Subject: LINUS PAULING

From: "E. Lewars" <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 30 Aug 1994 15:00:10 -0400

Here's another tribute to the late Linus Pauling, by another great, the
science and science fiction writer Isaac Asimov, who died in 1992.
In his eclectic biography *I. Asimov*, Asimov recounts (see also his more
conventional biography, published about 1980) how transformed chemistry
seemed to him when he again took up his Ph.D. research after a hiatus 
engendered by war work: "In September 1946, therefore, I presented myself
at Columbia, ready to go back to work....However, ypu can't go home again.
...while I had been gone, there had been a revolution in chemistry with
the application of quantum mechanics to it, something brought on largely by
the work of the great Linus Pauling....I had not kept up with that change
and was apalled to find that chemistry had turned into Greek for me."
(Asimov did get his Ph.D.)
===
E. Lewars
===

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From: "Peter Shenkin" <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 30 Aug 1994 16:47:50 -0400

On Aug 30,  3:00pm, E. Lewars wrote:
> Subject: CCL:LINUS PAULING
> science and science fiction writer Isaac Asimov...

Something else came up which reminded me of another contribution of
Pauling's which I don't think has been mentioned here:  his identification
of sickle-cell anemia as the first-discovered genetic disease with
a known etiology (a mutation of a GLU to a VAL in the beta-subunit).

Also, the following irreverent ditty was posted in sci.chem by
Mark Schnizius ([email-masked]):

	Sir Linus Pauling lies silent and placid
	From overdosing on ascorbic acid.
	His sickly cells' work on sickle cells ceased,
	Now he is dead, lying Nobel in Peace.

-P.

-- 
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*Peter S. Shenkin, Box 768 Havemeyer Hall, Chemistry, Columbia Univ.,*
*New York, NY  10027;     [email-masked];     (212) 854-5143   *
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