Linus Pauling: Nobel Prize Scientist

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So again, I wrote to this fellow — I didn't expect to go beyond this, you see — and said that I had found that there were several studies backing me up, one of which was a 1961 study — written in German — by Ritzel. I gave him the reference to Ritzel's paper, and I thought that that would end the matter.

The professor wrote back and said that he was too busy to hunt up the reference to Ritzel. Well, I made a Xerox copy of Ritzel's paper and mailed it to him, so he wouldn't have that excuse (laughter). Then he wrote to me, saying, "I am not impressed by the work of Ritzel. " I wrote back and said, "I'm not impressed by your saying that you're not impressed by the work of Ritzel. " After all, the boys in Ritzel's study who got the vitamin C had only a third as much illness due to colds as the boys who got a harmless placebo ... and the numbers in the paper have high statistical significance. You can't just say you're "not impressed" by the work ... you have to have a reason.

Well, the professor wrote and said that Ritzel didn't give the age of his subjects, nor their sex ... which happens to be untrue. I wrote the professor and said that because I had lived for a year and a half in Germany after receiving my Ph.D., I could read Ritzel's German without trouble, and it seemed clear to me that Ritzel said that his subjects were all boys in their teens. So then the professor wrote to me and said well, there were two ski camps in the study, and perhaps Ritzel gave the vitamin C to the boys in one ski camp and the placebo to the boys in the other ski camp, and maybe the camps were different in some way, and ... Well. I wrote to Ritzel about that, and he said — essentially — "How silly can you get. "

Here's this man, this professor — I didn't identify him when I wrote my book — Victor Herbert, who to this day keeps writing papers and giving speeches saying that no one benefits from taking extra vitamins ... and he won't look at the evidence.

The upshot of this whole thing is that I finally became sufficiently irritated by this fellow that I decided I ought to do something about it. So I sat down one summer — here, downstairs in my study — and in two months wrote a book, Vitamin C and the Common Cold.

PLOWBOY: That was in 1970?

PAULING: Yes, the summer of 1970. I started writing on the first of July, and the book was published on the 17th of November.

You know, I think my interest in the vitamins has developed to the extent that it has partially because of the obvious failure of the medical and nutritional establishments to look at the facts. It irritates me that there should be such a situation anymore. To me, it means that there's an opportunity here to do some worthwhile work. If Victor Herbert and these other physicians — and even the "authorities" who write the textbooks and reference books in medicine and nutrition-just ignore the observations that have been made regarding vitamin C and the common cold ... then — I feel — here is something that will be worthwhile for me to work on.

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