Double Nobel Laureate for Chemistry and Peace, advocate for vitamin C

Linus Pauling died at his home on August 16, 1994. He was ninety-three. He built the house overlooking the Pacific Ocean on his picturesque ranch near San Louis Obispo, Big Sur, California. His last few years had seen him in failing health and becoming extremely weak. He had earlier been diagnosed with prostate cancer for which he’d received surgery at Stanford Medical School but had declined follow-on chemotherapy in favor of an intravenous supplementation of vitamin C—an unproven experimental procedure he had chosen for himself. 

He had survived his wife Ava Helen by thirteen years. They had fallen in love at college, where he had also been a sophomore science teacher in her home economics class. She was three years younger than he and gave up completing her education to marry and to join him at the newly founded chemistry division at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena. In 1922, the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena accepted Pauling to work on his PhD. 

Ava Helen was 77 years old when she died of cancer of the stomach on December 7, 1981. Her last days were spent at Pauling’s Portola Valley home, close to the Stanford University campus. She, too, had declined the follow-on chemotherapy after the surgery to remove the tumor. 

The Paulings had bought Deer Flat Ranch after Linus had won the Nobel Prize for chemistry in 1954. Ava Helen had seen the for sale sign on an occasion they were driving back to Pasadena from Berkeley. The ranch was located on the scenic route along the Pacific Coast Highway between Los Angeles and San Francisco. It sloped steeply from the road to the ocean. When they purchased the property, it only consisted of a barn and a small cabin. However, they meticulously designed and constructed a home that perched like a nest on the edge of a steep drop leading to the ocean. Deer Flat Ranch was their sanctuary from the height of his scientific reputation in the mid-fifties to it’s implosion following the controversial award of the 1962 Nobel Prize for Peace in 1963 in recognition of his campaign to halt atmospheric nuclear testing. 

The Nobel Peace Prize, itself no stranger to controversy, had been withheld the year before by the Gunnar Jahn Chairman of the Norwegian Nobel Committee because the other committee would not agree to award it to Pauling. Also, the Cuban missile crisis had occurred during that October, close to when Nobel Awards are announced annually. At the time, no reason was given for the decision to withhold the prize—an accepted practice for the Nobel Committee. Jahn, unable to coerce the other committee members to award the prize to Pauling in 1962, was more successful in 1963 after the Nuclear Partial Test Ban (NPT) was signed on August 5. Two months later, the Nobel Peace Prizes for 1962 and ‘63 were announced. The ‘62 prize goes to Pauling for his efforts to bring about the end to nuclear weapons testing, and the ‘63 prize goes to the international Red Cross. 

The ensuing furor over the award to Pauling drew international criticism mostly for singling out Pauling for a campaign initiated by Albert Einstein and Bertrand Russell and supported by a large number of eminent scientists and multiple organizations, the most prominent of which was the Pugwash Conference and Joseph Rotblat, Nobel Laureate for Physics. It took another thirty years for the Norwegian Nobel Committee to award the peace prize jointly to Pugwash and Rotblat in 1995.

Having won Nobel prizes for Chemistry and Peace Linus’s interests moved towards the possibility of a third, for physiology or medicine. While he continued to profess an interest in world peace and an end to all wars, this was mostly expressed in activism rather than in participation in the development of international security policy or measures articulating arms control, either through organizations or by individual initiative. 

Linus, a scientist, held the belief that only scientific thinking and solutions could contribute to the betterment of humanity. At the same time he was admiring, perhaps even envious, scientists who could write poetry and recite from philosophy and ancient literature, like Robert Oppenheimer, for example. As children, neither Linus nor Ava Helen had much exposure to the value of the arts and humanities to society. Her family was immersed in issues to alleviate injustice, especially that effecting those most socially vulnerable. For his childhood, Linus was able to scavenge chemicals and apparatus to build himself a lab, learned to speak German with his grandparents, and read some Latin and Greek from a neighbor. His father, who died when Linus was nine, had provided a reading list that included classic literature, history and philosophy. However, by the time he arrived at college, this had done much less towards broadening his mind than hardening his feelings of intellectual superiority. For example, he did not receive a high school diploma because he considered the requirement to complete a civics and government class to be intellectually challenging and of no value to him.

