Organ Transplants
Vitamins and Health (4:55)
In 1993, Linus Pauling described the events leading to his interest in using vitamin therapy to cure disease (courtesy of the Ava Helen and Linus Pauling Papers Collection, OSU Valley Library).
I became interested in vitamins to some extent in the 1930s because I brought to Pasadena as a member of our chemistry department the man who had determined the structure of vitamin B1, thiamine, and the method of synthesizing it. That was the first vitamin I took an interest in.
Then in 1941, when I was ill, Dr. Tom Addis at Stanford Medical School treated me in an orthomolecular way. I didn’t get any drugs, but he did have me take vitamins. Essentially the RDA is still from 1941, and I took every day a pretty standard vitamin-mineral pill.
In 1966, Irwin Stone, a biochemist who had devoted much of his life to checking up on vitamin C, and who then wrote a book, The Healing Factor of Vitamin C Against Disease, wrote a letter to me sending some of his papers in which he argued that every person is deficient in vitamin C, because of the bad accident that interferes with the ability of human beings to synthesize it. And he said, evidence from animals that make vitamin C suggests that perhaps 10 grams a day, 10,000 milligrams per day, is the amount that people ought to be getting, rather than 60 milligrams a day. And he recommended that I begin taking three grams a day to see if it helped me to control the common cold, which I suffered from quite a lot, and perhaps other diseases.
That was all right. I still wasn’t very interested in vitamins.
Then I read the work of Hoffer and Osimund. I met those two psychiatrists, who were giving very large amounts of vitamins to schizophrenic patients, just as Dr. Kenyon has been too. That was when I had this burst of insight, that vitamins are really astonishing substances, because of how little toxicity they have. And the question immediately came up in my mind, How much of these, vitamin C for example, should I take to be in the best of health?
I thought about, why is it that megavitamins have value, for the control of schizophrenia. I published my first paper in this field in 1968. It was called Orthomolecular Psychiatry. It was also the paper in which the word “orthomolecular” was introduced. There I presented a number of arguments about mechanisms that go on in the human body and that involve vitamins. And why it is that even animals that manufacture their own vitamin C are benefited if you give them extra vitamin C. That may have been a new argument, but I have a background of knowledge of chemistry, not so much biochemistry, but chemistry as a whole, and I like to understand things. I like to understand what’s going on in systems.
Recently Dr. Hoffer said my contribution, Dr. Linus Pauling’s contribution, has been, not that he discovered megavitamin therapy of schizophrenia or of cancer or anything else, but that he presented us with an understanding why it works.