In reality, it was Linus Paulings Institute that had to gain since one of his major contributers was a company that produced and distributed vitamin c. Dr. Art Robinson who trained under and headed Paulings institute for quite a number of years had everything to lose. He in fact was fired for his research which went against everything Pauling had been saying at that time. There were also other institutions such as the Mayo Clinic which showed what Pauling was saying was not true. Here is part of an article about Pauling from AIM.org(accuracy in media) which explains a lot about him that the mainstream media never reported.
Severo's(The New York Times) lengthy obituary skirted around kookier details of his career. In his own field of chemistry, Pauling was frequently criticized as grabbing credit for research done by colleagues. When he ventured into medicine, as a windy advocate of Vitamin C as a cure-all panacea for everything from the common cold to AIDS and drug addiction, Pauling defended such quacks as a California physician who treated cervical cancer with coffee and buttermilk enemas. He was tantamount to a food faddist poster boy during his last decades. In political affairs, Pauling was the epitome of the useful idiot so skillfully exploited by the Soviet Union during the Cold War. He lent his name---and prestige as a Nobel laureate---to a nuclear ban campaign orchestrated by the Kremlin. That the campaign put his own nation at risk did not concern Pauling, a chronic publicity hound. Wearing his trademark black beret, Pauling pranced on picket lines from Washington to San Francisco, a puppet of Soviet operatives working to weaken America's defense and internal security agencies. Dr. Thomas Jukes, professor of medical physics at the University of California at Berkeley, and a member of AIM's national advisory board, was a Pauling watcher for years. He questioned whether Pauling's celebrity was due to original work or a knack for self-promotion. Jukes wrote, "Was Pauling mentally superior to practically all other human beings? Did his mind work faster and better than any others? He alleged that his meditations produced insight that revealed the answer to scientific problems. Did he have unique mental powers in this regard? Was he a real scientific super-giant? Or was he unusually skilled at using the ideas of other people and publicizing them as his own?" As an example of Pauling's glory-grabbing, Jukes cited his claim to the discovery of the alpha helix in protein structure, a landmark event. James Watson, in his book The Double Helix, described how Pauling had presented his claim during a lecture: "The words came out as if he had been in show business all his life. A curtain kept his model hidden until near the end of his lecture, when he proudly unveiled his latest creation. Then, with his eyes twinkling, Linus explained the specific characteristics that made his model--the alpha helix-uniquely beautiful." But as Jukes noted, "The alpha helix was not his discovery. It was that of a black colleague, Dr. Herman Branson." Branson later became president of Lincoln University in Pennsylvania. Branson gave his account of the discovery in a 1984 letter to persons writing a Pauling biography. In 1948-49, while working under Pauling at the California Institute of Techology, Branson was asked to do research on how amino acids might be arranged in a protein molecule. To summarize a very technical scientific matter, Branson proposed a single helix. Pauling disagreed with Branson, telling him that it was "too tight" to fit a protein molecule. But Branson went ahead and constructed a model showing the alpha helix. A Pauling associate named Corey saw it and said, "Well, I'll be damned." Branson wrote up his findings in the summer of 1949 and went on to other work. A year later Pauling wrote up the discovery listing Corey and Branson as co-authors. In 1988 he published a book in which he took all the credit for the discovery, saying that he found it by folding paper. Branson was not mentioned. Branson wrote that he "resented" how Pauling had handled the matter. Pauling's biographers, Ted G. Goertzel and his parents Victor and Mildred, wrote, "In the case of DNA, Pauling rushed into print with a paper that incorporated errors so basic that they should have been caught by any student who has mastered Pauling's introductory chemistry text....Apparently Pauling was willing to risk making errors in the hope that he would be given credit for publishing the first, even if partly incorrect, model of DNA." Jukes showed that Pauling took credit (along with colleagues) for findings concerning molecular disease that actually had been documented by a British scientist, Dr. A.E. Garrod, in 1908---when Pauling was seven years old. IgNobel Conduct Pauling's most publicized legacy, his advocacy of mega-doses of Vitamin C to counter cancer and' the common cold, well could be a legacy of harm to human health. Pauling's zealotry persuaded millions of Americans to put their faith in Vitamin C. Unfortunately, few of these persons realized the dangers they incur by following Pauling's advice. Pauling commenced his Vitamin C crusade in 1966, when (at age 65) he casually remarked at a banquet that he would like to live 15 or 20 years longer. A man named Irwin Stone suggested taking massive doses of Vitamin C. Rather than doing any scientific research on whether the substance actually helped human health, Pauling eagerly signed on as a Vitamin C advocate. His book, Vitamin C and the Common Cold, published in 1970, was a national best-seller for weeks. He claimed that one gram daily would cut the incidence of common colds by 45 percent for most persons, and that others might need larger amounts. A second edition, issued in 1976 as Vitamin C, The Common Cold and the Flu, recommended even higher dosages. No less than 16 clinical studies concluded that Pauling was preaching nonsense. One of the stronger dismissals came from the American Psychiatric Association, in contesting Pauling's claim that vitamin therapy might alleviate