Vitamin C and the common cold

A two-time Nobel Prize-winning scientist changed chemistry, biology, and the politics of science. But when he pushed vitamin C as a cure-all, did he go too far? Guest: Daniel M. Davis, head of the department of life sciences and professor of immunology at Imperial College London. He is the author of Self-Defense: A Myth-Busting Guide to Immune Health. For show transcripts, go to ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠vox.com/unxtranscripts⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ For more, go to ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠vox.com/unexplainable⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ And please email us! ⁠⁠⁠[email protected]⁠⁠⁠ We read every email. Support Unexplainable (and get ad-free episodes) by becoming a Vox Member today: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠vox.com/members⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Thank you! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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• 1:20Speaker 00

  Why is immunity interesting to you?

• 1:23Speaker 02

  It's a really wonderful frontier of science because it's so deeply complicated. The average undergraduate textbook, so students that would come into a classroom at Imperial College London where I am to study immunology, they would have a textbook that is 1,000 pages long. And that doesn't even get them to the frontier. That just gets you the kind of basics.

• 1:49Speaker 00

  After writing several books about it and teaching scores of students...

• 1:54Speaker 03

  Daniel M. Davis is still fascinated by the immune system.

• 1:59Speaker 02

  I think that the more depth you go into studying the immune system, the more you learn about this cell, that cell, this molecule, that molecule, this gene, that gene, it goes on and on, layer upon layer, regulating this bit with that bit, feedback loops here and there. And then how that system interacts with the body, your brain, your nervous system, your gut, your intestine, the way muscles affect the immune responsiveness, all sorts of nuances and complexities. What emerges for me is that the depth that there is to go into, the contemplation itself becomes its own reward.

• 2:44Speaker 02

  And it feels like you're doing something profound and soulful by digging into the detail of what is happening in your body.

• 2:58Speaker 03

  Davis often gives lectures to all kinds of people. Sometimes those lectures are in front of other researchers, sometimes to students. And he's fascinated by the questions that he gets after these talks when a shy hand shoots up in the back of a room. These questions that his students ask seem pretty simple. But the immune system is so complicated that even the simple questions are actually really difficult to get your head around.

• 3:26Speaker 02

  Should I take more of this supplement, that supplement? How does exercise affect me?

• 3:31Speaker 03

  Davis often replies, so this is everything we know about that question you just asked me. And this is everything we don't know about that question you just asked me. It's how science works, how we learn to learn.

• 3:47Speaker 03

  There's one question that Davis gets a lot. It's the perfect example, a simple, common question that sounds easy, but is actually really hard. So hard that one of the greatest scientists of all time spent decades trying to get to the bottom of this question. He staked his entire career, his good name, and his reputation trying to figure it out.

• 4:17Speaker 02

  Should I drink orange juice to get over a cold?

• 4:21Speaker 03

  I'm Amy Padula. This is Unexplainable.

• 4:39Speaker 02

  Linus Pauling is often said to be one of the greatest scientists of the 20th century.

• 4:45Speaker 03

  Linus Pauling grew up in Oregon in the early 1900s. He had an early aptitude for chemistry. A close friend introduced him to it.

• 4:54Speaker 04

  One day when I was 13 years old, he said to me, would you like to see some chemical experiments? And I said, yes, I would. We went into his house, up to the second floor where he had his little bedroom. And he carried out about three experiments, which really astounded me. They pleased me immensely.

• 5:19Speaker 03

  Pauling enrolled at Oregon State University. He studied chemical engineering and then went on to graduate school at Caltech, where he researched the structure of crystals. By the mid 1920s, he received a PhD in chemistry and mathematical physics. After that, he went to Europe to study with leading experts in quantum mechanics. He befriended Robert Oppenheimer and studied with other prominent scientists. Pauling was a real wonderkin. He was even awarded a prestigious prize for work in pure science by young chemists. And then, in 1931, Pauling got some real attention. He published a paper. It was called "The Nature of the Chemical Bond."

• 6:00Speaker 02

  He did some very important work on understanding how atoms interact with each other and create chemical bonds. And it's fundamentally shaped how we understand chemical reactions in chemistry.

• 6:15Speaker 03

  Pauling's discoveries in that paper were so groundbreaking, they became an essential key to our later understanding of the shape of DNA. Pauling became the chairman of Caltech's Chemistry Department at age 36, and he later wrote a textbook that revolutionized the teaching of the discipline for decades. By the 1940s, Pauling joined the war effort. He worked on explosives and the patent for an armor-piercing shell. And he was one of a few scientists awarded a Presidential Medal of Merit by Harry Truman. But as his public profile began to rise in the science community, his politics changed. He'd been apolitical before,

• 6:58Speaker 03

  actively helping the armed forces in the war effort. And then, something changed.

