LPISM in the 1980s

Linus Pauling Institute of Science and Medicine staff portrait, 1989.

[A history of the Linus Pauling Institute of Science and Medicine, Part 4 of 8]

In the spring of 1980, amidst a swirl of funding difficulties and legal actions, Emile Zuckerkandl was named President and Director of the Linus Pauling Institute of Science and Medicine. He quickly began working to expand LPISM into a more wide-ranging organization with a particular focus on cellular research. His leadership style was very different from the Institute’s previous presidents, but the staff liked him and generally supported his initiatives.

By this point, born of need, Linus Pauling’s relationship with the Institute began to assume a somewhat Faustian character. Pauling was contacted by, and began regularly meeting with, a man named Ryoichi Sasakawa to discuss future collaboration plans and possible donations. Sasakawa was a world-renowned philanthropist and famous businessman who had single handedly introduced and popularized motorboat racing in Japan. Sasakawa was also very controversial. An avowed fascist, he was an admirer of Benito Mussolini and a political strongman who had been charged with war crimes for his activities in support of the Japanese government during World War II.  He was also very wealthy and Pauling’s connection to Sasakawa would grow over time.

The summer and early fall of 1980 were largely preoccupied with the Art Robinson suits and fundraising. In August LPISM finally received some good news: the National Science Foundation had awarded the Institute a grant of $40,000 a year for two years to support research on the structure of molecules and complex ions containing transition metals. This provided a much needed financial boost, as finances were suffering greatly from the Mayo trials and the ongoing legal wrangling with Robinson.

The year ended somewhat stressfully when, in December, LPISM was forced to move from Menlo Park to 440 Page Mill Rd. in Palo Alto. The landlord of their building in Menlo Park had evicted all of his tenants while he was making structural repairs to the facility. Once completed, he decided not to welcome LPISM back, instead inviting more profitable companies to take their spot. The new building in Palo Alto was dramatically bigger and less expensive; it was also quite a bit shabbier, in part because it was made out of cinderblocks.  Employee Alan Sheets was able to help save the Institute a lot of money during the transition, as his father was a professional mover. As such, the Sheets family helped LPISM move itself instead of hiring the process out to a company.

Extracted from the LPISM Newsletter, Winter 1980.

The dawn of 1981 brought with it major financial relief for LPISM. After eight failed tries over eight long years, the National Cancer Institute finally agreed to fund a component of LPISM’s program – a two-year grant for $204,000 to research the effects of vitamin C on breast cancer in mice. At about the same time, Sasakawa’s company, the Japanese Shipbuilding Foundation, pledged $5 million to the Institute over the following ten years. As part of the deal, LPISM began working with Sasakawa to create the Sasakawa Aging Research Center, which was set up as a satellite facility on Porter Drive. Later in the 1980s, the building at Porter Drive suffered a major roof leak which destroyed thousands of pages of research and documentation. Thomas Hager, one of Pauling’s biographers, notes that LPISM successfully sued the landlord for neglecting to maintain the building.

Despite this influx of new cash, the close of 1981 proved to be an awful time for Linus Pauling and LPISM. In August, Ava Helen Pauling’s recurrent stomach cancer was declared inoperable and on December 7, after struggling with cancer for five years and three months, Ava Helen died. Linus Pauling was absolutely devastated, and the LPISM staff was greatly saddened by the loss as well. Pauling understandably did not cope well with the passing of the woman who was his wife for nearly 60 years, and he effectively ceased to be involved in LPISM except in the most cursory of ways, choosing instead to spend much of his time alone at his ranch in Big Sur, California.

The year that followed was, unsurprisingly, a tough one. Pauling remained in mourning and didn’t really contribute to LPISM, the Robinson suits dragged on, and the Institute’s fundraisers still struggled to cope with the fallout from the Mayo Trials. The NCI and Sasakawa donations helped to keep operations running, as did some of the revenue from Pauling and Cameron’s book, Cancer and Vitamin C. In the summer of 1982, Pauling took a trip throughout the Pacific Northwest where he visited many of his and Ava Helen’s favorite spots, as well as the cemetery where his maternal grandfather Linus Wilson Darling rested. The trip brought him closure and by the fall he became active at the Institute again.

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In February 1983, the lawsuits with Arthur Robinson finally ended, with LPISM paying an out of court settlement of $575,000. The Institute adamantly maintained no wrong doing, instead acknowledging the fiscal prudence of settling as opposed to prolonging the court battle, which was nearly five years old by that point.