schizophrenia. The APA wrote, "The credibility of the megavitamin proponents is low. Their credibility is further diminished by a consistent refusal over the past decade to perform controlled experiments and to report their results in a scientifically acceptable fashion. Under these circumstances, [the APA] considers the massive publicity which they promulgate via radio, the lay press and popular books...to be deplorable." Severo's obituary did mention that researchers at the Mayo Clinic and elsewhere had challenged Pauling's claim about the efficacy of Vitamin C as a cancer preventative. But he gave surprisingly short shrift to a tumultous episode involving Dr. Arthur B. Robinson, a onetime Pauling student who later worked at the Pauling Institute of Science and Medicine. In the 1970s Robinson did clinical tests on mice to evaluate the physical effects of high dosages of Vitamin C. To the dismay of his mentor, Robinson discovered that the quantities of Vitamin C recommended by Pauling doubled the incidence of skin cancer. Pauling responded by firing Robinson and destroying his laboratory data and killing the experimental mice. He also accused Robinson of "amateurish" science. Robinson sued Pauling and his institute for libel and slander and collected an out-of-court settlement of $575,000--of which $425,000 was for damages, the remainder for legal fees. (An exhaustive account of the Robinson affair ran in Barron's on June 11, 1979.) The Robinson case was important because it showed that Pauling wittingly suppressed the scientific record in order to protect his unproven Vitamin C theories. Why was he so vigorous in defending a medical theory that in fact could harm persons? Columnist Colman McCarthy, a Pauling chum, offered an interesting theory in The Washington Post (Aug. 27) for the disdain with which the medical community held his idol. "Such conventional treaters of colds as physicians beholden to drug companies and their high-priced pills tried to dismiss Pauling as a dabbler in quackery," McCarthy wrote. Perhaps. But as Dr. James Lowell wrote in Nutrition Forum in May 1985, 'The largest corporate donor (over $500,000) to Pauling's institute has been Hoffman- La Roche, the pharmaceutical giant which is the dominant factor in world-wide production of Vitamin C. Many of the institute's individual donors have been solicited with the help of Rodale Press (publishers of Prevention magazine) and related organizations which have publicized the institute and allowed the use of their mailing lists." The New York Times's distortion of the validity of Pauling' s work continued after the glowing Severo obituary. On August 28 the Times published a letter from Stephen Lawson, chief executive officer of the Linus Pauling Institute, continuing the argument that Vitamin C helped reduce the incidence of cancer, and dismissing debunking by scientists at the Mayo Clinic and elsewhere. Dr. Victor Herbert, of the Mount Sinai School of Medicine, rebutted Lawson in a letter which the Times did not publish. He wrote, "Vitamin C is not only worthless against heart disease and cancer, but harmful..." The Faddists' Friend Another facet of Pauling's career ignored by the Times was his record of defending fellow faddists, including some accused of highly questionable medical practices. In 1984 he appeared before the California Board of Medical Quality Assurance on behalf of a Mill Valley physician who attended a 56-year-old woman diagnosed as having treatable cervical cancer. The physician chose to treat her with no less than 99 remedies, including coffee and buttermilk enemas, herbs and enzymes. She died. Twin boys aged four years, who complained of earache, were treated with coffee enemas twice daily and 70,000 units of Vitamin A. Pauling's testimony was that coffee enemas might have had value because they clean out the lower bowel. Despite Pauling's efforts, the physician lost his license. In another case, Pauling defended a vitamin promoter who sold by mail a paper test to measure Vitamin C levels in the urine. He claimed that keeping a constant flow "probably offers 100 percent protection against bladder cancer." He also asserted that Vita- min C could cure drug addiction. The postal inspectors put the man out of business. ----- Original Message ----- From: "Bitbucket13" <bitbucke...@yahoo.com.au> To: <silver-list@eskimo.com> Sent: Monday, October 01, 2001 8:53 PM Subject: Re: CS>Study Indicates that Vitamin C is Not Effective for Colds > On Mon, 1 Oct 2001 07:10:18 -0700, Carol wrote: > >Forgive the length of this but this debunks Linus Paulings theory > >on vitamin C as a fraud. Makes you think twice on taking the > >stuff. Carol > > I belong to an alternative cancer group here in Australia. > > This document has been getting around for a while. This has got to be > a fake! It seems to be the opposite of the truth. The medical > profession has something to gain by discrediting Vitamin C because it > is not good for business. Will doctors promote CS from their offices? > Of course they wont. So it is with C. Vitamin C has been given to > cancer patients with good results - there have been no cautions > raised from the alternative industry. Others have tested vitamin C > too with positive results. > > The establishment has a long and proven track record in persecuting > cancer reseachers using litigation, lies, and deception. Why should > this document be any different? > > > > -- > The silver-list is a moderated forum for discussion of colloidal silver. > > To join or quit silver-list or silver-digest send an e-mail message to: > silver-list-requ...@eskimo.com -or- silver-digest-requ...@eskimo.com > with the word subscribe or unsubscribe in the SUBJECT line. > > To post, address your message to: silver-list@eskimo.com > Silver-list archive: http://escribe.com/health/thesilverlist/index.html > List maintainer: Mike Devour <mdev...@eskimo.com> > --- Outgoing mail is certified Virus Free. Checked by AVG anti-virus system (http://www.grisoft.com). Version: 6.0.281 / Virus Database: 149 - Release Date: 9/18/01
