-seat
MG roadster.
Protein structures continued to occupy Pauling's thoughts. At the time the Weinbaum case was breaking in the spring of 1950, a long paper by Sir Lawrence Bragg, John Kendrew, and Max Perutz appeared in the Proceedings of the Royal Academy. Pauling had a vertiginous moment when he saw the title: "Polypeptide Chain Configurations in Crystalline Proteins." It looked as though Bragg's team might have made a breakthrough, beating him to the great prize of being the first to describe a protein atom by atom.
He felt better as he read it. It was a strangely unfocused paper for Bragg's group, a laundry list of possible structures for the basic protein pattern found in Astbury's alpha-keratin chain with no overwhelming evidence in favor of any one. Some were spirals; others, kinked chains. Almost all of them, Pauling realized, could be easily dismissed on chemical grounds. Bragg and his team dismissed them, too. They could come to no firm conclusion about an ultimate structure and ended up weakly endorsing Astbury's old idea of a folded ribbon.
Reading between the lines, Pauling found the paper more interesting. The entire menagerie of models had been built as Pauling would have built them, using an understanding of the structural elements involved—especially, Pauling noted with satisfaction, detailed information from Caltech on the shapes and sizes of amino acids—and a consideration of the forces that would hold them in a final shape, placing special emphasis on the notion of hydrogen bonding.
It was obvious that Bragg had learned something in the fifteen years since he had been beaten by Pauling's rules. The time Pauling had spent at the Cavendish Laboratory in 1948 had also had an effect; soon after Pauling returned home, Bragg complemented the top-down approach of Perutz and Kendrew, which emphasized the structure of whole proteins, with a Pauling-like attack on the structures of individual amino acids.
But Pauling was relieved to see that Bragg still did not know how to play the stochastic game correctly. In his 1950 paper Bragg did not place enough chemical restrictions on his structural guesses to narrow them down sufficiently. The British apparently did not believe, for instance, that the peptide bond had to be held rigid and flat, and almost all of their models twisted or bent that bond in a way Pauling believed impossible—one reason they came up with twenty possibilities instead of just a few. And one restriction they did impose Pauling thought unnecessary. The Cavendish team assumed that there had to be a whole number of amino acids—three or four seemed most likely—in every full turn of their spiral models. Huggins had made this integral-number mistake, too, in his 1943 paper. The thinking was that if protein spirals crystallized as they did, then the basic repeating unit—the space group, it was called—had to exhibit a sort of symmetry describable by whole numbers. Because the space group in an alpha-keratin spiral was thought to consist of one whole turn, repeated ad infinitum up the chain, space-group symmetry thinking made it seem logical that there was an integer number of amino acids in each turn; that way, each whole turn would start and end at the same point on the amino-acid backbone.
It was not obvious to Pauling, however. When folding his paper spirals in Oxford, he had concentrated on chemical rules, not crystallographic dogma. The model he had roughed out had not involved a whole number of amino acids in each turn, and once he thought about it, he could see no reason why it should have to. After reading Braggs 1950 paper, he began to think that this integral-number fixation was akin to the "magic number" mania of protein researchers in the 1930s, the mistaken belief in nice, whole numbers that had led Dorothy Wrinch to her cyclols. Nature did not work that way, Pauling thought, spinning out living things according to mathematical equations. Nature was sloppier than that, more opportunistic—nature took the easiest way out, the way that required the least energy—the way that built the most stable chemical structures.
Bragg's team had missed the prize. But their paper had the major effect of refocusing Pauling on the race. Proteins had been his top priority when he had returned from England two years before, and he had assigned a number of researchers to it: Corey and coworkers continuing to lead the world in the structural study of amino acids and small peptides, with results continuing to support Pauling's idea of the planar peptide bond; Corey and a small team working on a whole globular protein, lysozyme, breaking it down into smaller pieces, separating them on chromatographic columns and analyzing the fragments; Pauling directing an effort to ease x-ray analysis by placing easily located atoms of heavy elements like mercury into the protein chain; a new faculty member, Jack Kirkwood, gathering information on the charge distribution and general properties of globular proteins, using the Tiselius apparatus. When a visiting professor of physics, Herman Branson, arrived in the winter of 1948-49, Pauling put him to work on an exhaustive review of all possible spiral protein models that fit the structural evidence from the work on amino acids. Branson, with the help of Sidney Weinbaum (this was prior to his perjury conviction), started to work, using his grasp of mathematics and extremely accurate model-building equipment to construct dozens of variations on the spiral theme.