Their legal problems resolved, LPISM fundraisers redoubled their efforts to regain their financial momentum, as the lawsuits had drained them of resources. Past fundraising techniques were unable to generate much steam, so Rick Hicks began cultivating relationships with individual, extremely wealthy donors, notably Armand Hammer, Ryoichi Sasakawa and Danny Kaye. As a part of this strategy, LPISM began annually awarding individuals – typically major donors – the Linus Pauling Medal for Humanitarianism. Sasakawa was its first recipient.

In November 1983, LPISM researchers announced that they had discovered a new type of chemical bond that mimicked the bond believed to exist between bulk metals. This was a fairly important discovery, and also helped restore some measure of favorable public opinion as people saw the good work that LPISM was doing. The announcement also reminded folks that LPISM wasn’t just about vitamin C research. The next year, in 1984, Pauling received the extremely prestigious Joseph Priestley Medal from the American Chemical Society for his lifetime of work and dedication in the field of chemistry.

However, the controversy over vitamin C was never far from the Institute and more arrived in a hurry when, on January 2, 1985, the Mayo Clinic released the results of its second set of trials. The Institute was given no warning of the release or chance to read the results in advance. This infuriated Pauling who saw it as an obvious insult levied by the study’s principal investigator, Charles Moertel.

Pauling Note to Self, January 14, 1985.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, Moertel announced that the study had reaffirmed his earlier assertion that vitamin C was useless in cancer treatment. Upon reading the report though, Pauling deduced that Moertel hadn’t actually examined Ewan Cameron’s papers, the very studies he was supposed to be replicating. Among other deviations, the amount of vitamin C used in the Mayo trials was lower than in Cameron’s studies, the amount of time that patients had been given vitamin C was shorter and patients were given vitamin C orally instead of intravenously. Both Pauling and Cameron publicly branded the Mayo report as “fraudulent” and angrily decried the false assertion that Moertel had closely replicated their work.

Many journals and newspapers refused to publish Pauling and Cameron’s rebuttals, or published them months after they were submitted such that the responses were no longer relevant. As a result, LPISM suffered still more financial hardships as public opinion once again swung away from the Institute and many people stopped donating. The direct-mail appeals that had been so successful in years past were only bringing in 25% of what they had a few months previously.

By 1986 LPISM was struggling with funding and also public awareness – the second Mayo Clinic trial seemed to have largely sealed public opinion on vitamin C research. But Pauling was still convinced that vitamin C had more merit than was being considered, and in support of this cause he published How to Live Longer and Feel Better. The book was well-received by critics and sold well.

For the Institute, its successes were manifold, as it provided a morale boost to LPISM staff, brought in sorely needed funds and dramatically raised awareness of the organization and its activities. Shortly afterward, Cameron and fellow LPISM employee Fred Stitt found themselves swamped with phone calls and letters to the Institute about health questions and recommendations. They quickly developed a standardized health information packet which they would mail out to people making more generic inquiries.

Nonetheless, as always, controversy was hovering over the Institute like a thunderhead. In 1987 Institute staffer Raxit Jariwalla began to research the effect of vitamin C on HIV/AIDS treatment. After a short period of time, Pauling became interested in the research and eventually Cameron did as well. Pauling began advocating increased usage of vitamin C in treating what seemed to be an incurable disease; the response was immediate and dramatic. Local donations increased, as the Bay Area was particularly sensitive to the hazards posed by HIV/AIDS. However, at the very same time, other sources of funding dropped as numerous groups and individuals pulled their support, stating that HIV/AIDS was a “moral disease.”

Through it all, the Institute continued to follow Zuckerkandl’s lead in expanding its research into areas outside the realm of orthomolecular medicine. In 1987 researchers began extensive work on protein profiling and the effect of phytic acid in cancer prevention, a program that was more or less entirely supported by a philanthropist based in New York.

The Institute also began working on superconductivity in 1988.  In particular, Pauling hoped to develop a room-temperature superconductor which he could then market as a stable revenue source for the Institute. Zuckerkandl, Steve Lawson, Pauling and even Cameron began working on this project, which utilized a material made out of borosilicate glass and tin. The process involved using a blowtorch and an inverted bicycle with its tires taken off the wheels. Pauling would often come down to the labs and help with the physical research and experimentation – it was the last research project he actively participated in. The process worked and the material was developed according to Pauling’s specifications. He received a patent for it early in 1989, and immediately began trying to market it, though ultimately without success.

