Getting your questions ready
Getting your questions ready
Beat the crowd
10 questions No timer
60 free Linus Pauling trivia questions with answers — science & nature quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
This Linus Pauling trivia quiz covers the only person ever to win two unshared Nobel Prizes, one for chemistry and one for peace. The easy questions handle the Nobels, the chemical bond, the alpha helix, Portland and vitamin C. From there it moves through the life: the drugstore father, the boy who left high school without a diploma, the home-economics class where he met his wife, the year with Sommerfeld, Bohr and Schrodinger, and the falling-out with Oppenheimer. The harder end covers electronegativity and hybridization, resonance in benzene, 3.7 residues per turn, the triple helix he got wrong, the passport the State Department withheld, sickle cell anaemia as a molecular disease, the oxygen meter that ended up in incubators, the petition handed to Hammarskjold, the debate with Teller, the libel suit he lost, orthomolecular medicine and the Mayo Clinic trials that sank vitamin C. Every answer was checked against Pauling's encyclopaedia entry before publishing and the supporting sentence is stored with each question. Our chemistry and famous scientists quizzes are the natural next stop.
30 of 60 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Pauling's second Nobel Prize, awarded for 1962, was in which category?
Peace
He is the only person to have won two unshared Nobel Prizes.
Q 02Pauling is one of only two people to win Nobel Prizes in two different fields. Who is the other?
Marie Curie
Sanger and Bardeen each won twice, but in the same field.
Q 03In which city was Pauling born in 1901?
Portland
February 28, his birthday, is Linus Pauling Day in Oregon.
Q 04What kind of business did Pauling's father Herman open in Lake Oswego, Oregon?
A drugstore
He died of a perforated ulcer in 1910, when Linus was nine.
Q 05As teenagers Pauling and a friend set up 'Palmon Laboratories' offering local dairies what service?
Butterfat testing
The dairymen would not trust two boys with the job and the business failed.
Q 06Pauling left high school without a diploma because he lacked two required courses in what?
American history
The school gave him an honorary diploma 45 years later, after his two Nobel Prizes.
Q 07Pauling entered which college at 15, then known as an agricultural college?
Oregon State
He founded its chapter of the Delta Upsilon fraternity and taught a course he had only just passed himself.
Q 08Pauling met his future wife, Ava Helen Miller, while teaching a course for students of what?
Home economics
They married in 1923 and stayed together until her death in 1981.
Q 09Pauling's 1922 bachelor's degree from Oregon was in what subject?
Chemical engineering
He then went to Caltech to study crystal structures by X-ray diffraction.
Q 10Pauling's Caltech PhD research used X-ray diffraction to determine the structure of what?
Crystals
He published seven papers on mineral crystal structures and graduated summa cum laude in 1925.
Q 11On his 1926 Guggenheim Fellowship Pauling studied under Sommerfeld, Bohr and whom in Zurich?
Erwin Schrodinger
In Zurich he also learned of the Heitler-London quantum treatment of the hydrogen molecule.
Q 12Which concept, with its numerical scale for the elements, did Pauling introduce in 1932?
Electronegativity
The scale predicts how ionic or covalent a bond between two atoms will be.
Q 13Which idea about mixing s and p orbitals did Pauling lay out in the 1932 paper he considered his most important?
Hybridization
It explained the four equivalent bonds of carbon in methane.
Q 21How did Pauling describe losing the race for the structure of DNA?
His life's biggest disappointment
He blamed misleading density data and the lack of good X-ray photographs.
Q 22Why did the State Department withhold Pauling's passport in 1952?
Suspected Communist sympathies
The legend that this cost him the DNA structure is false: he got the passport back within weeks and toured English labs anyway.
Q 23Which Pauling assistant, standing in for his boss, saw Rosalind Franklin's DNA images at a 1952 conference?
Robert Corey
Q 14Pauling's five rules of 1929 help predict the crystal structures of what kind of compounds?
Ionic
The fifth is the 'rule of parsimony'.
Q 15Why did Pauling abruptly end his friendship with Robert Oppenheimer?
He propositioned Ava Helen
Ava Helen refused the invitation to a tryst in Mexico and told her husband at once.
Q 16Pauling wrote most of his famous 1939 textbook while lecturing in 1937-38 at which university?
Cornell
The 1939 book was cited more than 16,000 times in its first thirty years.
Q 17Pauling's first Nobel Prize, in 1954, was for research into the nature of what?
The chemical bond
The citation added 'its application to the elucidation of the structure of complex substances'.
Q 18Pauling showed benzene was a superposition of Kekule's two structures, not a flip between them. What was this named?
Resonance
Like hybridization and polar bonding, it combines several electronic structures into one intermediate result.
Q 19Pauling's 1951 alpha helix had an unorthodox non-integer number of residues per turn. How many?
3.7
The insight rested on the planar nature of the peptide bond, which Bragg's Cambridge team had missed.
Q 20Pauling's mistaken 1953 model of DNA had how many strands?
Three
It also had neutral phosphate groups, which conflicted with DNA being an acid.
Pauling himself, once his passport was restored, chose not to visit Franklin's lab.
Q 24Pauling's 1949 paper showed sickle cell anaemia was caused by an abnormal what?
Haemoglobin
Electrophoresis showed a modified haemoglobin in patients' red blood cells.
Q 25Pauling and Emile Zuckerkandl proposed which idea about mutations accumulating at a steady rate?
The molecular clock
It grew out of his interest in the mutations caused by nuclear fallout.
Q 26Pauling's 'close-packed spheron model' of 1965 was a theory of what?
The atomic nucleus
He built nuclei from clusters such as deuterons and alpha particles and kept at it until his death.
Q 27Oppenheimer invited Pauling to head which division of the Manhattan Project, an offer he declined?
Chemistry
He did not want to uproot his family, but worked on 14 wartime research contracts anyway.
Q 28Pauling's wartime oxygen meter, designed for submarines and aircraft, was later adapted by Beckman for what?
Incubators for premature babies
The National Defense Research Committee had asked for a reliable instrument in October 1940.
Q 29Pauling's wartime group developed 'oxypolygelatin' as a substitute for what?
Human blood plasma
The 1942 proposal was titled 'The Chemical Treatment of Protein Solutions in the Attempt to Find a Substitute for Human Serum for Transfusions'.
Q 30How many scientists signed the anti-testing petition Pauling gave the UN in January 1958?
11,021
They came from fifty countries; Barry Commoner helped circulate it.