Now environmentalists get multi-million dollar grants and work in marble-floored, granite-columned offices in Washington, D.C. What a difference a few decades make.

Iconoclastic researcher warms up the debate
Oregon's Arthur B. Robinson attacks assumptions that are popular with other scientists
By Richard L. Hill
Copyright 1998 The Oregonian

CAVE JUNCTION -- A rural road meanders through a small valley snuggled in the forested foothills of the Siskiyou Mountains.

With a sharp turn, blacktop gives way to gravel, leading to a 340-acre farm with its patches of wild blackberries, sheep, horses, cattle and chickens. On the first of three locked gates, a purposeful sign interrupts the bucolic setting.

"Oregon Institute of Science & Medicine," it reads.

The road ends at a complex of buildings and a large pond. On the left, a large U.S. flag flutters from a tall pole in front of a two-story metal structure, where a sign repeats the institute's name. On the right, a beige farmhouse sits in a fenced yard.

From a one-room, dark-brown structure a few steps from the main house, a gray-haired man emerges. Arthur B. Robinson,in red-and-blue plaid shirt, blue jeans and white socks, introduces himself and his genial dog Shadrach.

In recent weeks Robinson -- maverick scientist, arch-conservative, home-school promoter and civil-defense expert -- has found himself in a storm of controversy. From this one-room structure, Robinson has directed a national petition drive that has garnered nearly 16,000 signatures from scientists, doctors and engineers -- including about 150 global-warming skeptics from Oregon -- urging Congress to reject the Kyoto treaty that would require reducing greenhouse-gas emissions. The petition, released shortly before Earth Day on April 22, has been a featured subject on the floor of the U.S. Senate and in congressional hearings. It has provoked the National Academy of Sciences and the Sierra Club. And it has made a number of researchers nationwide wonder about this lone scientist and his prestigious-sounding institute.

Controversy is not new to Robinson. The 56-year-old chemist and his late wife Laureleebought their farm in 1980 to re-establish their lives during a lengthy legal battle with longtime research colleague Linus Pauling,an Oregon native twice awarded the Nobel Prize.

Near Cave Junction, in the remote corner of southwest Oregon, the Robinsons found the privacy they sought to raise their children and start an institute where he could carry on his research.

Children do schoolwork
"This is where the kids do their schoolwork and I do my work," Robinson says as he leans back in his chair and puts his feet up on one of the metal desks in the cramped room.

Nearly 10 years ago, Robinson became a single parent with six children, ages 1 to 12, when his 43-year-old wife fell ill with pancreatitis and died within 24 hours.

One of the tasks he took over was education of the children. "I couldn't teach them because I had my own work to do. So I gave them the best books I could find and said, 'You're on you're own.' The rule was, I'll answer no questions. . . . They basically learned to work things out themselves."

Nearby, Robinson's youngest child, 10-year-old Matthew, works silently on math problems from an algebra book designed for ninth- and 10th-grade students.

Robinson developed a home-schooling curriculum and placed it on 22 CD-ROMs. "I'm told this is the third-largest home-schooling curriculum in the nation," he says.

In addition to Matthew, there's Zachary, 21, who earned a bachelor's degree in chemistry from Oregon State University last year; Noah, 19, a junior in chemistry at Southern Oregon University in Ashland; Arynne,18; and twins Joshua and Bethany, 15. Zachary, who works with his father in their labs, finished college in two years and soon will enter Iowa State University to pursue veterinary medicine.

Six days a week, after a 6:30 a.m. breakfast, the Robinson offspring head to their desks for four to five hours of study. "About 1 p.m., everybody scatters to their chores and interests," Robinson says. "Joshua might go till a field, Arynne will work with the sheep, and if Noah is home, he'll be in the labs working with Zachary."

On this particular day, all of the children except Noah are at home. Like their dad, each wears a plaid shirt, buttoned to the neck, jeans and white socks. Each carries a compact radio receiver-transmitter. "They all are ham radio operators, which makes it easy for us to communicate when we're scattered all over the farm," Robinson says.

