New postage stamp honoring OSU grad Linus Pauling will be released next week

The U.S. Postal Service will release a new 41-cent stamp honoring Linus Pauling next week at Oregon State University, the two-time Nobel Prize winner's alma mater.

The chemist and peace activist will be one of four researchers in the "American Scientists" series.

Ronald C. Anderson, customer relations coordinator for the Portland postal district, said he believes Pauling would be only the third Oregonian pictured on a stamp.

Dr. John McLoughlin and the Rev. Jason Lee, who helped shape the state in its earliest days, both received the honor in 1948, Anderson said.

Cliff Mead, head of special collections at OSU, which houses the 500,000-item Ava Helen and Linus Pauling Papers, said people had lobbied for a Pauling stamp since his death in 1994.

"This has been a long time coming," he added.

The stamp will be released during a celebration from noon to 2 p.m. on March 6 in the Memorial Union Ballroom. Pauling's son, Linus Pauling Jr., will attend and people can get envelopes stamped with a postmark designed for the occasion.

Standing in line at the Corvallis post office Monday, Del Weeks said the Pauling stamp was a great idea.

"I'm glad he's getting the recognition," Weeks said. "He's got the middle school named after him. He deserved it."

About half of the people contacted in line didn't know who Pauling was.

"I'm a little bit surprised. … Maybe this will help get his name out there a little bit more," said Christine Anderson, a technician at the OSU Lab Animal Resource Center.

The Lab Animal Resource Center provides critters used in research on vitamins and essential minerals at the university's Linus Pauling Institute. The institute just received word that $6 million in funding was renewed by the National Institutes of Health.

Along with the scientist's portrait, the Pauling stamp features sickle cell anemia molecules. Pauling's research on sickle cell anemia combined medicine, biology and chemistry.

"He jumped over several scientific boundaries," Mead said.

Pauling also crossed over from pure science to peace activism. Though he won the Nobel Prize in chemistry in 1954 for his work on the chemical bond, Pauling received the 1962 Nobel Peace Prize for years of activism against nuclear testing.

The stamp might be considered even more remarkable considering that Pauling's activism brought him much criticism from mainstream America during the Cold War. Life magazine called the 1962 Nobel Peace Prize a "weird insult" from Norway.

Pauling, who graduated in 1922 from what was then known as Oregon Agricultural College, is the only man to win two unshared Nobel Prizes.

The other scientists honored in the set of "American Scientists" stamps are biochemist Gerti Cory, astronomer Edwin Hubble and physicist John Bardeen.

While stamps honoring individual Oregonians are rare, the state's locales have been featured more often, Anderson said. Those have included the Columbia River Gorge, Crater Lake, and just last year, the Umpqua River Lighthouse near Reedsport.

This June, the U.S. Postal Service will launch a 60-stamp series featuring flags of the United States, including Oregon's state flag. The first set features the stars and stripes and the state flags of Alabama through Delaware. Besides a flag, each stamp will picture an everyday activity from that place. The series continues through 2010.

Kyle Odegard covers Oregon State University. He can be contacted at kyle.odegard@lee.net or 758-9523. To read his blog on recollections of Ava Helen Pauling, by Elizabeth MacDonald, go to http://www.gazettetimes.com.