The decade of the 1980s drew to a close on a mixed note for LPISM. The organization was, as always, struggling with controversy and financial problems. However, research was progressing well, popular support was increasing, and Pauling had come to terms with the death of his wife. The decade had seen its ups and downs, and what lay ahead would be no different.

The Departure of Art Robinson and Fallout from the First Mayo Clinic Study

Art Robinson, 1974.

[A history of the Linus Pauling Institute of Science and Medicine, Part 3 of 8]

By late 1978, the Linus Pauling Institute of Science and Medicine had reformed its fundraising strategy, an action which proved to be quite successful. As a result, for the first time in its five years of existence, LPISM was not struggling to keep its head above water.

This wave of good fortune carried with it unforeseen negative consequences. In particular, Rick Hicks and Art Robinson began to come into conflict over the best way to invest this sudden surplus. Robinson suggested that LPISM move to Oregon – which had recently announced “Linus Pauling Day” in honor of its native son – and build a campus of its own. The idea was not popular with many staff, most of whom did not want to leave the Bay Area.

At the same time, Robinson began cultivating ties with the Orthomolecular Research Institute in Santa Cruz, California, which was headed by Arnold Hunsberger. Linus Pauling was not pleased with this idea, as he felt Hunsberger’s research hypotheses to be off the mark. Pauling had also met Hunsberger and had said that his impression was “not a very favorable one.”

Robinson continued to press for closer ties between LPISM and ORI, a source of growing tension between him and Pauling. In particular, Pauling was angered when he learned that Robinson had begun to tailor experiments in accordance with Hunsberger’s ideas without first consulting Pauling. When confronted, Robinson defended his decision and redoubled his arguments for collaboration. Their relationship continued to sour and morale at LPISM plummeted as the tension between Pauling and Robinson mounted.

In June 1978, Pauling issued a memorandum to Robinson, ordering him to consult the Executive Committee - comprised of Pauling, Robinson, and Hicks – before making “any important decisions.” Robinson responded by immediately firing Hicks. Pauling responded in turn by overruling the termination and demanding Robinson’s resignation within thirty days. He then proceeded to issue a memorandum informing Institute staff that he had stripped Robinson of his position, and that the staff was to disregard all further instructions from Robinson. The next day, the staff arrived at work to find a second memorandum from Robinson, declaring that he was still the president, that neither Pauling nor Hicks had the authority to relieve him of his duties, and that he would not resign.

Pauling memorandum of July 10, 1978.

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The Board of Trustees met in mid-July to try and settle the dispute. They decided to place Robinson on a thirty day leave of absence, empowered Pauling with all executive authority and told him to resolve the issue. On August 15, with Robinson’s leave expired, Pauling was elected President and Director of LPISM. On August 16, Pauling promptly informed Robinson that he was taking over all of Robinson’s research, Emile Zuckerkandl was being appointed Vice-Director, and that Robinson was fired.

Now that Robinson was gone, LPISM attempted to consolidate and return to normal. Pauling asked Steve Lawson to assume a portion of Robinson’s research agenda, a request to which Lawson consented. Over the course of 1978, Lawson had steadily become less involved with the financial arm of LPISM and more involved with its scientific work. Zuckerkandl also tasked Lawson with setting up a cell culture facility where the two would conduct research on the differences between primary and metastic cancer cells, as revealed by protein profiling. Lawson worked closely with UC-San Diego, University of Colorado, and SRI International. He was later joined on that project by Stewart McGuire, Eddy Metz, and Mark Peck, all fellow employees at LPISM.

Robinson, however, did not take his firing lightly and on August 25, LPISM was informed that Robinson was suing the organization for $25.5 million, alleging a breach of contract and unlawful termination among other charges. LPISM’s lawyers began gearing up for a serious legal battle, standing firm in their conviction that the Institute had done nothing wrong.

Meanwhile, the Institute’s vitamin C research continued on despite the added burden of the Robinson lawsuit. In early October 1978, Pauling convinced Ewan Cameron to accept a one-year appointment to LPISM while the two worked on a book about vitamin C and cancer. Additionally, Pauling, Cameron, Lawson, and their coworker Alan Sheets began an experiment to determine the effects of vitamin C on chemotherapeutic drugs. The research took the form of a toxicology experiment in which multiple groups of fish were subjected to chemotherapeutic agents in their water, after which various groups were given different amounts of vitamin C while the research team observed the results.

