Our next entry in the Scientific Hall of Shame is also one of its least likely. A winner of two Nobel prizes no less, Linus Pauling’s later contributions to the world of healthcare left a lot to be desired.
You’ve heard the one about vitamin C and how taking it in large daily doses can help prevent colds? That’s one of Pauling’s proposals. An even more far-fetched idea was that taking megadoses of the vitamin could cure cancer. Together with Dr Ewan Cameron, our two-time Nobel Laureate reported that most of the terminal cancer patients in a study treated with 10,000 mg of vitamin C per day lived up to four times longer than those who weren’t. A wonderful idea but another example of wishful thinking, this time at the expense of a properly conducted clinical trial, marred by some serious selection bias.
More recent studies have shown that far from helping, vitamin C may hinder the effectiveness of some cancer drugs, with one finding that tumours in mice treated with the vitamin prior to chemotherapy actually grew much faster.
Pauling’s poorly-evidenced hypotheses aren’t entirely bereft of benefits though. Just ask the producers of vitamin C supplements, raking in hundreds of millions of dollars in sales every year.
