Vitamin C, Linus Pauling was right all along. A doctor's opinion

Here is an article written by Dr Hilary Roberts about Linus Pauling and his views on vitamin C.

Summary

It is the 10th anniversary of the death of Linus Pauling and his most controversial scientific conjectures about the health benefits of vitamin C are being confirmed. The weight of evidence may yet force the medical establishment to accept his ideas on nutrition and health.

Linus Pauling's claim, that he knew a cure for heart disease, cancer and infections, was greeted with ridicule. His remarkable health claims concerned the substance we know as vitamin C. Now, ten years after his death on 19th August 1994, his revolutionary ideas are finally on the way to vindication. Given his history, it should not surprise us if Pauling was right all along. He was, after all, the leading chemist of the last century and, arguably, the greatest ever American scientist. He remains the only person to have won two unshared Nobel Prizes, the first for Chemistry (1954) and the second for peace (1962). In addition to being one of the greatest scientists ever, he was a renowned humanitarian.

By the time of his death, the medical establishment had branded Pauling a quack, because he advocated the use of high doses of vitamin C to treat many diseases. Irwin Stone first introduced Pauling to vitamin C, and explained that it wasn't really a vitamin at all, but an essential substance we could no longer manufacture in our bodies. Most animals make their own vitamin C, in large amounts. In humans, the gene for this ability has mutated and no longer works properly.

When Pauling looked into Stone's claims, he found that conventional medicine had long ignored evidence from respected physicians and scientists. This research suggested that high doses of vitamin C might be a cure for many illnesses, including cancer and heart disease. However, when he explained these findings in his wonderfully constructed books "Vitamin C and the Common Cold" and "How to Live Longer and Feel Better", the medical profession was incensed, implying that a mere chemist could not possibly understand the intricacies of medical science.

If Pauling was correct, vitamin C could help overcome the major killers in the industrialised world. This sounded so unlikely that a lesser scientist making the claim would probably have been ignored; the medical world had already disregarded similar reports of vitamin C. Linus Pauling had a reputation for being 20 years ahead of other scientists.

He may well have been years ahead in other fields but, in medicine, the insiders considered such a thing to be impossible. Pauling battled with the medical authorities and convinced a lot of the public of the benefits of high dose vitamin C. He took on the medical establishment because the implication for health was enormous: an end to premature death and unnecessary suffering from heart disease, infection and many cancers.

Since Pauling's death, the medical establishment has reclaimed the scientific position with a series of experiments on vitamin C. In particular, the NIH measured the distribution of vitamin C in the body and claimed that Pauling was wrong about the need for high doses, as the blood could be saturated at low doses [Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA, 93, 3704-9.]. They added that doses higher than one gram were potentially dangerous. From this point on, the high dose vitamin C lobby were on the defensive.