Around the house and the lab building, wall plaques encourage reliance on God: "Trust in the Lord with all thine heart; and lean not unto thine own understanding."

"We're Christians," Robinson says. "We go to church about half the time, but we go to two or three different churches. We take care of that aspect of our lives ourselves."

Charles Bridges,pastor of nearby Bridgeview Community Church, says the Robinson family occasionally worships there. "He's a very private guy, and I don't know him very well, but everyone likes him," Bridges says. "He's very honest, very straightforward."

The farm itself isn't a commercial venture, Robinson says. "We have a flock of sheep, a herd of cows, and we cut hay for the animals. Then we grow a lot of our food. It's just a way of life -- a good environment to grow up in."

Television isn't allowed. "It's just a distraction, and the kids would wind up wasting four or five hours a day on it," he says.

MANY SCIENTISTS JOIN ROBINSON IN GLOBAL-WARMING SKEPTICISM Arthur Robinson's petition drive against the Kyoto agreement has netted nearly 16,000 signatures from global-warming skeptics along with national media attention and plenty of controversy. Mailings of the petition include a copy of a Wall Street Journal opinion piece and an eight-page report, both written by Robinson and his 21-year-old son Zachary. "We're not specialists in climate change," Robinson acknowledged. The paper didn't contain original research; rather, it contained a review of several research papers. The Robinsons concluded that there is no data to support human-caused global warming. Robinson declined to say how much the campaign cost or who financed it--only that a retired Portland man paid for about 18 percent of the petition drive. C. Norman Winningstad, a philanthropist and founder of Floating Point Systems, is perhaps the most prominent name among Oregon petition signers. Winningstad said he thought the paper was succinct and well-written. He said he did not know Robinson or contribute to the petition drive. The paper was co-written by astrophysicist Sallie Baliunas and Willie Soon of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics and the Mount Wilson Observatory. Included is a cover letter by Frederick Seitz, physicist and former president of the National Academy of Sciences. Baliunas, Soon and Seitz are with the George C. Marshall Institute, a think tank based in Washington, D.C. "The paper is very selective on what it talks about," said Michael C. MacCracken, director of the National Assessment Coordination Office for the U.S. Global Change Research Program. Nobel laureate F. Sherwood Rowland, a chemistry professor at the University of California at Irvine, said the article has little scientific merit. And Rowland objected to the paper resembling a published, peer-reviewed research article from the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The academy's governing council took the unusual step of disassociating itself from the petition and the eight-page paper. One of the Oregon scientists who signed the petition was Paul E. Hammond, professor emeritus of geology at Portland State University. "The article opened up the argument about how difficult it's going to be to separate human-caused conditions from natural conditions," he said. "He's not just a flag in the wind. There are others that are making the same point."

Television plays role
Ironically, television played a role in determining the direction of Robinson's life.

He grew up in Victoria and Houston, Texas, where his father was an engineer for Union Carbide. On the family's little black-and-white TV set, he followed a show called "Behind Closed Doors." In one plot, the bad guys were trying to blow up a planeload of scientists from the California Institute of Technology. Intrigued -- and challenged by a counselor who told him he'd never be able to get into Caltech-- that's where he decided to go.

It was at Caltech that Robinson and Linus Pauling -- to students, a legend -- first crossed paths.

"Even as an undergraduate, the young man (Robinson) displayed a marked talent in the laboratory. . . . He got a paper published in Science as a result. And he caught Pauling's eye," Thomas Hager wrote in "Force of Nature," a biography of Pauling.

After getting a bachelor's degree in chemistry from Caltech in 1963, Robinson went to the University of California at San Diego, where he received a Ph.D in 1968 under the direction of Martin D. Kamen,the discoverer of carbon 14. UCSD immediately hired him as an assistant professor.

Pauling and Robinson hooked up again at UCSD, where the elder scientist worked briefly in the late '60s before moving on to Stanford University. Robinson soon followed and worked with Pauling on his controversial vitamin C studies and other research. Frustrated with constricting government grants and academic bureaucracy, Pauling and Robinson in 1973 formed their own independent research institute, later called the Linus Pauling Institute for Science and Medicine.

