CHAPTER 7
NOBEL PRIZE DISEASE
“Pride goes before destruction, haughty spirit before a fall.”
Vitamin manufacturers today owe their multibillion-dollar-a-year business to one man: a Nobel Prize–winning scientist who, when he wandered far outside of his field, caused us to believe that large quantities of supplemental vitamins would make us live longer, better, healthier lives. In fact, they have only increased our risks of cancer and heart disease.
LINUS PAULING was a genius.
In 1931, Pauling published a paper in the Journal of the American Chemical Society titled, “The Nature of the Chemical Bond.” At the time, chemists had already described two different types of bonds: ionic (where one atom gives up an electron to another) and covalent (where atoms share electrons). Pauling said that it didn’t have to be one or the other—there was something in between. It was a novel and shocking concept—for the first time marrying quantum physics with chemistry. Pauling’s description of chemical bonding was so revolutionary, so far ahead of its time, that the editor of the journal had trouble finding an expert qualified to review it. “It was too complicated for me,” said Albert Einstein.
For this single paper, Linus Pauling was awarded the Langmuir Prize as the most outstanding chemist in the United States, elected to the National Academy of Sciences—the single highest honor that can be bestowed on a scientist by his peers—and made a full professor at Caltech, one of the most prestigious universities for science and engineering in the world. He was only 30 years old. And he was just getting started.
In 1949, Pauling published a paper in Science titled, “Sickle Cell Anemia: A Molecular Disease.” At the time, scientists knew that people with sickle-cell disease suffered crippling pain when their red blood cells changed from plump round disks to thin narrow sickles. What they didn’t know was why. Pauling showed that hemoglobin, the molecule in red blood cells that carries oxygen from the lungs to the rest of the body, had a slightly different electrical charge in patients with sickle-cell disease. It was the first time that a scientist had described the molecular basis of a disease, launching the field of molecular biology.
In 1951, Pauling published a paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences titled “The Structure of Proteins.” Taking yet another Einsteinian leap, Pauling showed that proteins folded upon themselves in recognizable patterns. At the time of publication, scientists knew that proteins were made of a series of linked amino acids. But they hadn’t envisioned what proteins looked like in three dimensions. Pauling did. One of the protein structures Pauling described was called the alpha helix, a finding that allowed James Watson and Francis Crick to solve the structure of DNA: nature’s blueprint.
In 1954, for his work on chemical bonding and protein structure, Linus Pauling won the Nobel Prize in chemistry.
Pauling was also active outside the laboratory. Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, Linus Pauling became one of the world’s most recognizable peace activists. He opposed the creation of the atomic bomb and forced government officials to admit that nuclear radiation damaged human DNA. His efforts were rewarded with the first nuclear test ban treaty. They were also rewarded with his second Nobel Prize, this time for peace. Linus Pauling had become the first (and so far only) person in history to win two unshared Nobel Prizes. In 1961, Pauling appeared on the cover of Time magazine, hailed as one of the greatest scientists who had ever lived.
Then, in the mid-1960s, Linus Pauling fell off an intellectual cliff.
TO THOSE WHO KNEW HIM, Pauling’s lack of rigor wasn’t surprising. It had first appeared in his science.
In 1953, Pauling published a paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences titled “A Proposed Structure for the Nucleic Acids.” Pauling claimed that DNA was a triple helix. (Within a year, Watson and Crick proposed their now famous double-helix model.) It was the single greatest scientific error of his career. And his colleagues never let him forget it. Whereas Pauling had spent decades considering the structure of proteins, he had spent only a few months on the structure of DNA. His wife, Ava Helen, later remarked, “If that was such an important problem, why didn’t you work harder on it?” James Watson was less kind, remembering his surprise “that a giant had forgotten elementary college chemistry.” “If a student had made a similar mistake,” said Watson, “he would be thought unfit to benefit from Caltech’s chemistry department,” where Pauling was a professor.
But Linus Pauling’s full descent into the abyss began on a single day in March 1966, when he was 65 years old. Pauling was in New York City where he had just accepted the Carl Neuberg Medal for his scientific achievements. During his talk, Pauling said that he wished only that he could live another 25 years so he could see how certain scientific investigations were proceeding. Pauling later wrote, “On my return to California, I received a letter from a biochemist, Irwin Stone, who had been at the talk. He wrote that if I followed his recommendation of taking 3,000 milligrams of vitamin C, I would live not only 25 years longer, but probably more.”