• 7:06Speaker 05

  A short time ago, an American airplane dropped one bomb on Hiroshima.

• 7:13Speaker 03

  Pauling was shocked. He began giving speeches about it to general audiences, explaining the science of the bomb and the grave moral implications of such a weapon. He felt that scientists should make their voices known about the risk.

• 7:28Speaker 05

  With this bomb, we have now added a new and revolutionary increase in destruction. It is an atomic bomb. It is a harnessing of the basic power of the universe.

• 7:42Speaker 03

  Pauling became a member of the Emergency Committee of Atomic Scientists, a small group that worked to encourage the peaceful use of atomic energy. Even for someone as respected as Linus Pauling, this was risky.

• 7:55Speaker 02

  There was a sense that science had a sort of purity to it. And most scientists were relatively apolitical in the public arena. Even the idea that scientists should have opinions was perhaps somewhat frowned upon.

• 8:12Speaker 03

  It was a dangerous message to the government. Pauling was suspected of being a communist, and Senator McCarthy saw him as a major threat. One communist on the faculty of one university is one communist too many.

• 8:28Speaker 03

  The State Department even denied Pauling a passport. There seemed to be suspicion that he might join the Soviet Union. But when he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry, they had to give it back so he could go to Stockholm for the ceremony.

• 8:42Speaker 04

  Well, I was pretty pleased.

• 8:44Speaker 03

  Back at Caltech, the faculty threw a huge banquet, more than 300 guests, to celebrate this big award.

• 8:54Speaker 06

  Pauling's courses can't be beat, can't be beat. Pauling's courses are a treat, are a treat.

• 9:03Speaker 03

  They performed an original musical in his name.

• 9:07Speaker 06

  If psi functions give you panics, try his course in wave mechanics. Once you've tried it, resonance theory can't be beat. We've been beat.

• 9:15Speaker 03

  The show was called "The Road to Stockholm."

• 9:18Speaker 06

  Dr. Pauling's never wrong, never wrong. And his double bonds are strong, they are strong. They're the strongest, longest double bonds around. The strongest we have ever found.

• 9:35Speaker 02

  1958, he published a really important book, blatantly titled "No More War", because he had taken up an important political stance against nuclear arms and would do wonderful speeches about how we need to be careful about nuclear weapons.

• 9:57Speaker 07

  Every activity that any one of us engages in has two effects. It brings to the participant the knowledge that he is taking a great action, that he is doing something that will affect the future of the world. And then it has its effect on other people. And so I say to you, do away with your affect.

• 10:16Speaker 03

  With his wife, Eva Helen, he presented in front of the UN to end nuclear bomb testing with thousands of signatures from scientists all over the world. He was subpoenaed by the Senate. How had he gathered these signatures? Did he have a communist organization behind him?

• 10:32Speaker 07

  My conscience does not allow me. To protect myself by sacrificing these idealistic and hateful people, and I am not going to do it.

• 10:43Speaker 03

  Pauling appeared before the committee in 1960, but refused to give the names of the people who circulated the petition.

• 10:51Speaker 07

  As a matter of conscience, as a matter of principle, as a matter of morality, I have decided that I shall not conform to the request of this subcommittee.

• 11:02Speaker 03

  After he published No More War, Pauling was graced once again with a prestigious honor, this time for activism.

• 11:12Speaker 02

  In 1962, he won a second Nobel Prize, this time for peace.

• 11:17Speaker 06

  On behalf of the Nobel Committee, to hand over to you this medal and a diploma.

• 11:29Speaker 07

  Thank you, sir.

• 11:35Speaker 03

  He is still, to this day, the only person to win two unshared Nobel Prizes.

• 11:41Speaker 02

  So he is someone that we certainly should be listening to. He was on the media, lots on TV, on the radio, in newspapers.

• 11:50Speaker 03

  When Pauling came home with this second award, there was no big party, no song and dance, not even a personal congratulations from the president of Caltech.

• 12:00Speaker 04

  It wasn't a very happy time. There had been the period of McCarthyism when there were repressions of freedom of expression of opinion. It had been unpleasant for us for when we didn't know what our friends were thinking or when it was pretty clear that some of them were no longer very friendly.

• 12:26Speaker 03

  He soon resigned from his position, a job he had held for over 40 years. And he took a job at the Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions, a liberal California think tank. His priorities were shifting, away from science and towards political work. After a lifetime of making unprecedented discoveries that labeled him a genius and taking up causes that branded him a traitor, he was about to take on the biggest crusade of his life. That's after the break.