Raising money by direct mail proved successful, bringing in almost $1.5 million from private donors alone in 1978. But that year also marked a schism between Pauling and Robinson, who had become the institute's president. Pauling dismissed Robinson, who sued the institute.

Robinson says the feud centered on his desire to move the institute to Oregon -- some institute officials balked at the idea -- and on a vitamin C study he had conducted. An experiment with mice that had skin cancer suggested that doses of vitamin C made the cancer grow rapidly. "The rise wasn't compatible with what (Pauling) wanted it to show. . . . And this was just disaster politically for what he was doing," Robinson says.

The legal battle lasted four years before the case was settled out of court, with Robinson receiving $575,000.

But "nobody won," Robinson says. "I lost my research. The people who really suffered would be the people who might have benefited from the research," he says.

"I don't have any bitterness. Linus and I worked hand-in-glove for 15 years. A lot of people thought I was his surrogate son. Near the end of his life, we corresponded a little bit."

The Pauling biography refers to Robinson as a conservative-libertarian, which draws a laugh from the chemist. "I have fairly conservative views, but they're not ultra right wing," he says. "I'm not a libertarian because I think they want too little government. You have to have government -- especially a good justice system -- so that free men don't get in the way of the freedoms of other men."

Robinson uses his newsletter, Access to Energy, to express many of his iconoclastic arguments. Examples: Global warming is a politically motivated scare campaign. The Chernobyl nuclear plant accident saved more lives from coal-fired pollution than it took by radiation. The thinning of the Earth's ozone layer is a manufactured crisis. The banning of DDT has directly led to the deaths of tens of thousands of people from malaria.

Experiment completed
Robinson spends much of his time in his two-story lab building, with its science library and about 5,000 square feet of laboratories. He recently completed a three-year experiment on carbon dioxide's effects on mice, because of interest in the carbon dioxide rise in the atmosphere.

He is also working on health profiling, examining techniques to measure a person's health by analyzing body fluids. He wants to get back to doing research about substances that may serve as molecular clocks, timing development and aging in organisms.

For a few years near the end of the Cold War, his institute worked on civil defense, promoting the use of bomb shelters.

Income from the institute, incorporated in 1982, is about $200,000 a year, with a donor list of about 500 people, Robinson says. He's the only paid employee, receiving $500 a month. Sons Zachary and Noah serve as unpaid board members, according to the nonprofit institute's 1996 annual report to the state. The institute's assets were $437,640. Revenue was listed at nearly $135,000, with $86,000 coming from donations and $39,000 from the home-schooling curriculum.

Robinson says the institute has six senior faculty members. They include Kamen, his former professor at UCSD; Fred Westall,an expert in the biochemistry of immunology and a former director of laboratory work at the Salk Institute; and Dr. Jane Orient,who heads the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons, an organization Robinson says works for "less socialism" in medicine.

"They come up on occasion to do some work with us," Robinson says.

Petition project takes time
Consuming most of Robinson's time in the past few months has been the petition project, which developed out of an opinion piece he wrote with Zachary for The Wall Street Journal's editorial page.

The article, which ran Dec. 4, argued that global warming is a myth and that an increase in carbon dioxide would lead to an Earth with twice as much plant and animal life.

"Hydrocarbons are needed to feed and lift from poverty vast numbers of people across the globe," they wrote. "No other single technological factor is more important to the increase in the quality, length and quantity of human life than the continued expanded and unrationed use of the Earth's hydrocarbons. . . . "

Robinson says the attack by environmental activists -- whom he derisively calls "enviros" -- was overwhelming. "The other side tried to marginalize us," he says. "The most blatant example was a physicist from the Union of Concerned Scientists who I agreed to debate on radio. . . . The first word out of his mouth was 'crackpot,' and it went downhill from there."

Wants to resume research
Robinson says he's looking forward to wrapping up the petition drive and getting back to research work.

But, for now, he concentrates on the campaign against the Kyoto agreement. He's intense in his belief that society will suffer from the treaty.

For him, the road that leads to the Oregon Institute of Science & Medicine is the road that may help lead to truth.