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Home  Vault  Contact                                                                     c2003-09 Thomas Barnard

What Linus Pauling Didn’t Know About Vitamin C

            What Linus Pauling didn’t know about vitamin C could fill a small book.  I’m thinking of that little book in 1970 entitled Vitamin C and the Common Cold.  The logic of the book was irresistible, irrefutable.  Pauling had applied his stellar intellect to the problem of the common cold (from which he suffered), and solved it.  He solved it the Mycroft Holmes way, which is to say, he didn’t deign to go out on the trail of the criminal like his brother, Sherlock, and do the research.  No, he did the London Club thing, he re-read the literature from his easy chair and found the scientists wanting.  They had come to the wrong conclusions, even on their own data.

            I was an impressionable college student, and the logic of such cogent argument seemed undeniable.  Instead of being a dispassionate reader, I became a true believer.  Sad, but true.  He struggled against an incompetent establishment.  I was sympathetic.  He seemed heroic, battling the inept powers that be.  But the logic was impressive:

            He started with the fact that human beings do not make their own vitamin C, as do almost all other species of the animal kingdom, who usually make it in their livers.  If human beings do not get vitamin C from their food, their teeth fall out, and they die either from internal bleeding or from infection.  And this was part of the reason the British had to impress men into the navy, because sometimes a third of a crew would die in a voyage.

            Linus Pauling then figured out how much vitamin C a human being would need to take to order to have the same amount of vitamin C in their system as an animal of a similar weight which made their own.  He figured this would be one to four grams.

            Then he explained to us how we could have lost the ability to make vitamin C because humans developed in central Africa where there were plenty of foods rich in vitamin C, so if we no longer made it internally, it wouldn’t be missed.  When we moved north and did not have the same exposure to foods rich in vitamin C, we developed sub-clinical scurvy.  All very logical.

            Chemically, it is an electron donor, which means that it has the capacity to give an electron to a free radical, thereby rendering them stable.  But there is a basic problem with this.  Antioxidants, which seemed like they were going to save all of our lives, are not the panacea they appeared to be.  Some free radicals are necessary, which complicates the picture.

            It was a wonderful piece of ratiocination, but as far as the common cold goes, it turned out to be a dud.  Even the Linus Pauling Institute’s most recent posting on the web is contradictory.  On the one hand, a recent Japanese study says that vitamin C will reduce the numbers of colds but not duration or severity, although this is contrary, they say, to most studies, which do not show any preventive effect, but do show a consistent benefit in reducing duration.

            This is not impressive evidence.  My own experience was to take so much when I got a cold that I developed more than my fair share of misery.  I would have a cold plus the runs from taking too much vitamin C.

            Nevertheless, I would highly recommend increasing one’s vitamin C intake during a cold, but not so much that you get diarrhea.  And as my doctor always reminds me, vitamin C is a water soluble vitamin which is mostly gone in four hours, so take some every four hours or so.  And we should not forget, after all, that about half of the mariners who died on board from scurvy died from infection.  And we also don’t want to relegate all of Pauling’s reasoning to the junk heap, it was all very true.  So, there is some role for vitamin C, and we don’t want to be pig-headed and stupid.

It is advocated among vitamin C practitioners that it should be taken to bowel tolerance.  As you reach bowel tolerance you develop gas or the runs.  Maybe this is a good way to saturate tissues, but I sense all you do is saturate the tissues of the bowel and that causes the gas and diarrhea, and you fail to get more vitamin C to the other tissues in the body, the ones most in need of it.  Even Pauling in his lecture on vitamin C and the heart says that after the first 250 milligrams, not so very much gets absorbed.

 Later in the 1970s, Linus Pauling teamed up with Ewan Cameron, a doctor from Scotland, and tried vitamin C against cancer, and although it wasn’t without value entirely, this didn’t work particularly well either, but they wrote a book about this, too.  In a trial of 10 grams per day, 9% of the Vale of Leven patients showed some tumor regression, 1% of the time, tumor death.  But it just wasn’t a reliable agent.  In fact, you wonder why he wrote the book.

            Regardless, I was still a big fan at the time, I have a signed copy of Vitamin C and Cancer on my shelves, and when I went out to the Linus Pauling Institute, they gave me a tour, and it seemed like the research they were doing was just basic stuff that I felt somebody should have done already.  Like giving rats various diets and then seeing what vitamins and minerals went missing with various diseases.  It seemed very straightforward to me.

Pauling had enemies most of his life.  He was brilliant and unstoppable.  James Watson in The Double Helix makes it plain that Linus Pauling was the competition in the race to solve the structure of DNA; he and Crick were scared to death that he would solve the structure of DNA before they would.  And in fact, because he had made an enemy out of Joseph McCarthy and Edgar J. Hoover, he was not permitted to travel abroad in the early 1950s when he surely would have seen the critical crystallography when visiting his son, Peter, who was at the Cavendish laboratory at Cambridge, where Watson and Crick did their work.  Those x-ray pictures showed that DNA had a helical structure.  It would have made a difference.

As it was, Linus tried to guess the structure, and completely fumbled.  His hydrogen atoms were bound, which meant they had no net charge.  “Pauling’s nucleic acid was not an acid at all,” said an elated James Watson.  Without the hydrogen atoms his guess at the structure was inherently unstable.  He absolutely fell flat on his face.  It was a mistake he should never have made.  After all, it was he who wrote The Chemical Bond (which, by the way, Watson and Crick relied on). 

The problem is this: even though all these things Pauling said about vitamin C were true, it just didn’t make much difference.  It didn’t do much to prevent or reduce the length of a cold.  And we are beginning to learn that not all antioxidants are benign.  It recently turned up that high vitamin E intake corresponds to higher lung cancer rates.

