An annual Linus Pauling Lecture has been established by the Division of Chemistry & Chemical Engineering at California Institute of Technology. Pauling himself gave the first lecture in the series late last month in Pasadena.

Pauling addressed a standingroom- only crowd of Caltech faculty and students in Room 22, Gates Annex, now also known as the Linus Pauling Lecture Hall. First-year chemistry is taught in the hall, and as such, it was the setting for numerous lectures by Pauling during his long career at Caltech.

In his talk, Pauling traced the development of x-ray crystallography, a history in which he played a major role. He arrived at the institute to do his graduate work in 1922, shortly after Caltech chemist Roscoe G. Dickinson had developed a procedure for using x-ray diffraction data to determine the structure of simple crystals. Pauling recalled that Alfred A. Noyes decided that Pauling should work with Dickinson in the then-new ...