The award of two Nobel Prizes, the first for chemistry at Stockholm in 1954 and the second for peace at Oslo in 1963, measures the eminence of Linus Pauling as a scientist and as a world citizen. Festschrifts honoured his sixty-fifth,¹ eightieth,² and ninetieth birthday,³ with autobiographical contributions by Pauling himself in two of these, and in the Annual Review of Physical Chemistry series (1965). Pauling was interviewed many times on his scientific and social concerns, and a selection of his replies and his occasional writings has appeared recently,⁴ as well as a collection of tributes to him to the Journal of Chemical Education (No. 1, 1996). Substantial biographies of Pauling are available, one by a philosopher,⁵ a second coauthored by a sociologist and a psychologist,⁶ and another, the most comprehensive, balanced, and informed of the three, by a medical writer turned academic administrator.⁷ The second biography curiously concludes with eight interpretations from expert psychologists of the replies Pauling had given to Rorschach ink-blot tests in the 1960s, when his biochemical view of mental disorders was at odds with standard psychoanalytical thinking. Only one of the experts suspects what is obvious to the layman, that Pauling was joking, making up answers based on Freudian or other psychology.⁸

Chemistry students of my generation were inspired by Pauling's The Nature of the Chemical Bond (1939), which brought a new ordering to theories of molecular structure and chemical bonding, and answered 'No!' to a popular examination question of the time, 'Is inorganic chemistry a closed and finished subject?' The book pointed the way ahead to the physical inorganic chemistry of the postwar period, but Pauling's interests had moved on by that time to molecular biology, then to the dire consequences of radioactive fallout from nuclear explosions in the biosphere, and finally, to orthomolecular medicine.