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• 16:28Speaker 03

  Linus Pauling was nothing if not industrious. Like, he was the youngest member ever elected to the National Academy of Sciences. In 1949, he was made president of the American Chemical Society, two-time Nobel Prize winner.

• 16:44Speaker 03

  So what does a person do who's become an international hero twice over for the discoveries he's made and the stances he's taken, only to be knocked off his pedestal, both by the government and a university afraid of his voice? What does someone like that do for redemption? Well, if you're Linus Pauling, you get really, really into vitamin C. You include this quote of his, "I like to take a very complicated subject where there is no order and think about it for a long enough period that I can find some way of introducing order to it."

• 17:23Speaker 02

  Exactly.

• 17:24Speaker 03

  How does that strike you?

• 17:26Speaker 02

  He had a knack for thinking deeply about problems and working out solutions,

• 17:34Speaker 02

  but was very much grounded in chemistry.

• 17:39Speaker 02

  And I think even in that starts to lie one of the problems because when he turned his attention to humans and human biology and nutrition and the idea of vitamins being important for helping us fight off diseases, everything is much, much more complicated.

• 17:56Speaker 03

  In 1965, he came across something bold in his research. Large doses of the B vitamin niacin could have some beneficial effects for people suffering with schizophrenia. To be clear, though, this is an idea not supported today. But Pauling fixated on this B vitamin tidbit because with most drugs, there are limits on how much of them can be taken safely. But were vitamins different?

• 18:24Speaker 02

  He somehow thought that maybe there's something special about vitamins that if you take them in a really high dose, they're still not harmful to the body.

• 18:34Speaker 03

  Pauling got in touch with a scientist, a man named Erwin Stone. And Stone made an alarming claim. High doses of vitamin C helped Stone and his wife heal rapidly after a car crash. Pauling glommed on to some of Stone's ideas. He was interested in vitamin C's benefits beyond the recommended amount needed to prevent scurvy. Like, were there any benefits of the vitamin in much higher doses?

• 19:02Speaker 02

  And he correctly said, well, the amount you need to not get that particular disease is not the same necessarily as the amount that is optimal for your health. Pauling wasn't wrong to question these things. And it is extremely hard to know how much of any supplement, of any vitamin, of any mineral, of anything is actually ideal for our health.

• 19:31Speaker 03

  Pauling and his wife began taking very high doses of vitamin C to the tune of 3,000 milligrams a day, per Stone's recommendation. They were taking something like 30 times the recommended amount in any country. And they came to feel that this huge intake stopped them from catching colds. Pauling then compiled research across scientific journals, including findings from controlled trials that supported his own ideas.

• 20:01Speaker 02

  Getting these reinforcements of his idea as anecdotes.

• 20:06Speaker 03

  And then published a book in the spring of 1970. It was called Vitamin C and the Common Cold. Did the book do well?

• 20:16Speaker 02

  Oh, it was an instant bestseller. Unlike any of my books, I'm sad to say.

• 20:24Speaker 03

  Pauling's big theory was the more vitamin C you took, the lower your chances of getting sick and the less sick you got. And he recommended a mega dose of 2,300 milligrams or more a day for optimum health. The grabby, clickbait headline, "Vitamin C Can Stop You From Catching A Cold", caught wildfire.

• 20:48Speaker 03

  The timing was perfect. Counterculture of the late 1960s fueled a ravenous interest in whole foods, natural remedies. A whole business popped up around vitamin C. Factories were built. Manufacturers of the vitamin even dubbed the public consumption of it, "The Linus-Palling Effect", and public consumption of the vitamin continued for decades. Where's my vitamin C? Harry, we can do better. Where's my vitamin C? George, we can do better. What can do better than your vitamin C? Introducing one of eight course So the public may have been buying a lot of it,

• 21:32Speaker 03

  but the medical establishment was not buying it at all. The American Journal of Public Health accused Pauling's book as little more than theoretical speculation, and the journal Science rejected Pauling's paper on an evolutionary need for vitamin C. Pauling had failed to convince the science community of his ideas, in part because he sidestepped the scientific peer review process in favor of publishing his ideas for a general audience. But he wrote more books.

• 22:01Speaker 04

  This new book, just a couple of months ago, Vitamin C: The Common Cold and the Flu, has about twice as much material in it, including not only the common cold and the flu, but hepatitis and many other diseases.

