Linus Pauling is considered the greatest chemist of modern times. He was the pioneer of quantum chemistry, molecular biology and New Scientist called him one of the 20 greatest scientists of all time,and as of 2000, he was rated the 16th most important scientist in history.
Pauling is the only person to win two unshared Nobel Prizes, one for chemistry and the other for his peace activism after the Second World War. He campaigned tirelessly along with his wife, fellow activist Ava Helen Pauling to ban nuclear testing. On January 15, 1958, Pauling and his wife presented a petition to United Nations Secretary General Dag Hammarskjöld calling for an end to the testing of nuclear weapons. It was signed by 11,021 scientists representing fifty countries.
His controversial work with Vitamin C and orthomolecular medicine garnered much derision and denial from both the scientific and medical communities. His claims that Vitamin C and nutrition were effective combatants and deterrents to both cancer and heart disease earned him accusations of quackery by respected scientists and doctors. How could a simple Vitamin fight cancer?
Double-blind testing by the Mayo Clinic denied his claims. The fact that the chief investigator Charles G. Moertel was virulently opposed to natural medicine seemed to escape the notice of the medical profession. Most people think scientists are innately impartial and have no biases. The testing was also faulty because 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 his partner Ewan Cameron publicly branded the Mayo report as “fraudulent” and angrily decried the false assertion that Moertel had closely replicated their work.
But the damage was done. Linus Pauling’s reputation was seriously tarnished for decades. His political activism resulted in his passport being denied by the US authorities when he attempted to travel to London to speak at a conference in 1952.
Pauling is on record as saying, “Everyone should know that the ‘war on cancer’ is largely a fraud, and that the National Cancer Institute and the American Cancer Society are derelict in their duties to the people who support them.”
Recent studies have since vindicated Pauling. A team of 16 doctors from University of Iowa Medical Center published two studies in the journals Radiation Research and Cancer Research in 2018.
The 16 Iowa co-authors have now shown that IVC [intravenous Vitamin C] in fact increases overall survival. In this patient group, it went from an average of 12.7 months to 21.7 months, for an absolute gain of 9 months. Put another way, it increased survival by 70%.
From the article: “The late Charles Moertel, MD, who supervised the vitamin C clinical trials at the Mayo Clinic, was known to his friends as “Dr. Debunker.” He had an extreme prejudice against all forms of alternative medicine, and its practitioners. He also supervised the ludicrously bad trial of laetrile (amygdalin or B17). His prejudice should have disqualified him from conducting a trial of vitamin C. But instead he was put in charge of it and totally screwed it up! This famous physician had to know the difference between a vitamin C pill and an infusion or the same substance, which is from 100 to 1,000 times more powerful. But he chose to give all the patients only the oral form…and then gleefully informed the world that Pauling had been proven wrong and that vitamin C was worthless in cancer.”
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