Linus Pauling

Even though he was raised as a member of the Lutheran Church, he later became a member of the Unitarian Church and declared that he was an atheist, two years before his death.

At the age of forty, he was diagnosed with Bright's disease, a kidney disease.

Linus Pauling was born in Portland, Oregon to Herman Henry William Pauling, a bread salesman and Lucy Isabelle ‘Belle’ Darling. The family lived together in a humble one room apartment.

After his sister Pauline was born, the family moved to Salem, Oregon as his father took up a salesman job at the Skidmore Drug Company.

During his younger days he was a voracious reader and was also fascinated by chemistry experiments, he even set up a laboratory with the help of an older friend.

Before he attended Oregon State University in 1917, he took a number of odd jobs—worked part time at a grocery store, as an apprentice machinist and also set up a photography laboratory with his friends—in order to earn enough money to fund his college expenses.

In 1922, he graduated from the Oregon State University with a degree in chemical engineering, after which he attended the California Institute of Technology.

In 1927, he became the assistant professor of ‘theoretical chemistry’ at the California Institute of Technology and during his five year stay at the institute he published fifty papers and invented the ‘Pauling’s rules’.

In 1930, he travelled to Europe to study the use of ‘electrons’ in ‘diffraction’ and after he returned, he built an instrument called the ‘electron diffraction instrument’ to study the ‘molecular structure’ of chemical substances.

In 1932, he published a paper on the concept of ‘hybridization of atomic orbitals’ and analysed the ‘tetravalency’ of the ‘carbon atom’.

He introduced the concept of ‘electronegativity’ and established the ‘Pauling Electronegativity Scale’, a tool to predict ‘bond between atoms and molecules’.

During the World War II, he did not work on any military projects and refused to work in the ‘Manhattan Project’, a research and development project that produced the first atomic bomb.

Published in 1939, his book ‘The Nature of the Chemical Bond’ is one of the most influential books ever published in the field of chemistry and it has been cited as a reference in many important journals and scientific papers.

He founded the concept of ‘molecular disease’; these discoveries inspired research work on many more such disorders and is the basis of today’s ‘human genome research’.