Linus Pauling: Nobel Prize Scientist

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PLOWBOY: Did Dr. Stone's statement that you could live fifty more years surprise you?

PAULING: Oh yes (laughter). I didn't believe it. I'm not sure that I don't believe it still. But I read his papers-the four papers that he sent — and they made good sense. And, of course, my wife and I both began taking large doses of vitamin C . . . three grams a day, which was what Dr. Stone had recommended.

PLOWBOY: Did you notice anything different after starting the " high-C" regimen recommended by Dr. Stone?

PAULING: My wife and I both noticed an increased feeling of well-being ... and we discovered that we no longer caught colds. Prior to receiving Dr. Stone's letter, I had been taking 100 milligrams of vitamin C a day for thirty years ... but this obviously wasn't enough to keep me in a state of optimum good health, because I kept catching bad colds over those years. After I started taking three grams of the vitamin each day, however, I no longer got colds.

PLOWBOY: Was this when you first began "crusading" for vitamin C, then?

PAULING: Oh no. I didn't take a public stand on vitamin C and the common cold until several years later. What happened was that in 1969, I was invited to speak at the opening ceremonies of a new medical school in New York ... the Mount Sinai Medical School. They had invited several people to speak at this ceremony, so I only had about ten minutes — maybe fifteen — to speak, but in my short talk I mentioned the value of vitamin C in preventing colds as something important to medicine, to health in general.

Well, one of the professors who attended the ceremony wrote me a very strongly worded letter attacking me for having made the statement about vitamin C. He said, "Do you want to support the vitamin quacks that are bleeding the American public of hundreds of millions of dollars a year?" And he asked: "Can you show me a single double-blind study that indicates that vitamin C has any more value than a placebo in fighting colds?"

I wrote to this fellow and told him that no, I couldn't show him any studies, but that I hadn't really looked at the literature, either. And I didn't pursue this for two or three months ... but it kept bothering me. Finally — after several months — I got around to checking the medical literature ... and I found six double — blind studies, every one of which showed that vitamin C did in fact have more value in preventing colds than a placebo. And by "double-blind", I mean that neither the people dispensing the pills nor the people receiving them knew which pills contained the vitamin C — and which ones were the placebos — until the end of the study. The records were kept, in other words, by a third party.

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