THE DANCING MOLECULE: LINUS PAULING AND THE ARCHITECTURE OF MATTER (en Inglés)
Reseña del libro "THE DANCING MOLECULE: LINUS PAULING AND THE ARCHITECTURE OF MATTER (en Inglés)"
He is the only person ever to win two Nobel Prizes that he did not have to share with anybody. He worked out why atoms hold together at all. He found the shape a protein folds into, and got it right while the best crystallographers in Britain were getting it wrong. He proved that a disease could live inside a single misspelled molecule, and opened the door to molecular medicine. He then spent the last three decades of his life telling anyone who would listen to take rather a lot of vitamin C. Most books about Linus Pauling choose one of those men and quietly bury the other. This one refuses. It argues that there was never more than one Pauling, and that the same restless habit of mind produced both the alpha helix and the megadose: an unmatched gift for stepping sideways out of a problem, paired with an almost complete inability to step back in. The title comes from his most beautiful idea. Benzene, he showed, does not flicker between two structures the way chemists had assumed. It is a blend of structures, none of which the molecule ever actually occupies. The dancing molecule does not dance. Understanding why that is not a cheat, and why Soviet chemistry once put the idea on trial for it, turns out to be the shortest route into the strange business of what science is allowed to say exists. Here are the crystals and the war work and the fallout petitions, the passport the State Department withheld, the night he spent stranded on a cliff above the Pacific, the ridiculed model of the atomic nucleus that anticipated a line of research now being pursued in earnest, and the long unhappy quarrel with the Mayo Clinic in which Pauling was right about the method and wrong about the medicine. No mathematics. Considerable affection. Very little forgiveness for committees. Keywords: Linus Pauling, chemical bond, molecular biology, history of science, vitamin C, Nobel Prize, scientific controversy