Linus Pauling: Nobel Prize Scientist

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This intrigued me. I was fascinated by the idea that these substances, which you usually take in very small amounts — I believe the Recommended Dietary Allowance for niacin is 16 milligrams daily and for vitamin C, 45 milligrams — could have valuable health-promoting effects when ingested in amounts 100 or 1,000 times greater than the usual dietary intake.

PLOWBOY: What did you do then?

PAULING: I began scouring the literature to find out whether other vitamins or naturally occurring substances might be effective in promoting good health when taken in large quantities. Here, I didn't go to the textbooks on nutrition and medicine ... I went to the original papers — the original scientific reports upon which the textbooks are based — to see what the investigators themselves had observed. Not even what they had concluded, but what they'd observed and reported. Perhaps surprisingly, I found that there was a good deal of evidence to support the idea that large doses of vitamins could be clinically useful.

PLOWBOY: Is this when you coined the term "orthomolecular"?

PAULING: Yes, that's right. In 1967, I wrote a paper —"Orthomolecular Psychiatry"— which appeared in the April 19, 1968 issue of Science, and that was when I introduced the word "orthomolecular". Orthomolecular, I said in my article, means — literally — "the right molecules in the right amounts". In practice, it means altering the amounts of the naturally occurring substances — vitamins, amino acids, and so on — in the human body until you find what corresponds to the concentrations necessary for the best of health. I thought this could be an important enough field of medicine to justify its having a name. I chose the word "orthomolecular" because it was broader in scope than the term "megavitamin", which was already being used in a different context.

PLOWBOY: What made you become interested in vitamin C — ascorbic acid — specifically?

PAULING: Well in March of 1966, I was in New York to accept the Carl Neuberg Medal. At the award dinner, I gave a speech. I was talking about the many remarkable scientific discoveries that had been made in the past fifty years — and that continue to be made, of course — and I went on to say that I hoped I would live long enough to see what would be discovered in the next fifteen or twenty years.

A month later — in April — I got a letter from a biochemist, Irwin Stone, who had attended the award presentation in New York. Apparently the things I had said about wanting to live another twenty years touched him, because in his letter he told me that he would like to see me remain in good health not for fifteen or twenty years, but for fifty more years! He gave a description of a high-level ascorbic acid regimen that he had developed during the preceding three decades, and said that if I would take large amounts of vitamin C it would improve my health. To support his claim, he enclosed reprints of four research papers that he had recently had published on the relationship between vitamin C and good health.

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