Linus Pauling at Oregon State
Linus Carl Pauling, Oregon State’s most famous graduate, was born in 1901 in Portland, Oregon. His father, a druggist, died in 1911, leaving his wife, a son (Linus), and two daughters with little income. Linus’s mother, Belle, turned to running a boarding house to make ends meet, but this left very little money for anything else. Despite pressure from his mother to take a good-paying job after high school, Linus persisted in his desire to attend Oregon Agricultural College to major in chemical engineering, which he was convinced would provide an interesting career.
He found instead that his interests widened and his scientific mind expanded to require much more, and with the help of professors in chemical engineering, he chose the path to graduate school and a life devoted to science and good causes. He is the only person to win two solo Nobel prizes. To sum Linus Pauling’s career, Stephen F. Mason, in Chemical Society Reviews, wrote
Pauling worked in so many different fields that he had no single contemporary peer in chemistry. Biochemistry, molecular biology, and geochemistry, he held, were all chemical sciences, alongside the mainstream subdivisions, and so too were the nutritional and pharmaceutical aspects of medicine. The range of his major contributions over these sciences mark him out as the greatest chemist of the century.
As Linus wrote much later, “Only when I began studying chemical engineering at Oregon Agricultural College did I realize that I myself might discover something new about the nature of the world, and also have some new ideas that contributed to a better understanding of the universe.”
This website focuses on Linus’s formative college years, which laid the foundation for what he would later become. For those interested in more information on his science and accomplishments, see the link “To Learn More/Sources.”