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The year 1979 started with good news. LPISM was informed by Hoffmann-LaRoche, the world’s largest producer of vitamin C, that they had seen sales more than double during the 1970s, and they fully recognized that Pauling was the cause. As a thank you, they had decided to donate $100,000 a year to the Institute.

The happy days were not to last long. In April, LPISM received an advanced release of the results of the major Mayo Clinic study on the treatment of cancer with ascorbic acid. Its primary investigator, Charles Moertel, had concluded that vitamin C did absolutely nothing to help cancer patients. Pauling was stunned and immediately began writing to Moertel to discuss the study in detail.

Then, over the summer, Art Robinson filed six more charges against LPISM and Pauling, bringing the total number of suits to eight and the total requested damages to $67.4 million. The year-long and highly publicized suit was greatly hurting LPISM’s reputation, and the Institute noticed a subsequent decrease in the donor funds flowing their way.

“Vitamin C Fails as a Cancer Cure,” New York Times, September 30, 1979.

Things then went from bad to worse when, on September 27, the New York Times published the Mayo Clinic study, definitively stating its conclusion that vitamin C was useless in treating cancer. Pauling immediately responded by pointing out that the patients involved in the test were undergoing cytotoxic chemotherapy, which he felt crippled their immune system. He also asserted that the trial was not conducted for long enough to develop accurate results.

Pauling’s response to the New York Times article, October 24, 1979.

Charles Moertel returned fire, defending his results and questioning Pauling, implying that he was fanatical in his zeal for vitamin C and refused to acknowledge the truth. Pauling and Moertel began exchanging volleys in public, writing articles and giving interviews that attacked the research and competence of the other. Unfortunately for Pauling, he took the worst of it, as many people began to agree with Moertel, thinking Pauling to be too enamored with vitamin C to see any negatives. Funding plummeted as donations shrank and LPISM began finding large numbers of grants rejected outright with no chance for an appeal.

Pauling refused to give up. Shortly after the New York Times article was released, he and Cameron published their book, Cancer and Vitamin C. Pauling personally bought 16,000 copies of the publication and mailed them to every member of Congress and to countless other physicians and researchers. This action helped Pauling’s cause significantly as many of the recipients read the book, or at least glanced through it. And even those recipients who didn’t read the text were made more aware of Pauling and his research. Likewise, in the marketplace the book sold well despite the bad reception it received from professional reviewers – the public seemed interested in Pauling and Cameron’s ideas.

In light of this, National Cancer Institute head Vincent DeVita agreed to a second round of trials. However, in doing so DeVita once again chose the Mayo Clinic to host the trials and chose Moertel to lead them. Pauling was furious with these decisions, an understandable point of view considering that he and Moertel had spent the past few months publicly accusing one other of being incompetent.  Pauling was also now without his co-author: their book completed, Ewan Cameron returned to Scotland to fulfill his duties at Vale of Leven Hospital. Before leaving, he was appointed a Research Professor at LPISM for a period of five years.

With a new decade approaching, the easier times of the mid-1970s were clearly gone and by early 1980 the future was once again uncertain. While the tensions evident during the Art Robinson era were now history, his lawsuits and the Mayo Clinic trials severely detracted from the future prospects of LPISM. Unfortunately for the Institute and Linus Pauling, their immediate future was not going to be a happy one.

The Story of 1985

Linus Pauling speaking at Oregon State University with the United Nations Bomb Test petition. 1986.

[A look back 25 years in honor of the Pauling birthday anniversary on February 28th.]

Even after a long, exhausting and prestigious career, Linus Pauling remained active and engaged throughout the latter years of his life. During the year 1985, he spent an impressive amount of time speaking and traveling around the country. Roughly four years had passed since the death of Ava Helen, and in her absence Linus kept himself busy writing papers, sharing new ideas, and defending old ones. Though he continued to make contributions to the peace movement throughout the 1980s, Pauling scaled back his activism for much of 1985 to defend a growing movement which sought to diminish the legitimacy of his nutrition advocacy.

