Title: Naturalizing the chemical bond
Description: This dissertation examines the relationship between local scientific cultures, the construction of scientific disciplines, and the bounds of scientific creativity through a detailed study of the early research career of American chemist Linus Pauling (1901-1992). In the years between Linus Pauling's introduction to quantum mechanics in 1927 and his move to defense related research in the wake of World War Two, Pauling and his collaborators at the California Institute of Technology pursued a series of researches that intertwined to form the epochal article series and monograph The Nature of the Chemical Bond (NCB). Viewed from the perspective of the late twentieth-century disciplinary landscape, as they often have been, the coherence and the disciplinary identity of these publications and of the research group that made them possible appear tenuous and confused. They present a loose assembly of what are now x-ray crystallography, quantum chemistry, electron diffraction, and molecular biology. This thesis argues that such an eclectic reading of NCB overlooks not only the concerted effort involved in defining new disciplines and establishing their claims to specific experimental and theoretical practices but also the often elaborate projections through which scientists lend their research temporary coherence, meaning, and significance while it is still underway.

While would be practitioners of quantum chemistry and molecular biology appropriated aspects of Pauling's researches to aid them in defining and legitimating these nascent fields, Pauling proposed an alternative fate for his efforts, as the vanguard of a reform of general chemistry organized around "the nature of the chemical bond" and "modern structural chemistry." Under these interconnected headings Pauling assembled an array of theoretical and laboratory practices drawn from a wide range of specialties within physics and chemistry, forging them into new research tools that he could bring to bear on long-standing conundrums in well-established domains of chemistry, such as the etiology of directed valence, the structure of aromatic molecules, and the additive properties of chemical bonds. The diversity of the practices upon which Pauling drew greatly aided the appropriation of these new research tools but simultaneously undermined his claims regarding their coherence and their disciplinary identity.