Linus Pauling: Nobel Prize Scientist

Article Tools

Image Gallery

Print

E-mail

Comments

RSS

PLOWBOY: All right. According to everything you've just said, vitamin C seems to be a powerful tool against not only the common cold, but the whole gamut of infectious diseases ... and cancer, too.

PAULING: That's right, and there's some evidence to indicate that vitamin C may be useful in preventing coronary disease, as well. It has been found, for instance, that an increased intake of ascorbic acid leads to a decrease in the concentration of cholesterol in the blood.

PLOWBOY: If what you say is true, vitamin C actually protects people against heart disease, cancer, and respiratory infections ... our country's first, second, and fourth leading causes of death, respectively. What you're saying, in effect, is that if people would take the proper amount of vitamin C every day they would live longer. Is that right?

PAULING: I have reached the conclusion that the regular ingestion of gram quantities of vitamin C should bring about a 75% reduction in the age-specific death rate. I take ten grams of vitamin C a day. I think that's enough to cut the probability of my dying to a quarter of what it might otherwise be. Every factor of one-half that you can achieve in the age-specific death rate corresponds to an eight-year increase in life expectancy . . . this was shown by the Englishman, Gumpertz, 150 years ago. Now if you can cut your age-specific death rate to 25% of what it should be — and I believe this is possible, if you take your vitamin C — you've increased your life expectancy by 16 years. That's with vitamin C alone. I'm sure that if people were to employ other health-preserving measures, they could live 25

PLOWBOY: You're talking about people living to be 95 or 100 years old, then.

PAULING: That's right. Instead of living to be 70 or 75 years old — 70 for men, 75 for women-you'd live on to 95 or 100.

PLOWBOY: Some people might ask whether it would be desirable to live an extra 20 or 25 years. Would those extra years be productive and happy, in your opinion ... or would they be something less than enjoyable?

PAULING: I think that they would be pleasurable years ... years of well-being, not deterioration. The process of aging is not well understood, but it has been observed that when people manage to live into their nineties, death is usually accompanied by a smaller amount of suffering than when people die at an earlier age. Very often, these older people seem to be in pretty good health and then they just die in their sleep, whereas younger people — persons in their forties or fifties — are more apt to get cancer and experience a year or two of misery, made worse — of course — by the anti-cancer drugs the doctors make them take, before they die.

RSS | Comments | E-mail | Print