Looking back over Linus Pauling’s life—a long one (1901–1994), blessed with huge success and every public honor—one can’t avoid his aphorisms. He was a polished public speaker, a famous aphorist, more so as he grew older and broadened his range from mere solver of deep scientific problems—such as the three-dimensional structure of molecules—to international instructor on the abolition of war and disease. In his last decades, the aphorisms became vacuous. Let me illustrate.

During the 1960s, microbiologist Sol Spiegelman epitomized, in a good aphorism, the new developmental biology, formerly embryology, which was being transformed by molecular genetics. “Synthesize the right proteins in the right place, at the right time, and everything else follows.” This was sure to infuriate anti-reductionists, but it could nevertheless be tested; and it proved fruitful. If, for example, you stop the right protein being made at the right place, etc., or cause the wrong one to be made, development stops or goes wrong. The role of genes was correctly implied. It didn’t have to be that way: early development could in principle have needed no protein synthesis. But the advance of biomedical science since then testifies to Spiegelman’s prescience.

By contrast: Barbara Marinacci’s devoted editing of Linus Pauling’s words offers, as epigraph to its eleventh chapter (entitled “Vitamin Crusader”), the following “favorite maxim of LP in his later, orthomolecular years”:

Having the right molecules in the right amounts in the right place in the human body at the right time is a necessary condition for good health.

A bad aphorism; a tautology. It cannot be false; it cannot be tested. Anybody who defined good health as the wrong molecules in the wrong amounts, etc., would be a fool. Yet this statement, from the greatest chemist of the twentieth century, the only winner of two unshared Nobel prizes, was a cornerstone of his late attempt to revolution- ize healing, the rule of his “orthomolecu- lar medicine.” Of course it resonates with millions of natural-foods and alternative-healing zealots, who believe that with it the specter of disease can be laid low.

Nor was Pauling, in his later years, loath to encourage such fantasies in popular books and speeches. As Ted and Ben Goertzel report in their sympathetic biography,

He did not hesitate to say that he believed that vitamin C and megavitamins, in the amounts he took and advised others to take, could cure or alleviate not only the common cold and cancer, but mental illness, viral pneumonia, hepatitis, poliomyelitis, tuberculosis, measles, mumps, chicken pox, viral orchitis, viral meningitis, shingles, fever blisters, cold sores, canker sores, and warts.

A paradox: no other single scientist has so brilliantly used modern physics and the facts of chemistry (of which he was a living encyclopedia) to deduce molecular structures —and to illuminate biological functions. Speculative as it may appear to outsiders, in structural chemistry scientists come close to the ideal of objectivity. The data force it. The young Pauling was obdurate in his insistence upon full review of all the evidence, in recognizing the constraints of nature and of logic. He denounced competitors (for example Dorothy Wrinch, in the race for the polypeptide structure) who let mere plausibility outrun the evidence.

No other public figure, moreover, has so courageously faced political enemies (as Pauling faced Senator Thomas Dodd and the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee), or so shamed them in public by his calm recitation of all the facts. He was, as Tom Hager has it, a force of nature. Yet in middle age and after, his energy undiminished, he was increasingly a maker of aphorisms and an advocate of nostrums that violated his exalted evidentiary standards. His pronouncements on vitamin C, as the Goertzels observe, “were not backed up by clinical studies but were based on theories he had developed to explain why vitamin C was so potent in helping the body to resist disease.” His public declarations embarrassed many friends and admirers. Hager admits that in his final years, Pauling’s “scientific image changed from brilliant individualist to monomaniacal crank.”

How could this happen to a humanitarian and a scientific genius? The reflex response, from those who never knew Pauling, is— a nice, ordinary senility. But that won’t do. For one thing, Pauling’s wholehearted adoption of the counterculture and its shibboleths began in the prime of life. For another, the evidence of those close to him, and from his continued work in pure chemistry, is that he remained a powerful intelligence. These two engrossing biographies, agreeing remarkably on the facts but different in style and emphasis, do not address the paradox directly, although it was clearly on the minds of the authors.

Hager’s is the bigger and more comprehensive work, the more literary in its effort to create and sustain suspense, to develop character beyond that of the protagonist, and to relate Pauling’s story to that of academic science in America. Pauling’s family background and childhood are painstakingly explored. All his scientific works are touched upon; but mainly via the relevant human relationships and very little through the substance of the science itself. This may have an unintended consequence. Social-constructivists will attribute too much of Pauling’s success to his powerful sponsors—of whom there were several including the most influential chemists in the country, G. N. Lewis and A. A. Noyes—and not enough of it to the beauty and extraordinary utility of his results.