Over the previous years, Pauling had become a strong supporter of vitamin supplements for the treatment and prevention of illness and disease. Most notable was his insistence that vitamin C could be used to significantly improve the condition of cancer patients. Ewan Cameron, a surgeon from Scotland who had been in contact with Pauling for several years, undertook a study to treat cancer patients with vitamin C. The outcome from the study, released in 1976, reported longer survival rates and a number of other positive effects in terminal cancer patients who had been administered high doses of vitamin C.

A study addressing Cameron’s results was later released by the Mayo Clinic, overseen by a professor of oncology named Charles Moertel. The study refuted conclusions from Cameron’s research, and insisted that the results from his study were not reproducible. According to Pauling and Cameron, this was largely due to Moertel’s unwillingness to correctly match the design of Cameron’s work. Though much of the scientific community was generally unreceptive to Pauling’s promotion of vitamin mega-dosing, this initial Mayo Clinic study did not fully repudiate Pauling and Cameron’s claims.

In 1985 a second study was released by the Mayo Clinic, the intention of which was to more closely replicate the conditions of Cameron’s experiment. The final results of the study countered Cameron’s claims once again, and this time the study was almost unanimously accepted by the scientific establishment. Pauling promptly denounced the second study, and spent a great deal of energy fighting the perceived conclusiveness of its findings.

Perhaps the most substantial objection issued by Pauling was that the Mayo studies were using a different framework to measure the success of vitamin C treatment. The Moertel study stopped testing when no visible tumor recession appeared, whereas a primary emphasis for Cameron’s earlier study involved measuring quality of life improvements for the patients undergoing treatment. Though tumor recession was a goal of Cameron’s study, it was not the ultimate determinant of its success.

Shortly after the release of the second Mayo study, a dip was experienced in mail-in donations to the Linus Pauling Institute of Science and Medicine. Pauling largely blamed the Mayo Clinic for these decreases, which partially explains the ferocity of his response. Even with these setbacks however, the Institute remained open, and Pauling was able to carry on with life-as-usual for the most part.

Though most of Pauling’s work during the year was focused on refuting results from the Mayo Clinic study and promoting his vitamin C agenda, he still managed to publish other material that was somewhat unrelated to the controversy. He finished his final book, How to Live Longer and Feel Better, the last of sixteen books written by Pauling. The book offers suggestions for a healthy lifestyle, touching on physical and mental practices, and appeared on the New York Times’ bestseller list when it was first published in 1986.

He also authored several articles addressing chemical bonds, quantum chemistry and crystal structure theory. Several publications involving quasicrystals were perhaps his most notable works for the year in this regard. Upon their classification as such, quasicrystals were a category of crystal that seemed to violate the prevailing crystallographic principles of the time. A number of theories were produced to explain their irregular tendencies, and Pauling formed a hypothesis that received widespread attention among his peers.

Besides his turbulent interactions with the scientific community throughout the year, Pauling was also kept busy by a number of personal affairs. His friend of over 60 years, Paul Emmett, died in April, and Pauling attended his funeral in Portland later that month.

Though the debate over vitamin C absorbed much of Pauling’s attention during the year, he still managed to travel, write, speak for peace and relax at his Big Sur ranch. If nothing else, Pauling’s impressive age and remarkable vigor provide a convincing testament to his behavior and lifestyle advocacy. Throughout the rest of the 1980s, Pauling’s routine and activity would change very little.

Ewan Cameron

Ewan Cameron, 1976

“Today I propose to tell you of my personal involvement in this still highly controversial subject, the vitamin C in cancer story. The matter is capable of arousing almost any emotion from bitter prejudice and blazing anger on the one hand, to unbridled (and undeserved) enthusiasm on the other, with all grades of scorn, laughter, ridicule, and pity in between. I hope to convince you that the whole research project has a perfectly sound scientific basis, and that Dr. Pauling and I are neither gullible fools, nor are we charlatans.”

-Ewan Cameron, “Vitamin C and Cancer: A Personal Perspective,” September 1984.

Ewan Cameron, about whom we’ve written before, was born in Glasgow, Scotland on July 31, 1922. His interest in medicine emerged early in life and at the age of twenty-one he was interning in surgery and medicine in several Scottish hospitals.  One year later he received the British equivalent of an M.D. degree from the University of Glasgow and shortly thereafter was stationed in Burma, performing surgeries as a Lieutenant Colonel in the British Army Reserve at the close of World War II.

