Resonance Heresy

From now on, Soviet chemists will have to watch their test tubes more carefully than ever: heresy may be lurking in any one of them. Last week the California Institute of Technology issued a report on how a theory developed by CalTech's outstanding chemist, Professor Linus Pauling, had been the downfall of four leading Soviet chemists.

The Pauling resonance theory of chemical bonds is of little interest to the toiling masses. It uses the difficult methods of quantum mechanics to explain how the "resonance" (internal vibrations) of atoms makes them join together into molecules. Parts of the theory are still to be worked out, but other parts have been embedded in advanced textbooks for years. Biochemists rely on it to understand the complex molecules in living cells.

Soviet chemists, in all innocence, had been doing the same. Two of them, Y. K. Syrkin and M. E. Dyatkina, published a well-regarded textbook, The Chemical Bond and the Structure of Molecules, that is based almost entirely upon the resonance theory. Recently they got their comeuppance, when they were violently denounced in Pravda. At a scientific conference they and two sympathizers were censured by a dutiful vote of 400 colleagues. The charge: that they applied the principles "of the harmful resonance theory in their research," and failed to give "a comprehensive criticism of this idealistic teaching."

CalTech suspects that Dr. Pauling's theory was excoriated chiefly for nationalistic reasons. The Russians have 19th Century Chemist Alexander Mikhailovich Butlerov, whom they would like to credit with the discovery of the nature of chemical bonds. The work of Pauling and other Western chemists may stand in the way of this rewriting of scientific history.

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