Ava Helen and Linus Pauling near the beach at La Jolla, 1969.
[Pauling at UCSD, part 3 of 3]
In early 1969, Linus Pauling announced that he had accepted an appointment at Stanford University, and that he would be leaving the University of California, San Diego, where he had been on faculty for the past two academic years. In making this announcement, Pauling explained his feeling that Stanford would be a better fit for his orthomolecular research, in part because of the Palo Alto school’s well-established department of psychiatry. (Stanford was also significantly closer to the couple’s home at Deer Flat Ranch, which pleased Ava Helen Pauling immensely.)
Though Pauling and his colleagues had made significant progress on their psychiatric studies at UCSD, one problem that they had yet to conquer was the ability to control for other variables – especially those introduced by diet – that could contribute to variations in the levels of nutrients observed in test subjects’ bodies. Because of this, the group was not able to accurately track what Pauling called “individual gene defects.”
Moving the project to Stanford meant that the researchers would be afforded the opportunity to work with mental health patients at Sonoma State Hospital, all of whom were consuming the same diet, as provided by the Vivonex Corporation. Intrigued, Pauling coordinated with Vivonex to obtain copies of the diet that the company had tailored, the idea being that his control group could follow it as well.
By now, Pauling and his team felt confident that they had uncovered evidence of abnormal patterns of ascorbic acid elimination in individuals suffering from acute and chronic schizophrenia. He and his colleagues planned to continue their analyses of these abnormalities as they moved toward the identification of genetic defects, the creation of diagnostic tools, and the promotion of effective therapies for sufferers of mental disease.
San Francisco Chronicle, May 27, 1969
Pauling’s final act at UCSD was appropriately radical. Shortly after the student occupation of People’s Park at UC-Berkeley and the subsequent death of James Rector, a Berkeley student who was shot by Alameda County Sherrifs in May 1969, UCSD students and faculty gathered to decide how they would respond to the tragedy at their sister school. Most of the faculty in attendance expressed a desire to simply mourn the death and voice their solidarity with Berkeley, but not to disrupt daily operations.
Pauling, on the other hand, stood in front of the hundreds of students who had gathered and encouraged them to go on strike in protest of recent actions taken by the National Guard, the police, and Governor Ronald Reagan. In so doing, Pauling claimed that the violence at Berkeley was
part of a pattern—the pattern of the war in Vietnam, the increasing militarism of the United States, the growth of the military-industrial complex, the suppression of the human rights of young men and others.
He further explained that those who held power would do whatever was necessary to protect and move forward with a deeply cynical plan. And in detailing his point of view, Pauling made it clear where he stood with regard to the next appropriate actions.
The plan is the continued economic exploitation of human beings. The purpose of the plan, which has been successful year after year, is to make the rich richer and the poor poorer…Everyone in the whole University of California, all the students, the faculties, the employees, should strike against the immorality and injustice of the act at Berkeley.
Less than a week later, Pauling participated in a march and rally at the State Capital in Sacramento, where he gave an impromptu speech that echoed his remarks in San Diego. “The university is not the property of Governor Reagan and the other regents,” he exhorted. “We must protest until the police and the National Guard are removed from the campus of the University of California…the university belongs to us, the students, the faculty, and the people.” So concluded Pauling’s final remarks on the UC system and its regents while a member of the UC faculty.
Although Pauling never worked within the University of California again, his short time at UCSD was undeniably productive and useful. For one, his two years in La Jolla marked a reemergence, of sorts, into the scientific realm following his frustrating tenure at the Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions.
UCSD also provided the opportunity for Pauling to incubate his partnership with Arthur Robinson. This relationship later proved key to the creation of the Institute for Orthomolecular Medicine, known today as the Linus Pauling Institute. The collaboration also provided a strong foundation from which Pauling worked doggedly to expand his research on all manner of topics related to orthomolecular medicine. Though the work ultimately proved to be very controversial, as he left La Jolla, Pauling had every reason to be optimistic about the bold new direction that his research was taking.
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