Following his three years of active military service, Cameron returned to Scotland and resumed his training in surgery and radiotherapy. In 1956, at the age of 33, he was appointed Consultant Surgeon at Vale of Leven District Hospital in Dunbartonshire, Scotland – at the time, Cameron was the youngest such appointee in all of the U. K.

Cameron’s formal association with Vale of Leven would last for twenty-six years, and it is during this period that he formulated an important theory on the nature of cancer. Cameron’s idea was that the malignant invasiveness of cancer cells might be combated by manipulating hyaluronidase inhibitor, a naturally-occurring substance that controls the hyaluronidase enzyme liberated by malignant tumors. The theory, which Cameron developed for at least eleven years before publishing, was founded on the notion of fighting cancer through the strengthening of the human body’s natural protective mechanisms.

In 1971 Cameron further hypothesized that vitamin C was required for the body’s synthesis of hyaluronidase inhibitor, and thereafter noted promising results for those terminally-ill cancer patients at Vale of Leven being treated with ten daily grams of ascorbic acid. This line of inquiry was a natural fit for work being conducted several thousand miles away by Linus Pauling. Cameron recalled

Just as the idea evolved, I learned that Professor Linus Pauling had stated that vitamin C might be helpful for cancer patients. My first reaction was one of dismay, even defeat, but such a feeling did not last very long. I wrote immediately to Dr. Pauling and we have been close collaborators ever since. Dr. Pauling had reasoned that an adequacy of vitamin C (necessary for collagen formation) might increase the scirrhous reaction and help encapsulate tumors. On further reading we realized that vitamin C was involved in many other aspects of host resistance, such as cell-mediated immunity and the biosynthesis of interferon. Many independent investigators subsequently were able to show that ascorbate administered in the gram range enhanced these defensive mechanisms to levels of activity far above the so-called normal range. Therefore, there is a strong case for the expectation that supplemental vitamin C, in adequate dosage, might have some beneficial effect against cancer.

Thus began a fruitful partnership resulting in ten papers co-authored by Cameron and Pauling on the potential value of vitamin C in the treatment of cancer.

Ewan Cameron, Ava Helen and Linus Pauling, Glasgow, 1976.

In 1978 Cameron accepted Pauling’s offer of appointment as Chief Medical Officer at the Linus Pauling Institute of Science and Medicine, and moved with his family to California. A year later, Pauling and Cameron published Cancer and Vitamin C, a book-length description of their work written for a more general audience. Initially self-published by the Institute, the book was eventually translated into French and Japanese.

Cameron and Pauling continued to work on the cancer question throughout the 1980s, at points turning their attentions to ascorbic acid’s potential value to those suffering with AIDS. Amidst it all, the duo was routinely attacked by the mainstream medical establishment – a source of tremendous frustration for both Pauling and Cameron. In concluding his 1984 talk, Cameron provided a glimpse into the resentment that the bad press had engendered.

Despite unethical and unprofessional well-publicized attacks on our integrity in the media by Mayo Clinic investigators on the basis of two very seriously flawed trials, I remain convinced that the value of supplemental ascorbate has now been proven beyond a shadow of a doubt, and that in time supplemental ascorbate will come to form a part of all comprehensive cancer treatment regimens. It appears that the general public is already ahead of the medical profession in reaching such a decision.

Ewan Cameron died on March 21, 1991, aged 68, of prostate cancer – the same disease which ultimately claimed Linus Pauling’s life three and a half years later. To date no clear consensus has been reached on the body of work created by the Pauling-Cameron collaboration, though it is worth noting that research published in August 2008 by the National Institutes of Health reported that “High-dose injections of vitamin C, also known as ascorbate or ascorbic acid, reduced tumor weight and growth rate by about 50 percent in mouse models of brain, ovarian, and pancreatic cancers.”

The Ewan Cameron Papers is just one of the many collections housed in the Oregon State University Libraries Special Collections.

Linus Pauling, Vitamin C and the AIDS Crisis

Ewan Cameron, Ava Helen and Linus Pauling. Glasgow, Scotland, October 1976.

“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 drugs are highly toxic as well.“
- Linus Pauling, December 1986

Today, December 1, 2008, is World AIDS Day. In honor of the fight against AIDS, The Pauling Blog would like to discuss Pauling’s own attempts to find a cure.