• 22:19Speaker 03

  His convictions about the vitamin's benefits became more controversial as he reached his 70s. After that first book came out, a physician in Scotland, this guy Ewan Cameron, started communicating with Pauling. He claimed the cancer patients he was treating were helped by vitamin C. Cameron appealed to Pauling, writing, "I am unashamedly optimistic that with your help, we could conquer cancer."

• 22:46Speaker 02

  And of course, Linus Pauling seized on this as a whole nother angle on the importance of vitamin C. Other scientists at the time immediately considered Cameron's data to be too anecdotal, not done with any rigorous way as a clinical trial, but rather just his own opinion about what was happening to his patients.

• 23:09Speaker 03

  Pauling encouraged Cameron to continue his studies of cancer and vitamin C. The two of them co-authored a paper and submitted it to the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. It was rejected, twice.

• 23:23Speaker 03

  But Pauling didn't back down. He remained enthusiastic about vitamin C, even in his personal life.

• 23:31Speaker 02

  Ava Helen, Linus Pauling's wife, had surgery for stomach cancer but did not take radiotherapy or chemotherapy and instead took a high dose of vitamin C and she claimed that it helped her feel better.

• 23:45Speaker 03

  I just wanna, I just, I can't believe this. Like, just help me understand how a mind like this would be seduced by the anecdote.

• 23:58Speaker 02

  I've sort of interviewed lots of really brilliant scientists who've done amazing things. And one other thing that often comes out is it sounds so simple and so obvious and yet perhaps we forget, they are still susceptible to getting things wrong. Even a person who's won two Nobel prizes won't get everything right. All of us are also sort of susceptible to, you know, somehow it feels like we're kind of hardwired to sort of enjoy very black and white thinking, whereas everything is much more grey scale. The bottom line answer, I think, to that question is just very simply Linus Pauling was a human.

• 24:45Speaker 03

  With Cameron, Pauling doubled down on the cancer benefits. He asserted that vitamin C in high doses was of value in almost every disease state. He was repeatedly rejected for funding for his research from the National Cancer Institute. By the early 1970s, Pauling was nearly completely ostracized from the medical profession.

• 25:08Speaker 03

  He contacted the head of the National Cancer Institute about his work. The head of the institute decided to set the record straight. There would be a clinical trial.

• 25:17Speaker 02

  To decide once and for all whether vitamin C will help cancer patients.

• 25:22Speaker 03

  They chose a heavy hitter to run the experiment, a man named Charles Myrtle, professor of oncology at Mayo Medical School.

• 25:32Speaker 03

  The trial would test whether or not the vitamin shrank the size of a person's tumor. It would be double-blind, include late-stage cancer patients, and it would include high doses of the vitamin.

• 25:43Speaker 02

  The results, when they came back, said absolutely not. Charles Myrtle concluded, "Vitamin C does not help patients with cancer."

• 25:54Speaker 03

  The final report slammed Pauling's point of view. Vitamin C performed no better than a dummy medication.

• 26:02Speaker 02

  But that wasn't the end of the matter.

• 26:05Speaker 03

  Pauling fought back. He argued that the Myrtle experiment had flaws. The patients had been given aggressive chemotherapy treatments ahead of the vitamin C trial, weakening their immunity.

• 26:17Speaker 02

  This is important because it is true that clinical trials are vital to how we find out new medical information, but it is also equally true that clinical trials can be still debated. It depends a lot on what is being measured and the particular situation for the patients.

• 26:37Speaker 03

  But despite Pauling's retort, the Myrtle study was taken as proof that Pauling's ideas were, for lack of a better word, quackery.

• 26:49Speaker 03

  Pauling wrote another book. It was called Cancer and Vitamin C. He put more pressure on the institute to do another study.

• 26:56Speaker 02

  So Charles Myrtle did another clinical trial, and this time he made sure to use patients who had not had any prior treatment.

• 27:08Speaker 03

  So in 1985, the second Myrtle study was published.

• 27:13Speaker 02

  Again, he concluded, seemingly once and for all, vitamin C had no effect on helping people with their cancer.

• 27:23Speaker 02

  And then again, Linus Pauling found ways to think about it deeply, look at the data, and could still argue the point. He said that you just looked at the outcomes, you know, how long they lived for. But Charles Myrtle did not look at how were the patients feeling? And Euan Cameron said that, yes, his patients were feeling much better on high doses of vitamin C, and that wasn't taken into account. Secondly, Linus Pauling said the trial ended too early. You needed to give patients high doses of vitamin C for a long time to allow the drug to have an effect.

