A Recent Meeting Makes Me Reminisce about My First Opinion Column

Every year the California State University system holds an annual meeting of their organization that supports faculty and students involve in the pursuit of knowledge that broadly falls into the umbrella term biotechnology.?This year I was reminded of my many years attending, and of my inspiration to start writing in a popular form.?I wrote an opinion column for the local Solano County newspaper for years, and the columns covered local politics and often science.?The constant deadlines and suggestions from the editor helped me convert my academic and sequential writing into a popular and journalistic style – and I hope that I’ve retained some of what I learned there these many years hence. ?CSUPERB played a role in my writing journey.??????

Dr. Stephen Dahms from San Diego State University and Dr. Crellin Pauling from San Francisco State University founded this organization with the clever acronym CSUPERB, the California State University Program for Education and Research in Biotechnology 35 years ago.?https://www.calstate.edu/impact-of-the-csu/research/csuperb

???????????Every year they are nice enough to invite faculty from the community colleges that serve as feeders to the CSU system, and I attend most years.?I attended this year – the first in-person post-COVID year.???I’ve been going to these meetings for a while.?In the old days they held them at the conference center on Cal Poly Pomona – this was the former site of the Kellogg’s (of corn flakes fame) horse ranch.?They the conference outgrew the site and now alternates between Northern (typically in Santa Clara) and Southern California (typically in Anaheim).?This year’s conference was the 35th.?I know that I didn’t attend the first, but I may have attended the fourth.?I distinctly remember attending in 1996 when the conference arranged a pre-conference class on Good Manufacturing Practice; I was on sabbatical building my biotech program and Genentech’s staff had told me that this was important.?The awards are named for CSU faculty who helped launch the organization, and I knew them, but the young Assistant Professors did not.?The graduate student teaching award is named for the late San Francisco State Biologist Crellin Pauling.?

???????????This year his widow and his son gave out the award.?I knew Kay Pauling since she had taught in the community college system (at Foothill College on the Peninsula), and we had worked on several (unsuccessful) grant proposals together.?This year I renewed the acquaintance and reminded her that the failed grant proposals were important – they became the national consortium of biotech faculty Bio-Link which ran for decades and continues at the organization InnovATEBio.?I told a few stories of Crellin, who was always nice to me, and of his father Linus,.?Linus Pauling might have been the greatest scientist of the twentieth century, and he could have been arrogant, but he wasn’t.?He had no ego – he had always been the smartest person in any room that he ever occupied and he didn’t have anything to prove.?And he was nice to a very young graduate student in the 1970s.?

???????????Linus Pauling is as famous for his wrong ideas as for his right ideas.?He proposed a model for DNA, a triple helix, that turned out to be wrong.?And he proposed an explanation for antibody formation that turned out to be wrong – but I have to say that after he explained his reasoning to me it was so logical that I thought to myself, “that’s the way nature should work – it doesn’t – but it should.”?And these thoughts reminded me of my formal journalistic career.?

??????????So in 1994 our local newspaper, the Fairfield-Suisun Daily Republic, approached me to write an opinion column.?They had been approached by the local Democratic Congressman who had been getting pummeled by their conservative community columnists (and by the conservative reporter on the front page) and he asked for me by name.?In the end I wrote every week for six years – 300 columns – on deadline week in and week out. This experience proved to be very valuable for me – I transformed my academic writing into a more popular style.?And I learned that in journalism you place everything that you want to say up front – your reading sipping their coffee on a Sunday morning will move on if you haven’t grabbed them in the first few sentences.?Rather than jumping into politics, I wrote the following tribute to Linus Pauling on his death.?I added my email at the end – I hadn’t seen anyone do that before.?And notice that the email is AOL – that dates the piece too.

???????????Writing this reminds me of my weekly writing process back-in-the-day.?Sometimes the words flow, and sometimes you just have to grind it out.?I would block out the content, and then fill in.?Sometimes the column wandered into an area where you hadn’t planned.?And sometimes, and these occasions were sweet, everything would suddenly fall into place in the most satisfying way.?Those days made everything worthwhile.?

???????????I don’t remember the process of this particular first column.?I think that it flowed pretty easily.?But now reading it decades later, it remains satisfying.?Here it is from August 1994.???????

THE PASSING OF LINUS PAULING

Two time Nobel Laureate Linus Pauling died last week.?Although newspapers and magazines published a few retrospective articles that examined his life, no article captured the impact of this remarkable person on the history of science and on the history of the United States. Pauling was the Nobel Laureate whose genius other Nobel Laureates most respected (and feared).??His work influenced an entire generation of chemists and biologists at a critical time in the history of these fields.

Linus Pauling received his first Nobel prize in Chemistry. He determined the distances between the atoms within a protein molecule, and used this information to work out one of the fundamental structures of proteins, the alpha helix. Linus discovered the alpha helix while home with a cold one day (this was before his Vitamin C days).?He became bored with mystery novels, so he sketched the structure of a protein on a piece of paper.?He discovered that he could fold the paper protein model into a helix.?(Experimental studies later confirmed that the structure proposed by this afternoon's brilliant flash of insight is a dominant feature of proteins). Jim Watson and Francis Crick later used this model building approach to discover the structure of the genetic material DNA.?(I recommend the book The Double Helix by Jim Watson to get a feeling for how Linus Pauling's influence dominated the most important discovery of the 20th century.?The BBC made this story into a movie, The Race for the Double Helix, that shows on A & E.)

In 1962, the Norwegian Academy awarded Pauling the Nobel Peace prize for his successful campaign to ban atmospheric nuclear tests.?This action was not popular in the United States.?Linus Pauling had been vilified too often for his "extreme" political views.?By contemporary standards, Pauling's "radical" political efforts seem logical.?He argued in favor of a ban on above-ground nuclear testing that the U.S. government later embraced.?We now recognize that a Chinese or French atmospheric test places detectable amounts of radiation in the U.S. atmosphere.?All of us now embrace his arguments against cold war hostilities.?During the McCarthy era, politicians and newspapers attacked these highly visible stands.?No contemporary article has captured the venom of his critics.?On one TV talk show a politician asked him, "Why do you always share the same opinions as the Kremlin?"?He was vilified from all directions.?Other scientists did not believe that scientists should get involved in politics, and national figures argued that scientists should stay out of public affairs.?At Cal Tech, it is a tradition to hold a large party when a Faculty member receives a Nobel Prize.?According to a friend of mine who taught there at the time, Pauling received no party for his Peace prize and few faculty members approached him to congratulate him.?

In my career I've had the opportunity to hear many Nobel Laureates lecture, but Linus Pauling impressed me most. In a lecture on immunology, he talked about his earlier ideas on the structure of antibodies (the protein molecules that circulate through the blood and lead to the destruction of bacteria or viruses).?His ideas turned out to be wrong.?When he explained the reasoning steps that he used to reach his conclusion, it seemed so clear.?Even his wrong ideas seemed logical.?He told us, "develop a lot of ideas - some may be wrong, but many more will be right."???

Linus Pauling leaves behind a giant scientific legacy.?Although scientists criticize his later work and conclusions on the value of Vitamin C in disease prevention, this does not diminish his earlier accomplishments.?And, privately, many biochemists will take megadoses of Vitamin C every day; Pauling had been right too many times.

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Jim DeKloe teaches Biology at Solano Community College