Beginning in the early 1930s, stemming from early investigations into the chemical nature of hemoglobin, Linus Pauling became deeply interested in the application of chemistry to medical problems.  Once involved in a long-term study of the substance, he began to recognize the significance of hemoglobin to the health of individuals. In 1949, Pauling coined the term “molecular disease” in reference to a mutation in hemoglobin cells that caused sickle cell anemia.

His interest in medicine did not stop there, however. During World War II, Pauling designed a meter to measure oxygen levels aboard U.S. submarines. He later converted this meter to be used in incubators for premature babies with underdeveloped lungs, saving thousands of lives in the process.

In the early 1970s, Pauling developed an interest in the use of megadoses of vitamins as a means for both preventing and treating disease. He became particularly interested in vitamin C because, even in huge doses, it proved to be non-toxic.  Pauling began recommending its use to prevent colds and other illnesses, eventually suggesting that a high-dosage vitamin C regimen could help cancer patients by fortifying the immune system and potentially destroying carcinogens.

With the onset of the AIDS crisis in the early 1980s, Pauling saw potential for another area in which vitamin C could be put to good use. Though he did not officially endorse vitamin C as a treatment for AIDS until the early 1990s, he commonly noted its possible benefits and lack of side effects.

In 1988, Pauling headed a study on the effects of vitamin C in combating the AIDS virus, measuring the impact that ascorbic acid had on infected T-cells. The results, though not extraordinary, were promising.

In 1990, Pauling and his colleagues published the results of their study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, claiming that vitamin C appeared to suppress the growth of the AIDS virus. As was true of Pauling’s previous claims regarding vitamin C and orthomolecular medicine, the studies were at least a source of intrigue to many, though likewise dismissed by a wide cross-section of the medical community.

At the same time that Pauling was embarking on his AIDS research, Ewan Cameron, a researcher at the Linus Pauling Institute of Science and Medicine in Palo Alto, approached Pauling regarding a book he was writing entitled The AIDS Disaster. The book was meant to serve as a comprehensive study of the AIDS virus, describing its history, socio-political context, and related research.

Cameron and Pauling's unpublished manuscript, "The AIDS Disaster." August 1988.

Cameron requested that Pauling serve as co-author, editing the book and providing a chapter on vitamin C and AIDS. Pauling agreed and, in late 1988, the book was completed. Due to a variety of publishing issues, the text never reached bookstore shelves, but several complete versions of the manuscript are held in Cameron’s papers here at Oregon State University.

Until his death in 1994, Pauling continued to emphasize the responsibility of the scientific community to help cure diseases such as AIDS and cancer. He gave frequent lectures on the subject of orthomolecular medicine and continually worked to increase support for medical research.

For additional reading on Ewan Cameron’s AIDS work and research, check out the Cameron Papers finding aid, hosted online by the OSU Libraries Special Collections.  Please also note that a few more of Pauling’s thoughts on the treatment of AIDS with ascorbic acid are linked off of this index page from the Linus Pauling Research Notebooks website.

Cancer and Vitamin C Redux

Group photo of the Linus Pauling Institute of Science and Medicine staff, 1989. Ewan Cameron stands adjacent to Linus Pauling

The conversation concerning the possible use of vitamin C in the treatment of cancer continues to gather momentum. 

As we’ve noted before on the PaulingBlog, the possibility that ascorbic acid might be a useful tool in the fight against cancer was a topic of intense interest to Linus Pauling and a handful of his colleagues (Ewan Cameron and Irwin Stone, among others) over the last two decades of his life.  Pauling’s devotion to the subject, and often-fiery defenses of his beliefs, attracted no small amount of criticism from the scientific and medical mainstream.  More than anything else, Pauling’s vitamin C and cancer research is the source of the “Pauling as quack” notions still prevalent in certain circles.

With Pauling’s death in 1994, the push for rigorous study of the vitamin C and cancer question steadily dissipated.  In recent time however, thanks in large part to new findings published by the National Institutes of Health, the possibilities suggested by Pauling, Cameron, Stone and others are now re-entering the scientific discourse.  As reported yesterday in Cancer Monthly, a new commentary written by Dr. Balz Frei and Stephen Lawson of the Linus Pauling Institute, and published in the August 12, 2008 issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, (free extract available here) lends further credence to the preliminary results reported in early August by the NIH.  Quoting from Cancer Monthly

“[Pauling and Cameron's] research was intriguing enough that the National Cancer Institute (NCI) launched two subsequent studies on the subject at the Mayo Clinic.  However, when those studies failed to show that vitamin C increased survival in terminal cancer patients, interest in the antioxidant as an anticancer therapy began to wane….Where the NCI studies were likely missing the mark was by giving vitamin C orally in relatively small doses, say the commentary authors….’We know that IV vitamin C produces levels in blood that are many times greater than those achieved with oral supplementation, and these very high concentrations may be necessary to kill cancer cells,’ says Lawson.”