His health was a constant concern from 1941, when he was first diagnosed with glomerulonephritis, a kidney disorder. It occurs on its own or with other conditions such as lupus or diabetes. An inflammation of the tiny filters in the kidneys (glomeruli). The condition, depending on its severity, can be fatal. It can come on suddenly or gradually. The condition was considered incurable at the time and treatable mainly by dietary modification, as kidney dialysis had not yet been developed nor transplant surgery. The problem was first noticed after Pauling traveled to attend a scientific meeting on the east coast. He fell ill with a severe inflammation of the kidneys. The condition only worsened on his return journey to California by train. At that time, a highly regarded specialist for nephritis patients was at Stanford University Medical School, and Pauling was referred to him. Dr. Tom Addis Jr., a Scottish emigre, treated nephritis patients exclusively through a specialized diet derived from the urinalysis of the patient. The diet was comprised of a low-salt, low-protein intake with vitamin supplements. Pauling’s condition began improving immediately. Linus, Ava Helen (who charged with the administration of the diet), and Tom Addis bonded and remained close until Addis’s death in 1949. Pauling’s nephritis went into remission, and he maintained the diet for a decade and a half. 

The nephritis diagnosis came shortly after the publication of Pauling’s seminal textbook, ‘Nature of the Chemical Bond’. At this point he was already a star at Caltech, having been made head of the chemistry division by the time he was thirty-one years old. Both the events of his succumbing to a then frequently fatal condition for which there were no widely accepted treatments and his recovery from it by a dietary plan supplemented with vitamins left a deep impression that shaped the way he would view the management of human health for the rest of his life. 

     By the time of the award of the Nobel Peace Prize in 1963, Pauling’s activism and the shift in his scientific interest away from chemistry towards biology and health had significantly impacted his management of his division at Caltech. His frequent and extended absences from campus while he travelled both domestically and internationally promoting his petition for scientist signatures supporting a halt to atmospheric nuclear testing and seeming disinterest in the routine management of the Chemistry Division had driven Caltech’s Board and Trustees to exasperation. His peers at Caltech at the time described the situation as “very messy.” Pauling would not accept that the Chemistry Division had fallen into disarray; “no one could tell Linus anything; they were all afraid of him; he was like the Pope of Caltech.” Remarked one senior member of the faculty. Moreover, there was growing acceptance of the orbital theory over Pauling’s valence bond theory that he had so eloquently articulated in the Nature of the Chemical Bond. It also did not help that the President of the Caltech Board was Robert Millikan, who was one of the major developers of molecular orbital theory. Although Nature of the Chemical Bond was selling widely and new editions were being issued, Pauling steadfastly refused to acknowledge the importance of the emergence of molecular orbital theory in the revisions to his book, relegating it to a note in the appendix of a late edition of Nature of the Chemical Bond.

After he had successfully predicted the structural basis of the uptake of oxygen by hemoglobin, Pauling went on to identify that sickle cell anemia was a structural abnormality of the hemoglobin molecule causing the curved sickle shape of the red blood cells with this anemic disorder. But he had also latched on to the idea that the intake of large amounts of niacin would alleviate schizophrenia. These areas of investigation occupied a significant portion of the Chemistry Division’s lab space, displacing traditional chemistry research. It is undeniable that Pauling played a significant role in propelling the fledgling Caltech to a level comparable to historically prominent American institutions such as Harvard, MIT, and Cornell. Equally, without Caltech’s nurturing, Pauling May would have struggled to distinguish himself from the other high-achieving individuals on those campuses. Also, while Pauling quickly emerged as a remarkably talented member of Caltech’s faculty, he was by no means alone or even in a minority. Over a couple of decades from the 1950s, Caltech’s campus was bursting with Nobel Prize winners. In spite of Pauling’s second Nobel, perhaps even because of it, neither Pauling nor the Caltech Trustees could reach a settlement about Pauling’s future, and they parted ways. Pauling, angry and embittered by his treatment by the Caltech Trustees and Board, and for their part, Caltech frustrated by Pauling’s activism, his absences from campus, and his pursuit of research priorities well outside and at the expense of what they felt should have been the focus of the chemistry division. 