• 28:04Speaker 03

  The bottom line is that there was then and there is now no evidence that vitamin C cures cancer. Even though the matter was closed, Pauling still called for a retraction of the Myrtle Study. In December 1991, Pauling had contracted prostate and rectal cancer. He got surgery for it, but also treated it with vitamin C, raw fruits and vegetables. In a lecture at Stanford Medical School in 1992, he espoused the vitamins benefits for people with heart disease, even suggesting it could help people with AIDS. He died two years later.

• 28:42Speaker 04

  Two-time Nobel Prize-winning chemist Linus Pauling is dead at age 93. I'll probably be remembered as having discovered vitamin C. Of course, I didn't discover vitamin C.

• 28:55Speaker 03

  Will vitamin C cure the common cold? No. Back in 2013, a review of nearly 30 studies of people with colds taking a normal amount of vitamin C found little to no evidence that it reduced the symptoms.

• 29:09Speaker 02

  People who supplement themselves with vitamin C get over a cold about 8% quicker.

• 29:17Speaker 03

  So that means on average, if you suffer for a few days, you might get a little better a few hours earlier than if you hadn't taken the supplement.

• 29:26Speaker 02

  But that is still quite hard to interpret because people taking high doses of vitamin C are probably doing lots of other things in their lives that help them be healthier. So overall, vitamin C has not really much of an impact in how quickly you get over a cold, and it definitely has no impact on whether you catch a cold in the first place.

• 29:43Speaker 03

  Today, revenue for vitamin C has surpassed over $2 billion, and it's growing.

• 29:49Speaker 03

  Davis says it's not going to help, but it's also not going to hurt you. But what he is weary of is the idea that any one simple supplement, like vitamin C, be held up as a kind of cure-all.

• 30:05Speaker 02

  We are wired to listen to other people. We naturally warm to a scientist telling us something as declarative as that when they've won two Nobel Prizes and are charismatic. Linus Pauling did something brilliant and yet did something utterly not brilliant.

• 30:22Speaker 03

  From history of science, there's a moral to be learned. The faculty that performed the musical for Linus Pauling at Caltech right after he won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry issued a sort of cautionary tale. And every chemist needs his patrons. Filthy lucrative can't be spurned. But don't forget that Galileo very nearly burned. So make those associates smile.

• 30:51Speaker 03

  Galileo once almost burned at the stake for claiming the planet revolved around the sun. It was a statement so shocking that the Catholic Church moved to persecute him. He eventually recanted his defense of heliocentrism, and he lived under house arrest for the rest of his life. It wasn't until 1992 that the Vatican finally acknowledged that Galileo was right.

• 31:21Speaker 03

  Linus Pauling believed so deeply in the power of vitamin C, even when presented with evidence countering his conviction for decades. And for that, he was knocked off the throne he once sat upon.

• 31:40Speaker 03

  We've continued to study vitamin C and its effect on everything from COVID-19 to further studies on cancer patients. Just a couple of years ago, researchers conducted a large clinical trial of intravenous vitamin C administered to people with sepsis. There was a lot of enthusiasm that it might help. It was not found to be an effective treatment.

• 32:05Speaker 03

  Might Linus Pauling receive an apology someday? Maybe. In the meantime, though, old habits die hard.

• 32:16Speaker 02

  I mean, even though I know having a glass of orange juice is not going to cure my cold, I know that. That does not mean that if I have a cold, I won't still have a glass of orange juice.

• 32:34Speaker 03

  You can read Daniel M. Davis's new book. It's called Self-Defense: A Myth-Busting Guide to Immune Health. This episode was produced by me, Amy Padula. It was edited by Jorge Just with help from Meredith Hoddinott. Mixing and sound design from Christian Ayala, music from Noam Hassenfeld, and fact-checking from Melissa Hirsch. Special thanks to the Ava Helen and Linus Pauling Papers at the Oregon State University Libraries, Special Collections, and Archives Research Center. Joanna Solotaroff is running the show. Sally Helm is thinking all the time about black holes.

• 33:15Speaker 03

  Julia Longoria is our editorial director, and Bird Pinkerton walked toward the hole in the tree roots, feeling every platypus eye trained on her. As she got closer to the hole, she took a closer look at the guitar. The neck was snapped, and the guitar was destroyed.

• 33:38Speaker 03

  Thanks, as always, to Brian Resnick for co-creating the show, along with Bird and Noam. And if you out there have thoughts about the show, please send us an email. We are at [email protected]. You can also leave us a review or a rating wherever you listen. That really helps us out. If you're into supporting the show and all of Vox in general, join our membership program. You can go to vox.com/members to sign up. Unexplainable is part of the Vox Media Podcast Network, and we'll see you next time.

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