In the spirit of lending added historical perspective to this evolving topic, the PaulingBlog is pleased to provide exclusive access to Linus Pauling’s first complete speech typescript on the subject at hand.  Below the fold is the entirety of a fourteen-page talk titled “Ascorbic Acid and Cancer,” delivered by Pauling to the California Orthomolecular Medical Society at a meeting in San Francisco on February 14, 1976. While this typescript does not represent the first presentation that Pauling gave on the topic (the earliest talks date back to at least November 1971), the content published below does represent the oldest complete vitamin C and cancer speech typescript held in the Ava Helen and Linus Pauling Papers.

Vitamin C and Cancer Back in the News

Ewan Cameron, Ava Helen Pauling and Linus Pauling, Glasgow, Scotland, 1976.

The National Institutes of Health news release of Monday August 4th, titled “Vitamin C Injections Slow Tumor Growth,” (which, a day later, was the subject of this article in the Washington Post) is of particular interest to those familiar with the life and work of Linus Pauling.

Though he made important contributions to numerous disciplines of scientific study throughout the course of his seventy-plus year career, Pauling is probably most popularly known as “The vitamin C guy,” in large part due to his best-selling book Vitamin C and the Common Cold, published in 1970.  Suffice it to say, Pauling was a vitamin C enthusiast; and one does not have to look very hard to uncover another of Pauling’s ascorbic acid-related topics of interest — that of the potential use of vitamin C in the treatment of various forms of cancer.

In 1976 Pauling and a colleague, a Scottish physician by the name of Ewan Cameron, published a paper titled “Supplemental Ascorbate in the Supportive Treatment of Cancer: Prolongation of Survival Times in Terminal Human Cancer.” [1976p.16] The co-authors used this paper to outline what they felt were promising results from a clinical trial of one-hundred patients suffering from terminal cancers — namely that ascorbic acid treatments, when used in conjunction with more conventional cancer treatments, seemed to lead to longer survival times.

As it turned out, this paper was the opening salvo of a long-running and often-contentious period of research for Pauling and Cameron.  Convinced of the validity of their position, the duo engaged in a number of further studies, while at the same time confronting — sometime angrily — a steady stream of criticism directed their way from multiple segments of the scientific and medical establishment.  Of particular note was a long-running dispute between Pauling and Charles Moertel of the Mayo Clinic, whose own double-blind studies concluded that “no significant difference in symptomatic improvement” was evident between cancer patients treated with a placebo versus those recieving ascorbic acid therapy. (See Boxes 11.044 and 11.045 of the Pauling Science section)

In 1979, the same year as Moertel’s study, Pauling and Cameron published a book titled Cancer and Vitamin C, in which they detailed their theories on the nature of cancer and the role that vitamin C might play in helping to treat the disease.  Though the co-authors would continue to write and lecture widely on the subject throughout the 1980s and early 1990s, (Cameron died in 1991; Pauling in 1994) the 1979 book is perhaps the most accessible encapsulation of Pauling and Cameron’s thinking on the subject.

For those who might be interested in further tracing Pauling’s thoughts on this highly-controversial subject, the digitized Pauling notebooks offer a great deal of immediately-accessible content — see the listings under “Cancer” on this page.  Of course there is plenty more to be found in the physical collection itself, most notably in Science section 11, and in Pauling’s later article manuscripts and speeches.  A huge amount of content related to the 1979 Cancer and Vitamin C book is also available, as are several boxes of material created for a proposed but never-published follow-up, which was to have been penned with Abram Hoffer and was given the working title How to Control Cancer with Vitamins.

Readers should also note that, in addition to the Pauling archive, the Oregon State University Libraries Special Collections is likewise home to the Ewan Cameron Papers, a 57-linear foot collection that is, in the main, devoted to Cameron’s contributions to a line of research now being continued by scientists at the NIH.