 By this time in the early1960’s,s all ofPauling’ss major scientific accomplishments in chemistry were behind him. Most scientists have completed their contributions by theirfifties,s and Pauling was in his early sixties at the time he took his position at the Center for Democratic Institutions in SantaBarbara,a not far from his beautiful and beloved ranch in Big Sur. His time here was short andinconsequential;l unable to pursue lab work or associate with scientificthinkers,s he moved to the chemistry department at theUniversityy ofCalifornia,a San Diego. He wasunable toe move UCSD to allow him free reign to develop his ideas for treating diseases with vitamins and supplements in that these ideas lay outside the scope of a chemistry department. Finding a sympathetic ear in ArthurKornberg, at StanfordUniversity,y Pauling moved there in 1969. Kornberg had been awarded the NobelPrizee in 1959 for his work on DNA synthesis and was both a biochemist and an MD. Pauling must have been optimistic that his ideas for what by then he had called “orthomolecular medicine” would find a warmer reception at Stanford.

From the very outset, orthomolecular medicine had a hostile reception from the medical community. Referring to the practice of varying the concentration of substances normally present in the body to prevent and treat disease, “orthomolecular” was strikingly comparable to megadoses of vitamins and other supplements to treat illnesses. A practice identified as having no scientific basis or confirmation of medical benefit to patients. Introduced to vitamin C in the mid-1960s by Irwin Stone Linus and Ava Helen began taking doses in significant excess of the recommended daily allowance. Believing that their personal experience supported the benefits of vitamin C in preventing the Common Cold Pauling published a book on the subject in 1971. The book became a huge success and triggered a deluge in sales for vitamin C. But Pauling cannot have anticipated the consequences of this success.

Unable to establish any research at Stanford either within the scientific departments or the medical school, Pauling decided to set up his own independent research institute for orthomolecular science and medicine near the Stanford campus. But he had also to face the reaction of organizations such as the American Psychiatric Association, which launched a full-scale debunking of his ideas for the orthomolecular treatments for schizophrenia. Now in his early seventies, Pauling still believed he was capable of generating another Nobel Prize-worthy discovery. Despite his failure to predict the double helical structure of DNA in the mid-1950s, Pauling shifted his focus to discovering ways to treat human diseases by manipulating the amounts of naturally occurring substances in the human body, particularly vitamin C. After all, Pauling’s near-fatal personal experience with glomerulonephritis was an example of how dietary plus supplemental treatments could be effective. 

In his books on vitamin C and the common cold, Pauling had suggested that it might also be beneficial in the treatment of cancer. Studies were started at the Pauling’s Institute on the efficacy of large doses of vitamin C for the treatment of cancer. These studies were funded not only from private donors but also from the National Cancer Institute and the National Institutes of Health. 

The research institute suffered early on from mismanagement of research and funding issues. By the time Linus Pauling died in 1994, he had fired the first director of research whom he had hand-picked himself, and the succeeding director had to be forcibly removed by the Boar of the Institute. Both sued Pauling and his institute, resulting in lengthy and expensive litigation. Pauling’s eldest son, Linus Jr., took over management of the institute, settling its liabilities. With Pauling’s papers transferred to the Oregon State University Library archives, the Pauling Institute was closed, and it’s assets were used to set up an institute named for Pauling at OSU to continue his interests in the benefits of vitamins and supplements in improving human health and well-being.

My forthcoming biography explores Pauling’s scientific genius and why his success in applying quantum mechanics to chemistry and later structural chemistry to biology floundered when he turned his extraordinary intellect to the most difficult problems of human health. Pauling was not only intellectually unchallenged in his time; he possessed a unique ability to intuitively predict molecular structure and to interpret solutions to scientific problems that would sometimes take years to verify. Yet his determination to extrapolate his personal experience with recovery from illnesses and the idea that this was likely based on correcting imbalances in naturally occurring substances in the body was without success or acceptance by the medical profession, especially as Pauling would claim for schizophrenia and cancer.