Linus Pauling was born in 1901 to a pharmist in the suburb of Portland, Oregon. When Linus was nine, his father died, leaving Linus, his two younger sisters and their mother to fend for themselves. This started a long 15 years when Pauling tried to pursue his education, while finding means to support his mother and sisters. By the time he was twelve he was a freshman at Washington High School in Portland. .
In November of 1950, he was scheduled to appear before the Senate Investigating Committee on Education of the State of California. He testified for over two hours, swearing that he had , in no way, been influenced by communism.
This was just after Linus had used the idea gained from his paper model to work out the structure of many different protein molecules. His proposed structure was not accepted by the scientific world, especially by scientists in England. In January of 1952, Pauling requested a passport to attend a meeting in England to defend his ideas. The passport was denied. This pattern of Pauling requesting a passport to attend various conferences and the state department denying the application continued for over two years. .
In April 1954, he requested a passport again and was denied it once again. On November 3 1954, he learnt that he had been awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry. He applied immediately for a passport and for weeks he heard nothing. On November 27, finally, his passport did arrive. .
The year he had spent in getting his passport had greatly caused him a lot. In 1948 he was already working toward the structure of DNA. By the early 1950's, Rosalind Franklin had already taken the sharpest photographs of DNA at that time. These contributed to Watson and Crick in their discovery of the DNA double helix. If Pauling had attended the spring 1952 conference, he would have seen the photographs and possibly could deduce the struture of DNA before Watson and Crick. It is sure that the lack of this information contributed to his proposed structure which states that DNA was a single helix.