And as they say, if I took vitamin C I still had colds that lasted for 14 days, and if I did nothing, it was two weeks.  By 2000, I was disenchanted.  It’s all well and good to write a cogent, logical little book, but your main contention has to be true, and his was basically false.  Moreover, he was so certain, confident, and obnoxious, that I think he set back research on the vitamin a full generation, though happily enough, high intake of vitamin C still seems pretty much harmless even if taken in large quantities.

Vitamin C as a means of delivering hydrogen peroxide (H₂O₂)

Well, okay, now is time to update the story.  Along comes Mark Levine, a generation later, from the National Institutes of Health, (the establishment, of all places) who decided to take another look at vitamin C.  And he found that vitamin C, if taken intravenously, could develop concentrations that killed cancer, but not normal cells.  He found that vitamin C created hydrogen peroxide (H₂O₂) at the site of a cancer cell, and it was the hydrogen peroxide which killed the cancer.  At the end of his paper, he pointed out that not only does it appear to work against cancer, but that hydrogen peroxide is also effective against Hepatitis C.  Remembering that he has already established its effectiveness in vivo against cancer, consider his closing remarks, “Use of ascorbate as an H₂O₂-delivery system against sensitive pathogens, viral or bacterial, has substantial clinical implications that deserve rapid exploration.”[1]

It almost sounds like that famous line from the Watson and Crick paper unraveling the structure of DNA, “It has not escaped our notice that the specific pairing we have postulated immediately suggests a possible copying mechanism for the genetic material.”

            It is not known how the hydrogen peroxide is generated at the site of a pathogen, but the experimenters saw that it happened.  More study is needed to know exactly what is happening.

Vitamin C as a means of delivering nitric acid (NO)

            Meanwhile, Europeans found that vitamin C could reverse the dysfunction to blood flow in the forearms in subjects infected with the E. coli. 

            They discovered that when they infected the forearms of its subjects with the bacteria that a consistent finding was a reduction in vitamin C during inflammation.  They also said that existing studies had shown a consistent reduction of vitamin C in the blood of patients with angina, in patients at risk of myocardial infarction and in patients with PAD (peripheral artery disease).  And with these findings they propose that vitamin C concentration be used as a marker of oxidative stress during inflammation.

            They stated, “Our data indicate that an altered antioxidant balance can be restored by exogenous vitamin C in vivo.”[2]  In other words, again there appears to be a role for the administration of intravenous vitamin C.  They also suggested the vitamin C increased the intercellular tetrahydrobiopterin, a cofactor in NO (nitric oxide) synthesis, which may assist in restoring the dysfunction caused by the E. coli infection.  Nitric Oxide (NO) is known to kill bacteria.  If vitamin C does, in fact, increase NO, then this would be a second means vitamin C would have in its arsenal to kill bacteria.

            There are doctors who administer vitamin C intravenously, though they are constantly dogged by the FDA, which apparently hasn’t gotten the word.  A doctor in California, Robert F. Cathcart, has been administering intravenous vitamin C for 30 years and more, and he maintains that vitamin C by itself against viruses, or together with the appropriate antibiotic against bacteria has proven an effective treatment.

            Though it is known that vitamin C increases the output of calcium oxalate, of which some kidney stones are made, Cathcart has not seen any adverse effects of this kind.  My doctor, Edwin Miller, who did research on the subject with Herta Spencer, has reminded me vitamin C is a chelator, which means it attaches to metals and removes them from the system, so to prevent any mischief, blood work should be done to make sure levels of magnesium and other substances are in balance.  Levine also warns that clear safety documentation in the administration of intravenous vitamin C is necessary.

            There is a paper out there on the web about three cancer patients who were aided by intravenous vitamin.  This may be a fine study, and encouraging, but it is strictly a clinical study and not a broad study, and cannot be relied on as having established that vitamin C works against cancer.  But if you add it to the work of Levine, you can see a pattern beginning to form.

            Inasmuch as there are no serious findings against the use of intravenous vitamin C, it would probably be in the public interest for the FDA to leave administration of intravenous vitamin C to the doctors, who may be able to use it against cancer, viruses and bacteria.

Yet Linus had cause to be optimistic

            One of Linus Pauling’s friends was a man named Irwin Stone, who wrote a book called The Healing Factor: Vitamin C Against Disease.  Irwin Stone uncovered the work of various researchers into vitamin C, and one in particular was a doctor in North Carolina named Fred Klenner. 

            In 1948 Fred Klenner treated an outbreak of polio with oral and intravenous vitamin C.  There were 60 cases.  All 60 cases responded positively.  Klenner presented a paper to the annual session of the AMA in 1949, but his research went completely untested.  And fifty-nine years later, it still goes untested.

            Though not unridiculed, most recently in an episode of House, in which one doctor fakes an attack of polio in one of his patients, and then “solves” it with vitamin C, once again casting the weary vitamin in a bad light, though in light of the research of the Europeans and Mark Levine’s team at the National Institutes of Health, it certain seems possible that it could cure a case of polio, and is surely worth a test.

            Klenner tested vitamin C against many diseases, and had luck against virus pneumonia, measles, chicken pox, virus encephalitis.  That Klenner was not afraid to use intravenous vitamin C lends some credibility to his results in the light of Levine’s work, but a large double blind test is necessary to establish that this a reliable therapy for doctors.

The guy had instincts

            The best you can say about Linus Pauling is that the guy had great instincts because his own studies were largely disappointing, and his re-interpretation of previous vitamin C studies looks like wishful thinking.  Vitamin C does not work very well for the common cold, and the evidence he presented against cancer was lukewarm at best.  At worst, instead of admitting that he didn’t have the proof, he forged ahead willy-nilly, turning the scientific community against him, setting back vitamin C research years and years.