Big Pharma vs Linus Pauling and Vitamin C
Pharma 1 – Pauling 0
Author’s note: Recently, a massive dose of ascorbic acid (Vitamin C) ended my 18-month post-mRNA illness, and I recalled a story Linus Pauling told me which, in light of recent Pharma scandals, deserves to see the light of day.
First Nobel
In 1952, as Crick and Watson worked on the structure of DNA at Cambridge, they heard that Cal Tech’s Linus Pauling was nearly as close to the Holy Grail as themselves. “The wolf’s howl,” they wrote, “grew closer every night”.
Pauling won his laurel two years later, for revolutionizing the study of chemistry and founding the field of molecular biology. In 1962, the Peace prize made him the the only person to win two unshared Nobels and, in 1980, he told me how he had missed a third.
As I remember it forty years later, this is what happened.
Chasing number three
Pauling was casting about for yet another Nobel when he received a package from Ewan Cameron, a Scottish MD and clinical director of the world’s largest inpatient cancer hospital. Campbell had given a thousand units of Vitamin C to five-hundred patients and a placebo to five-hundred and the placebo group survived only half as long as their vitamined counterparts1.
Pauling published Cameron’s results and several well-received papers on the biochemical and physiological pathways of ascorbic acid. After Scientific American picked up the story, Vitamin C vanished from the shelves of every drugstore on earth. Today, it’s a $12 billion industry.2
Pauling also forwarded the trial results to the National Institutes of Health3 , asking them to perform a more rigorous, double-blind trial. The NIH’s form letter (‘mimeographed,’ he said) claimed that they were too busy, to which he tartly replied that he would personally investigate the work of any Medicine Nobelist they rejected.
Pauling next turned to Senator Ted Kennedy, then chair of the Senate Committee on Health, for help. A year later, reluctantly, the NIH announced a grant to the Mayo Clinic for a double-blind, randomized trial of Vitamin C. Pauling wrote the Mayo investigators, warning that patients whose immune systems had been destroyed by irradiation or chemicals should be excluded from the trial as the Scottish studies determined that ascorbic acid could not help them.
Five years later
Pauling opened his Sunday New York Times to a Page 77 headline: VITAMIN C STUDY REBUTS PAULING. No Prevention of Relief of Common Cold is Found.
Weeks later, Kennedy sent him documents showing that Mayo’s entire trial cohort consisted of twelve convicted criminals with compromised immune systems4.
Whatever he may have felt at the time, Pauling’s only comment to me was that Big Science was one of the most politicized fields on earth. By then, he was busy with Kaiser Permanente Hospitals, working on predictive medicine.
He had developed advanced gas chromatographs that could break down newborns’ urine samples into thousands of chemical indicators and showed me how each chart’s peaks and valleys corresponded to (mostly mild) metabolic imbalances. New mothers, he said, would receive comprehensive information about their child’s likely potential deficits and allergies, along with suggestions how they might be rebalanced nutritionally. The investigation was abandoned immediately upon his death.
The moral of the story?
Preventive medicine, cheap natural cures were as taboo then as they are today. The US Government was as uncaring about our health and and Big Pharma was as ruthless forty years ago as they are today but, now we’re paying the price. Americans’ life expectancy has fallen below China’s.
Let that sink in.
Cameron & Pauling’s studies (1976 & 1978 in PNAS) were retrospective and non-randomized. They involved ~100 terminal cancer patients at Vale of Leven Hospital (Scotland) given 10 g/day vitamin C (initially IV, then oral). These were compared to 1,000 historical controls from the same hospital who received no vitamin C. Survival appeared ~3–4× longer in the vitamin C group, but the design was heavily criticized for selection bias (treated patients were not truly comparable; controls were declared “terminal” earlier). It was not a prospective, randomized, placebo-controlled trial—no blinding, no concurrent placebo group of 500.
When Wuhan discovered an imported strain of Covid-19 in December, 2019, the city’s hospitals ordered ten metric tons of liquid C.
The CDC says that, by December, 2019, four million Americans were Covid seropositive and that the world's first Covid death occurred in Kansas, not China.
Pauling’s main criticism was that Mayo used oral vitamin C (not IV/oral like Cameron) and discontinued it upon progression (vs. lifelong in Cameron). He also argued prior chemotherapy in the first trial invalidated results (the second/third trials excluded prior chemo patients—still negative).