Which individual is the only recipient to be decorated twice with two unshared Nobel Prizes?

Linus Carl Pauling (1901 – 1994) was an American chemist, biochemist, chemical engineer, peace activist, author, and educator.

He is one of four individuals to have won more than one Nobel Prize alongside Marie Curie, John Bardeen and Frederick Sanger.

Of these, he is the only person to have been awarded two unshared Nobel Prizes, and one of two people to be awarded Nobel Prizes in different fields. The other being Marie Curie.

His first award was the 1954 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. This recognized his research into the nature of chemical bonding. Eight years later, his militant pacifism during the Cold War which focused primarily on combating nuclear weapons, earned him the Nobel Peace Prize (1962).

A dominant figure in twentieth century chemistry, Pauling revolutionized the way we see molecules by applying quantum mechanics to chemistry. He also studied in depth the hydrogen bond, protein folding and also got to know the structure and function of hemoglobin in red blood cells, which carry oxygen in the blood.

At the end of the 1940s, frightened by the danger that a nuclear war would pose for mankind, he wrote an appeal to end the testing of atomic bombs. He argued that among other things that the fallout from each test would cause thousands of cases of cancers. He gathered signatures from more than 8,000 foreign scientists from 49 different countries. Their campaign culminated with the signing of the first Partial Nuclear Test Ban Treaty in 1963.