| Website of the Week — Linus Pauling Online | |
| Washington, D.C. 24 July 2009 | |
It's time again for our Website of the Week, when we showcase interesting and innovative online destinations.
In recent years, more and more research libraries are using the Internet to share their archive collections, such as the papers and manuscripts of notable scientists.
Pauling, who died in 1994, was a chemist who developed the concept of the molecular cause of disease, and he is one of only two people to have won unshared Nobel Prizes in different fields.
"He won the Nobel chemistry prize in 1954 for his work on the nature of the chemical bond," Peterson said. "Essentially what he did was he formulated the modern scientific understanding of how atoms join together to form molecules. He was also a very prominent peace activist, and he won the [1962] Nobel Peace Prize for his work against above-ground nuclear testing."
Pauling's papers take up 1,800 boxes - more than 1,300 feet of shelf space - and only a small fraction is online, but Chris Peterson and his colleagues have tried to make the site accessible to all curious visitors, not just scholars. For example, there's a detailed chronology of Linus Pauling's life assembled by his biographer, Robert Paradowski.
"And so he gave us permission to put that text online, and we've done so and amplified it with illustrations, and we think that chronology is one of the more important and easily accessible texts on Pauling's life, and we're actually in the process now of translating it into Spanish."
Linus Pauling Online also features a curriculum for both teachers and students, sections on Pauling's work on sickle cell anemia and his efforts to decode the structure of DNA and more. You can also read his research notes in his own hand at Pauling.Library.OregonState.edu, or get the link to this and more than 250 other Websites of the Week from our site, VOAnews.com.
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AHANAOA A. C.
Lic. Nut. Miguel Leopoldo Alvarado
