Akira Murata

A year before being introduced to Fukumi Morishige‘s work, Linus Pauling was paying close attention to research being conducted by another Japanese colleague, Dr. Akira Murata, who was studying the inactivation of viruses by vitamin C.  Over the coming years, Morishige and Murata often worked together on research related to vitamin C.  And as with [...]

Biochemical Individuality

[Part 4 of 4 in a series on Vitamin C and the Common Cold] Toward the end of his book Vitamin C and the Common Cold, Linus Pauling included a chapter on human biochemical individuality.  In it, he addressed the fact that every human is different, and as a result, each individual has a unique [...]

Vitamin C Deficiency in Humans: An Issue of Evolution?

[Part 3 of 4 in a series on Vitamin C and the Common Cold] In the chapter “Vitamin C and Evolution” from his book Vitamin C and the Common Cold, Pauling wondered about the reasons why the rest of the animal world can synthesize vitamin C, while human beings, along with a very small group [...]

Physicians Anecdotes and the Safety of Large Doses

[Part 2 of 4 in a series on Vitamin C and the Common Cold] “The medical profession itself took a very narrow and very wrong view.  Lack of ascorbic acid caused scurvy, so if there was no scurvy there was no lack of ascorbic acid.  Nothing could be clearer than this.  The only trouble was [...]

Five Controlled Trials

[Part 1 of 4 in a series on Vitamin C and the Common Cold] Linus Pauling became interested in ascorbic acid thanks to Dr. Irwin Stone, a biochemist from New York. After meeting Pauling in 1966 and hearing Pauling speak of his desire to live for an additional fifteen or twenty years, Dr. Stone sent [...]

Vitamin C, the Common Cold and Controversy

By Tom Hager [Part 3 of 3. For the full text of this article, originally presented as a lecture sponsored by Oregon Health Sciences University, please see this page, available at http://thomashager.net] Pauling’s reading of the literature convinced him that the more vitamin C you took, approaching megadose levels, the lower your chances of getting [...]

The Birth of Orthomolecular Medicine

By Tom Hager [Part 2 of 3.  For the full text of this article, originally presented as a lecture sponsored by Oregon Health Sciences University, please see this page, available at http://thomashager.net] The concept of orthomolecular medicine was Pauling’s grand theory of human health. His approach was chemical, and viewed the body as a vast [...]

Formulas, Pictures and Sports Drinks: The Pauling Chalkboard, Part III

(Part 3 of 3) While much of the real estate on Linus Pauling’s chalkboard is consumed by lists of names, a number of additional annotations, when examined, prove to be of keen interest. Metabolic Profiling On the right side of the board, below the last column of names, is the following text: NSF – Mol. [...]

Pauling’s Work on Swine Flu

The current concern over the world-wide spread of swine flu virus brings to mind research that Dr. Linus Pauling conducted on this very subject, some thirty-three years ago. Pauling’s interest in swine flu seems to have been stoked by a convergence of two factors: 1) mounting fears over a potential swine flu epidemic that first [...]

Linus Pauling, Vitamin C and the AIDS Crisis

“Many orthomolecular substances are so free from toxicity that they show beneficial effects over a 10,000-fold range of concentrations. Yet if you take even ten times the amount of aspirin that many patients take, for example, you’d be dead; hundreds of people do die every year from aspirin poisoning. And all of the other major [...]