Then Pauling turned his attention to other things. His year as president of the American Chemical Society (ACS) began in January 1949. His political work was claiming more of his workday. The sickle-cell-anemia work had blossomed, and for a few months in late 1949 and early 1950, Pauling put a great deal of effort into using it as the jumping-off point for a concerted, molecular-level attack on such medical problems as cancer and heart disease. "I feel sure that significant progress in attacking disease can be made by bringing medical research into more intimate contact with the most advanced outposts in basic science," he wrote, "and that the only way in which this can be done is to have medical research become an intrinsic part of the activities in laboratories in which basic science is being advanced." He wanted to create a place where young M.D.s like Harvey Itano could come to develop a new approach to medicine based on an understanding of molecular action, and he started dreaming of a new building to house it, a laboratory of medical chemistry that would extend between his Crellin Laboratory of Chemistry and Beadle's Kerckhoff Laboratory of Biology, using staff from both divisions to reshape medical research.
In January 1950, with Beadle's help, Pauling put together a proposal for the Rockefeller Foundation to build such a place. Weaver shot down their idea, however, explaining that biology and chemistry needed to consolidate their research, not expand it, and that in any case the foundation was not in the business of financing buildings. Pauling and Beadle spent weeks that spring writing letters and pounding the streets of New York seeking support from other foundations and drug companies—including asking the Kresge Foundation for $1.5 million—to no avail. Physicians and philanthropists, who barely had time to come to grips with the notion of a molecular disease, found the term "medical chemistry" a "disturbing description," the Caltech pair discovered—too vague on the one hand, too newfangled on the other. They would offer the Caltech team nothing but short-term, limited support.
Giving that up, Pauling turned back to protein spirals. The previous fall, after a year's study, Branson and Weinbaum had concluded that only two spirals—including the one Pauling had come up with in Oxford—provided maximal hydrogen bonding and accommodated the planar peptide bond while still keeping atoms close but not overlapping. The tighter of the two numbered roughly 3.7 amino acids in each turn of the spiral; the looser, 5.1 amino acids. Only two possible, but still Pauling would not publish. The problem was the same he had seen in England: Neither of the two spirals matched the 5.1-angstrom x-ray reflection present in alpha keratin, which most researchers assumed represented the distance along the axis between each full turn, a very important marker for the structure. Branson and Weinbaum's work confirmed that the tighter spiral, the one Pauling now thought might represent the structure of alpha keratin, had about 5.4 angstroms between each turn. "I felt so strongly that the structure must explain the x-ray data," Pauling remembered, "that I took a chance by waiting."
But one of the spirals that Bragg's team post
ulated, the one with four amino acids per turn, came perilously close to Pauling's 3.7 residue spiral, and Pauling felt that it was only a matter of time until the British corrected their approach. In the spring of 1950, he threw himself back into his protein work, overseeing Corey's final systematic analysis of possible structures, building models out of wire, balls, and sticks, and a showy new modeling system carved out of wood in the Caltech shop in which atoms appeared as spheres at their full van der Waals radius, with hollows whittled into the sides to allow them to fit together like masses of soap bubbles—space-filling models, they were called, another Pauling innovation that would become standard equipment in hundreds of chemistry labs and classrooms. Playing strictly by the rules he had imposed on protein structures, making sure that every possible hydrogen bond was formed, that every peptide bond was flat, that there was no undue strain and no atoms jostling too close to others, Pauling and Corey confirmed the chemical plausibility of the two spirals. And they discovered new insights this time—including a way to stretch one structure to account for the properties of silk. But a basic puzzle remained after all the fine tuning: The tighter of Pauling's two basic spirals, the form he believed was most likely that of alpha keratin, still did not explain the observed 5.1-angstrom x-ray reflection. The difference between this and the 5.4-angstrom reflection predicted by Pauling's theoretical spiral—one-sixth the width of a single hydrogen atom—was the only thing standing between him and the honor of being the first man to describe the atomic structure of a protein. It might as well have been the Grand Canyon.