The Goertzels do it differently. Theirs is a tersely factual account, adequately but not exhaustively documented; but it does make some effort to convey the scientific substance, hence the reasons beyond sponsors, energy, and brains, of Pauling’s meteoric rise to international acclaim. His first Nobel Prize was a rare tribute to a career of superb science, rather than to a single discovery. The Goertzel volume offers explanation, within a few pages, aided by some desultory diagrams, of what exactly it was the young Pauling accomplished by producing, from then-new quantum mechanics (which worked well for simple atoms but not for molecules) and the chemistry of atoms in molecules and crystals (their “valencies”), the first adequate theory of the chemical bond. It is hard to guess what insight the Goertzels’ explanatory effort will give readers who have little physics and chemistry. Probably not much. Also, given today’s computer-drawn pictures of real proteins, it is strange that the Goertzels did not select appropriate graphics to illustrate Pauling’s remarkable discovery of the alpha helix structure of polypeptides.

Still, the Goertzels are more realistic than Hager about Pauling’s politics (including his politics of health and disease) as those emerged in his maturity (he had no politics to speak of before World War II). And the Goertzels are closer to examining the paradox of a great mind moving away from its own high standards. In fact Linus Pauling: A Life in Science and Politics appends a personality assessment, based upon Rorschach tests, that will, depending upon one’s level of respect for psychological theory, amuse or horrify, for the tests were interpreted blind—without identification of the subject —by authorities in the field.

According to Pauling, who saw it completed shortly before his death in 1994, the Marinacci volume is the closest thing to his memoirs. Assembling selected speeches, occasional writings for lay readers, and extracts from his best-selling books, with Marinacci’s connectives interspersed, it will be a tool for scholars and a delight to Pauling fans; but it offers no help in understanding the paradox. Marinacci, a long-time Pauling associate, works for the Linus Pauling Institute in Palo Alto: the book is a celebration of its founder. It cannot be expected to identify Pauling’s less justifiable acts—there were those even in connection with this institute—much less to examine failings.

But failings, of course, there were. Who, even among the saints, is without them? Son of a father often absent and soon dead, fatherless as a small boy, Linus had to learn self-sufficiency. The Paulings were left, if not destitute, then in marginal circumstances. Belle Pauling, unable to make a living otherwise, used her husband’s small death benefit to establish a boarding house. She was a complainer, disabled by her anemia, who made heavy demands upon her children and especially the boy. Linus worked for pay; growing up was a constant struggle for freedom and against Belle. She wanted him simply to have a well-paying job; he, recognizing his advantages, wanted escape and an education. The lonely young man was resolute to succeed, as nobody in his family had done. Thus he was a distant son and later a distant father. The one close relationship was with his wife, Ava Helen. Those two were inseparable and their division of labor was absolute. Despite her political radicalism and her activity in good works, Ava Helen’s real job was family caretaker. She managed their lives; he did science. Ava Helen strove to be the perfect mother. They saw Pauling’s work as too important for him to bother with domestic involvement.

He knew his own worth and learned how to maximize its yield. His sponsors at the California Institute of Technology and the University of California at Berkeley were masters of the social side of academic science; Pauling soon played the game as skillfully as any. The substance of his work, however, was, at least up to the time of his first defeat~dash\Watson and Crick got first to the DNA structure—quite separate from these academic games. It was on a higher plane than that of his colleagues, and not just at Caltech. Those around him knew it. He got the support he needed because the science was indisputably the best of its kind. It required certain characteristics of mind: high intelligence, skill in mathematics, a powerful memory, the courage to simplify —even to oversimplify—to make a problem accessible to modeling, and a heroic work ethic. When Pauling had worried a problem long enough, an answer came. It was usually right; and he knew it. He was immensely self-confident. Thereafter he simply pushed his solution. Addressing one of the many investigative boards before which he had, later, to defend himself against charges of Communist affiliation, Pauling once said, eschewing false modesty, “I have, I think, a broader grasp of science as a whole~dash\mathematics, physics, chemistry, biology, and geology (mineralogy)—than any other man in the United States.”

