www.independentscientist.com
He lives on a 350-acre farm in southern Oregon, with his brothers and sisters, and his father, the scientist Art Robinson. Next to the piano is a huge home-made wood-burning stove. Twe nty years ago, Art built a 30 kilowatt hydro-electric generator next to the creek near his house, but the Department of Fish and Game has yet to give its approval. So the house is heated by burning wood, which of course releases carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. This supposedly contributes to global warming, but it also helps the trees grow.
There are six Robinson children, all of them home-schooled . Matthew's older brother Joshua, 18, has pinned to the wall of his room the skin of a cougar that he trapped. His older brother Noah, 22, was t he top chemistry graduate applicant to MIT, but chose instead to go to h is father's school, Caltech. N oah's older brother, Zachary, 24, is at Iowa State University studying t o be a doctor of veterinary medicine, and also working for a chemistry P hD Bethany, 18, is still at home, and her older sister Arynne, 20, has finished two years of college. On the piano Matthew is still on grade 1 B, but his math is going well. He will be only 14 by the time he has fin ished calculus. The area around Cave Junction, not far from the California border, was de veloped in the gold-rush days. Miners used hydraulic methods that would terrify today's environmentaliststhe top soil was blasted away with fir e-hoses. The Robinson's h ave hundreds of sheep and lambs, 15 cows, 7 horses, 4 dogs, and 50 wild turkeys. But the economics of farming locally are not good, Art Robinson says. They may net $1 0,000 a year from farming, and if they did nothing else and made no mist akes, maybe they could double that figure. A short distance from the farm house there stand several buildings of ste el construction. The largest, with 10,000 square feet of floor space, ho uses the Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine, founded by Art Robins on in 1980. Jane Ori ent of Doctors for Disaster Preparedness, visiting from Tucson, was work ing alone in the small library. Some of the labs are unused, others cont ain equipment-vials, bottles, a cryogenic freezer-that was mostly bought at auction. Mass spectrometers were used at Oak Ridge to help develop the atomic bomb, but this version is many times more powerf ul. Robinson is using it to work on "molecular clocks" in the body. This could shed light on one of the greatest unsolved problems of biochemist ryaging.
Art has no employeesanother triumph of the computer revol ution. But his children help out as lab assistants, and recently Noah be came a full-fledged co-worker. Before he left for graduate studies, Art and Noah submitted a paper to the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Over the years, Art Robinson co-authored scientific papers wi th many famous men, including his teacher of 40 years ago, Linus Pauling . But this new paper, "Molecular Clocks," based on research mostly done on an Oregon farm with his own son, is "the best scientific paper I have ever had my name on," he says. Some of the work was also done in New Yo rk, at the Rockefeller University lab of R Bruce Merrifield, who won th e Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1984. Piled 12 feet high in another building, the mailing room, are the books a nd home-schooling curricula that the Robinsons have published in recent years and now ship to the public. In a smaller building is the printing press where Robinson's newsletter, Access to Energy, is printed; and nex t to the main house is a log-cabin structure where all the Robinson chil dren have been home-schooled.
He was a chemistry stude nt at Caltech himself, and something of a whiz kid. He was one of the fe w students ever to be appointed to the faculty of the University of Cali fornia (in San Diego) immediately after getting his PhD He is not plea sed by many developments in America in the last generation, especially a t the intersection of science and politics, and his own life has been be set by obstacles and tragedies. But he is a man of steely determination and intensity, and he has achieved a good deal since moving to Oregon 20 years ago. In the mid 1970's, after a few years at UC San Diego, Robinson teamed u p with Linus Pauling to form the Linus Pauling Institute of Science and Medicine in Menlo Park, California. Robinson, president and research dir ector, revered Pauling both as a teacher and a chemist, while Pauling ha d referred to him as "my principal and most valued collaborator." Paulin g had won two Nobel Prizes, for Chemistry (1954), and Peace (1962), and by the mid 1970'S had widely publicized the claim that Vitamin C could c ure the common cold. In addition, he said, "75 percent of all cancer can be prevented or cured by Vitamin C alone." At the new institute, on Sandhill Road, Robinson devised some mouse exper iments to test this amazing theory. By the summer of 1978, he was gettin g "highly embarrassing" results. At the mouse-equivalent of 10 grams of Vitamin C a dayPauling's recommended dose for humans-the mice were gett ing more cancer, not less. Pauling responded to the unwelcome news by en tering Robinson's office one day and announcing that he had in his breas t pocket some damaging personal information. He would overlook it, howev er, if Robinson were to resign all his positions and turn over his resea rch. When Robinson refused, Pauling locked him out and kept the filing c abinets and computer tapes containing nine years' worth of research. Pauling also told lab assistants to kill the 400 mice used for the experiments. Pauling's later sworn testimony showed t hat the story about the damaging information was invented, while experim ents by the Mayo Clinic conclusively proved that the theory about cancer and Vitamin C was wrong. A sharp divergence of political opinion between the two men also became a pparent. A few years after he won the Nobel Peace Prize, Pauling also wo n the Lenin Peace Prize. He told Robinson that he was more proud of the Soviet than the Norwegian award. For his part, in the spring of 1978 Rob inson had given a speech at the Cato Institute, then in San Francisco, d eploring the government funding of science as harmful to the independenc e that is essential to scientific inquiry. Pauling responded by telling Robinson that he had in his pocket some damaging personal infor mation. Pauling died in 1994, at the age of 93, but his peace-prize activities co ntinue to resonate among scientists, and the subject still absorbs Robin son. In 1958, Pauling had engaged in a series of televised debates with the developer of the hydrogen bomb, Edward Teller. The subject was "nucl ear fallout," or the residual radiation after an atomic explosion. Pauli ng won, Robinson says, with the help of an argument that was unsupported by evidence at the time. The argument involved a "linear extrapolation to zero," in Robinso n's scientific lingo. High levels of radiation will certainly kill you, and lower levels will harm you. Pauling calculated the damage at minuscu le levels by extending that graph back in a straight line to zero. At low levels, by his calculations , not many would be harmed. But multiplying that harm-rate by the popula tion of the world, as Pauling did, allowed him to claim that continued n uclear testing would kill "millions of children." So it should be stoppe d Pauling and his wife Ava Helen organized a petition against testing i n the atmosphere, signed by 11,000 scientists and presented to the Unite d Nations. For that he won the Nobel Prize, and the Lenin Prize a few ye ars later. Now we have the "hormesis" data, gathered in the last 20 years, and that' s what interests Robinson. It goes down to about 700 millirems a day, then heads back up again, lik e a hook. Low background levels of radiation seem to be good for you. Th e evidence that the "linear extrapolation to zero" is wrong, accumulated by Bernard L Cohen, an emeritus professor of physics at the University of Pittsburgh, comes from many sources. Bad for you in large doses, rad iation does some good in small doses. It seems to keep the DNA repair me chanisms in good working order. T...
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