Linus Pauling Commemorative Ceramic Mural
While in Palo Alto for the holidays, I stumbled on a piece of public art I didn’t previously know about: the Linus Pauling Commemorative Ceramic Mural, created in 2000 by Ross Drago.
It’s a set of individually decorated ceramic tiles, installed on a wall along the sidewalk on the north side of Oregon Expressway, near its corner with El Camino Real. It’s not an area that attracts much foot traffic. If you’re driving by you won’t see it behind the oleander bushes that separate the sidewalk from the street, although there are some more purely decorative tiles further along the wall that are more visible. So to find it you either have to be randomly exploring (as I was) or know that it’s there and go out of your way to see it.
In case you’re unfamiliar with Pauling’s history, I’ve summarized some of it below from his Wikipedia article. Linus Pauling (1901–1994) was a pioneer of both quantum chemistry and molecular biology who won the Nobel Prize twice: once for chemistry in 1954, and the Nobel Peace Prize in 1962. He and Marie Curie are the only people to have won it twice in different areas. He dropped out of high school in Oregon to enter college at age 15, and was only given an honorary high school diploma after the second of his two Nobel Prizes. After a 1925 PhD in physical chemistry from Caltech, and a postdoctoral visit to Europe, he began his work on the quantum nature of atoms, molecules, and atomic bonds, and returned to a faculty position at Caltech.
From the 1930s to the 1950s, Pauling’s interests shifted to the use of X-ray crystallography to study the three-dimensional structure of biomolecules. He determined the structure of hemoglobin, and identified alpha-helices and beta-sheets as common motifs in protein structure. He was close to understanding the helical structure of DNA, but incorrectly throught it was a triple helix, and ended up beaten to the punch by Watson, Crick, Wilkins, and Franklin. His work from this period also included early recognition of the importance of complementarity in antibody-antigen binding and in DNA replication, and the recognition that abnormalities in protein structure could cause diseases such as sickle-cell anemia.
During World War II, Pauling was invited to be part of the Manhattan Project. He declined, but did work on scientific instrumentation, synthetic blood for transfusions, explosives, and rocket propellants for the war effort. Immediately following the war he became a prominent anti-nuclear and peace activist, for which he was given the Nobel Peace Prize. All of this activity, unrelated to the topic of his academic appointment, caused the Caltech Board of Trustees to remove Pauling from his department chair position in 1958, in response to which he resigned his faculty position. After working briefly for a political think tank and then for the University of California, San Diego, he moved to Palo Alto in 1969 to become a professor of chemistry at Stanford University.
In the 1970s, Pauling became famous yet again, for his controversial advocacy of vitamin C megadoses as a treatment for atherosclerosis and to prevent the common cold. He founded the Linus Pauling Institute of Science and Medicine, originally in Menlo Park just north of Palo Alto. Pauling lived in Big Sur in his retirement, and died there in 1994. After his death the institute he founded moved to Oregon State University, where it continues to exist.
When I mentioned the mural to a friend who lives nearby, he recalled that Pauling did some of his vitamin-related work in an office at the location of the mural. There was nothing about this in Wikipedia, but according to a 1996 story in the Palo Alto Weekly, the Linus Pauling Institute’s offices on Page Mill near El Camino were zoned for residential uses in 1993, leading the institute to move to Oregon State in 1996. Page Mill and Oregon Expressway are the same road, changing names at the crossing with El Camino, and some residences are visible in the photo above, on the other side of the wall holding the mural. The south side of Oregon is business property, and across El Camino are a shopping center and some soccer fields, so this is the only location that matches the description. I suspect that my friend is correct and that the Weekly got the street name wrong.
Some of the key milestones of Pauling’s life, including his work on atomic bonds, a protein alpha-helix, his peace and anti-nuclear activism, and his time at Caltech, are clearly visible in the tiles of the mural. At least one tile mentions vitamin C, but with an abstract rather than repesentational design. The portrait of Pauling himself, in a tile next to the title tile, appears to be modeled after several photos of Pauling wearing his habitual beret taken late in his life, in the 1980s. At least one tile appears to have fallen and become lost or destroyed. My photos here show the tiles in left-to-right order, but it is not obvious to me whether they were intended to follow any sort of logical or chronological order.