A self-assured genius, then, is confronted, in mid-life, first with the menacing facts of nuclear bomb testing, and second by the left-wing activism of his beloved and admirable wife. He reads some of the literature, thinks the problem through, and decides—that testing must stop. It makes sense! Already a hero, he gets to work and is soon the most famous crusader for a test-ban. Outside the USA, this gets him an avalanche of thanks and love. To the lecture halls packed with admiring scientists are now added public amphitheaters filled with wildly-cheering crowds. His speeches become simpler, even simplistic. There is no place for the nuances, the assessments of all the evidence, upon which his work in chemistry had stood. Being right comes first. And his political enemies lose, in the end, not only for good reasons of science (there is danger in adding fallout to the background radiation, by definition, however trivial the increment) but for complex political ones of which he is probably unaware. A treaty is signed. Pauling receives for this fight his second Nobel—the Peace Prize.

He had overstated the consequences of fallout, and ignored the serious politics of the arms race; but the other side, led by Edward Teller and others, had understated the consequences of fallout and been obsessed with the (real) deceptions of the Soviet Union.

What does such a man do then, when in the course of fighting he discovers that (1) he can sway multitudes; (2) enemies have conspired against him; (3) those enemies are members of elites; and (4) morality and politics are easy, after all? Why, he sees a problem, thinks it through, gathers facts (especially as they come from sources he can trust, e.g., a wonderful wife); he applies his powers of modeling, makes a theory, and then—goes for it! Needed are only self-confidence, an unquenchable thirst for recognition, and a ready audience. All those Pauling had. Thus, Goertzel:

There is a striking contrast between Pauling’s scientific thinking, which was innovative and highly complex, and his political thought, which was simple and predictable. His political speeches were similar to those being given by thousands of other New Left radicals at the same time… . In his scientific work, he sought out difficult unresolved problems. In his political rhetoric, he avoided the difficult issues, such as how to reconcile revolutionary egalitarianism with the need for economic incentives and human rights.

In the final period, vitamin-time, Pauling’s politics were fully integrated with his scientific thinking. Hubris and adulation, however much the latter was deserved, drove him; the desire to make more dazzling discoveries, to be once more the winner, was not to be denied. Taking from a biochemist, Irwin Stone, certain plausible but unproven ideas on the role of vitamin C in the maintenance of bodily functions, Pauling ran with them. No longer did he examine all the evidence, as had been his iron rule in the past. He made a theory based upon a theory, incorporated in it his new abhorrence of elites (in this case, the medical profession), his radical-egalitarian politics, and his genuinely humanitarian instincts. He was convinced that disease, like war, could be ended if people would just look at the logic of things, his way.

Humans cannot make vitamin C—that’s why it is a “vitamin”: it needs to be taken with food. Most other life-forms can make it. How could this have happened? By a gene mutation, somewhere on the synthetic pathway for vitamin C (ascorbic acid). It probably didn’t matter among our remote ancestors: their frugivorous diet provided huge quantities of C. What happens in C deficiency? Scurvy, which, at various stages presents the stigmata of many other diseases! How much C, then, should humans really take in? Well, much more than the government’s minimum daily requirement, more than is needed just to hold off scurvy!

This was the beginning of the megavitamin craze, toward the end of which Pauling treated his wife’s cancer with megadoses of C (she died of cancer) and his own (he died of cancer). In the arguments that occupied his final days, disinterested use of all the evidence, which had so distinguished his early science, had vanished. Pauling’s praxis reverted to the epistemology of politics: put the best possible spin on all results; give opposing claims, but not your own, the most skeptical review; take credit for good happenings; blame the other side for bad ones: that’s the truth.

It may yet turn out, not only that eating large amounts of fresh fruits and vegetables, rich in antioxidant vitamins, does lower a bit the probability of developing some cancers—or a cold—but also that megadoses of C should be everybody’s daily. Given present evidence, however, it does not look that way. For one thing, megadoses have potential dangers. There was and is no unequivocal evidence for large protective effects, much less of cures for any disease—except scurvy. Like his early speculations on immunity, Pauling’s “orthomolecular” medicine is a set of plausible but rather naïve proposals. His war against the Solons of medicine was primarily an emotional and political war. In most of it, there was no sign of that lucid, self-critical, scientific intelligence by which he had become the emperor of chemistry.