Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, August 21, 1994 TAG: 9408210006
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A-8 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Associated Press
DATELINE: SAN FRANCISCO LENGTH: Medium
This 20th century Renaissance man in a floppy beret was also "the greatest of teachers . . . a fantastic showman," one colleague fondly recalled Saturday.
Pauling died late Friday at the age of 93 at his home in Big Sur, 110 miles south of San Francisco. A son and daughter were with him, said Stephen Lawson of the Linus Pauling Institute of Science and Medicine at Palo Alto.
An advocate of vitamin C as a life-extender, Pauling had maintained a vigorous schedule until recent months, when the prostate cancer diagnosed in 1991 began to take a toll, said Dorothy Munro, a spokeswoman for the Pauling Institute.
"It may be that my vitamin C put the cancer off by 20 years," he once said. He took 18,000 milligrams of vitamin C a day; the federally recommended daily allowance for adults is 60 milligrams.
Pauling, an outgoing man with bright blue eyes, often wore a floppy beret on his white hair and displayed a wry wit. He said once that the government's recommended daily allowance of vitamin C "only keeps you from dying of scurvy."
He is the only person to win two unshared Nobel Prizes - first in chemistry, and later the Nobel Peace Prize for his work for nuclear disarmament.
Pauling made contributions to all areas of chemistry, had opinions about everything and was often way ahead of his time, said Dr. James Collman, professor of chemistry at Stanford University.
"Any one of those things a great scientist would be pleased to have as his or her accomplishment during their lifetimes, and he had many. There's just no one quite like him."
Pauling was a child of 11 or 12 when he first sought to understand the universe. "Life has always been something of a puzzle, which I'm always trying to figure out," he told The Associated Press in a 1991 interview.
He won his first Nobel Prize in 1954 for his research on the nature of the chemical bond that holds molecules together and its use in understanding the structure of complex compounds.
"I consider him to be certainly the most influential chemists of this century, but he really belongs among the most extraordinary scientists of all time," said Dr. Henry Taube, professor emeritus of chemistry at Stanford.
"In a sense, he put structural chemistry on the map. He made some of the most important contributions to this field, and his ideas on the structures of proteins stand today," Taube said.
Pauling also worked to unravel DNA, the molecular blueprint of life.
by CNB