“Dear Dr. Pauling”
The correspondence of a century
Curator Cliff Mead will let you hold the satin shoes Ava Helen wore in 1923 when she wed Linus. He’ll also show you an ordinary-looking navy-blue sport coat made extraordinary by its one-time wearer. “Linus Pauling’s DNA,” Mead says, “is on this jacket.”
The genetic traces of an entire era are, both literally and figuratively, all over the collection, observes author Thomas Hager, whose most recent book is The Demon Under the Microscope. Historic forensics are especially evident in the correspondence, which comprises about two-thirds of the holdings. Meticulously filed in towering cabinets of gunmetal grey are personal letters from every U.S. president since Harry Truman, from senators, congressmen and world leaders, from movie stars, novelists, philosophers and musicians. With great care, Mead will take out letter after letter, typed or handwritten, bearing the salutation, “Dear Dr. Pauling” or, now and then, “My dear Pauling.” There are letters penned by Ho Chi Minh and Marlon Brando, Jawaharlal Nehru and Frank Sinatra, Eleanor Roosevelt and Lena Horne. Signatures of such luminaries as Robert F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King Jr., Henry Kissinger and Nikita Khrushchev are sandwiched in 385 archival-quality boxes protected by massive steel shelving units.
Along with letters from the century’s most prominent scientists — giants like Einstein, Oppenheimer, Watson and Crick — are notes from its most exalted humanitarians, Albert Schweitzer among them. With the lofty coexists the quirky. Letters from Jack Kevorkian, the notorious “Dr. Death,” are one example. In the collection’s files are exchanges with:
- Odd Hassel, Norwegian physical chemist and Nobel laureate
- Carleton Gajdusek, American physician, researcher and Nobel laureate
- The Institute for Optimum Nutrition and the Institute for Orthomolecular Medicine
- William Astbury, English physicist and molecular biologist
It seems fitting, given the extent of Pauling’s correspondence, that the U.S. Postal Service should honor him with a stamp, as it did in March when it rolled out its “American Scientists” commemorative series. The stamp celebrates his discovery of the molecular nature of sickle cell anemia.