2-25-08

Media Release

OSU Celebrates Linus Pauling and Release of New U.S. Postal Service Stamp

CORVALLIS, Ore. – Ninety-one years ago, a young man from Portland enrolled at Oregon Agricultural College, predecessor of Oregon State University, to begin studies in chemical engineering. Those studies would start him on a path that 37 years later would take him to Stockholm, Sweden, where he would be awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry.

By the time Linus Pauling died in 1994, he had become not only the first person ever to win a second individual Nobel, but one of the most decorated and respected scientists of the 20th century. The U.S. Postal Service will recognize Pauling’s lifetime of achievements on March 6 with a new set of “American Scientists” stamps honoring Pauling, biochemist Gerti Cory, astronomer Edwin Hubble and physicist John Bardeen.

As part of the official release of the new stamps, OSU will host a March 6 celebration at noon in the Memorial Union Ballroom featuring Linus Pauling Jr. and Corvallis Postmaster John Herrington, who will stamp envelopes with a commemorative postmark designed specially for the occasion. Corvallis Post Office staff will be on site to offer the American Scientists stamps for sale between noon and 2 p.m. The event is free and open to the public.

Though Pauling earned his bachelors degree in 1922 and spent the rest of his academic and professional life at California universities and research centers, his fondness for OSU – the place where he met his wife of nearly 60 years, Ava Helen Pauling – never waned. In 1986, he donated his papers and those of his wife to OSU; the collection numbers more than 500,000 items.

Two years after his death, the Linus Pauling Institute, which he helped to create, was moved from California to OSU, where it continues Pauling’s scientific legacy through internationally acclaimed research on vitamins and essential minerals. The institute was named a center of excellence for complementary and alternative medicine by the National Institutes of Health in 2003 – a status renewed recently with a $6-million grant from the NIH.

Pauling’s legacy lives on in a multitude of other ways at OSU, as well, from the annual Ava Helen and Linus Pauling Memorial Lecture for World Peace to the Linus Pauling Chair in Chemical Engineering, held now by Dr. Philip Harding.

“Linus Pauling placed an enormous amount of trust in OSU to serve as the guardian of his legacy,” said Cliff Mead, head of Special Collections for the OSU Valley Library and co-author, with Pauling biographer Thomas Hager, of Linus Pauling, Scientist and Peacemaker, due out in paperback next month from the OSU Press. “We take that responsibility very seriously, and honor the faith he invested in OSU through our efforts to make his knowledge available to scholars around the world.”