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Simon & Schuster, pp 310, Pounds sterling 15.95

IN FEBRUARY 1964 Linus Pauling, newly appointed to the staff of the
Center for Democratic Institutions at an annual salary of $25 000, applied
to the US National Science Foundation for an additional salary of $39 785
a year over the next five years. This was to cover a dazzling portfolio
of projects, ranging from research into ageing, death, anaesthesia, antiferromagnetism,
nuclear fission and the molecular basis of mental deficiency, to the completion
of books on the molecular basis of biological specificity, the chemical
bond theory of metals and ‘science and civilisation’.

As Anthony Serafini observes on the first page of this portrait, Pauling
has always been ‘unshakably confident in his own genius’. One of the most
versatile and influential scientists of this century, Pauling also displayed
a lifelong attachment to rationality. As a child, lying in bed, he was struck
by the halo which appeared above a drawing of the head of Christ. After
investigation, however, he ‘discovered the after-image effects . . . of
the retina and satisfied myself that this was a general natural phenomenon’.
Arrogance was another early quality. Pauling did not receive his diploma
from Washington High School because he refused to take a course in civics.
He told the school administration that he could absorb all the civics he
needed simply through his own reading.

Later in life, the arrogance and the undoubted touch of genius were
to fuel a craving for tension and conflict, not least when this rumbustious
and occasionally rude man bulldozed his way through fields distant from
the chemistry which his critics considered to be his own rightful territory.
Whether in clashes with William Bragg over X-ray crystallography, in his
battles with medical orthodoxy over the efficacy of vitamin C therapy against
cancer, or his crusades against nuclear testing andMcCarthyism, Pauling
manifested a quite unnerving certitudeand Thatcheresque disregardfor even
the remotest possibilitythat he might be wrong.

Two additional characteristics have often enhanced the rancour felt
by Pauling’s enemies. These are his skill as a publicist and his failure
to give what other researchers feel is appropriate credit to their work.
Both qualities are illustrated by the emergence of the widespread but erroneous
belief that Pauling alone linked the great problems of chemical bonding
with the ideas of quantum mechanics. Similarly, the so-called Pauling rules,
which express the various relations between atoms that dictate the stable
forms of a crystalline substance, were largely adumbrated by Bragg and others
before Pauling published them.

Serafini recounts all of these attributes and episodes competently enough,
though with tedious repetitions. The Nature of the Chemical Bond, for example,
is described, inter alia, as ‘his most famous scholarly book’, ‘a classic
in its field’, ‘his magnum opus’ and ‘an epochal book’. Even more maddening
are the points at which Serafini fails to insert essential information or
provide meaningful links for the reader who does not know the story or its
dramatis personae already.

Elsewhere, Serafini refers to an apparently crucial gathering repeatedly
as ‘the meeting’, before identifying it as a Royal Society discussion meeting
(for which the State Departmentrefused Pauling a passport). On page 235,
we learn that among ‘many valuable suggestions’ from Pauling’s protege Arthur
Robinson was ‘an examination of the striking differences between a vitamin
analysis of urine from mentally disturbed subjects and that from ‘normal’
subjects.’ But this is 64 pages after we have heard that metabolic variations
among normal individuals are so wide that this approach is not helpful.

The major criticism of this seriously flawed book is theauthor’s failure
to project at all clearly the intuitive way in which Pauling has always
worked, orto relate this to his antipathytowards religious ideas. On theone
hand, readers are assuredthat Pauling is firmly weddedto objectivity: he
is ‘antimetaphysical’ and ‘a victim tothe dogmatism of science’. Being ’eminently
pragmatic’, he does not qualify as one of history’s greatest thinkers because
he has not, like Einstein or Heisenberg, ‘reached beyond the practical’
and grasped ‘the philosophical, the moral and aesthetic dimension of science’.
Yet a mere 10 pages later, in a passage contrasting Pauling with physicist
John Slater, a plodding, Cartesian calculator, Serafini says the very opposite.
‘In philosophical terms,’ he writes, ‘Pauling was a Hindu mystic or an intuitionist
in the late medieval style of philosopher Meister Eckhart.’

Given the ‘brilliant, undisciplined and rebellious’ nature of its subject,
this is a strangely colourless biography. It also contains explanations
of basic science that are either dull (DNA and all that) or marginally weird
(immunology). But Pauling’s own energy, creativity and idiosyncracy do emerge,
through some occasionally clotted prose, to make this a worthwhile read
for Yuletide relaxation.

Long-standing New Å®ÉúСÊÓƵ readers can have the bonus of reading the
book in light of the highly critical article regarding the Linus Pauling
Institute for Science and Medicine and its president Arthur Robinson which
we published on 28 July 1977. Pauling stoutly defended Robinson in a reply
on 12 January 1978. But as we now know from Serafini, just five months later
he stormed into Robinson’s office, demanded his resignation, and plunged
the institute into legal costs of up to $200 000 a year over five years
of acrimonious litigation. Born into financial hardship, Pauling has always
been good at raising, and spending, money.

Bernard Dixon is European contributing editor of Bio/Technology.