Pauling followed Stone’s advice, taking 10, then 20, then 300 times the recommended daily allowance of vitamin C, eventually 18,000 milligrams a day. It worked. Pauling said that he felt livelier, healthier, and better than ever before. No longer did he have to suffer the debilitating colds that had plagued him for years. Convinced that he had stumbled upon the fountain of youth, Linus Pauling, with the weight of two Nobel Prizes behind him, became the nation’s leading advocate for megavitamins. Based on his limited personal experience, Pauling recommended megavitamins and various dietary supplements for mental illness, hepatitis, polio, tuberculosis, meningitis, warts, strokes, ulcers, typhoid fever, dysentery, leprosy, fractures, altitude sickness, radiation poisoning, snakebites, stress, rabies, and virtually every other disease known to man. Now a zealot for a cause, Linus Pauling would later ignore study after study showing that he was wrong. Clearly and spectacularly wrong.
THE MEETING BETWEEN Linus Pauling and Irwin Stone was a watershed moment in the history of the vitamin and supplement craze in the United States—made all the more remarkable by the contrast between the two men. Pauling was the product of a classical education, well grounded in the fields of chemistry and physics. Stone, who was generously described by Pauling as a “biochemist,” had studied chemistry for two years in college before receiving an honorary degree from the Los Angeles College of Chiropractic and a bogus Ph.D. from Donsbach University, a nonaccredited correspondence school in California. Pauling had succeeded in unlocking some of nature’s best kept secrets because he was dogged in his devotion to formal proofs—the kind of proofs that result in publications in major scientific journals and the kind of proofs that win Nobel Prizes. Stone had never received a valid scientific credential, never published a paper in a medical or scientific journal, and had graduated from a program in Los Angeles that taught that all human diseases were the result of misaligned spines. Yet Pauling accepted Stone’s revelations uncritically.
IN 1970, Linus Pauling published his first book, Vitamin C and the Common Cold, which urged Americans to take 3,000 milligrams of vitamin C every day—roughly 500 times the recommended daily allowance. The book became a national best seller. Within a few years, more than 50 million Americans—1 of every 4 people living in the United States—were following Pauling’s advice. Scientific studies, however, failed to support him.
In 1942, about 30 years before Pauling published his book on vitamin C, a group of researchers from the University of Minnesota published a study in the Journal of the American Medical Association of 980 people with colds, finding that vitamin C did nothing to lessen symptoms.
After Pauling published his book, and largely in response to its popularity, researchers at the University of Maryland and the University of Toronto and in the Netherlands performed several studies of volunteers who had been given 2,000, 3,000, or 3,500 milligrams of vitamin C a day for the prevention or treatment of colds. Again, large doses of vitamin C were found to be useless.
Because of these and other studies, not a single professional medical, scientific, or public health organization recommends vitamin C for the prevention or treatment of colds. Unfortunately, it’s been hard to unring the bell. Once Pandora’s box is opened, you cannot put anything back inside; once Americans had become convinced that vitamin C was a wonder drug, there was no going back.
Then Linus Pauling doubled down, claiming that vitamin C also cured cancer.
IN 1971, PAULING WROTE that megadoses of vitamin C (those greatly in excess of the recommended daily allowance) would cause a 10 percent decrease in the incidence of cancer in the United States; six years later, he upped his prediction to 75 percent. If we followed his advice, Pauling believed that vitamin C could make us practically immortal, living longer than ever before. He predicted that the average American life span would increase to a hundred years, then 150 years. Like Vitamin C and the Common Cold, his books Cancer and Vitamin C and How to Live Longer and Feel Better also became instant best sellers. Linus Pauling was so powerful, such a media darling, that cancer victims started to take his advice. Doctors, blindsided by Pauling’s influence, had no choice but to see if he was right.
In 1979, Charles Moertel and colleagues at the famed Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, studied 150 cancer victims. Half were given 10,000 milligrams of vitamin C a day (roughly 1,500 times the recommended daily allowance) and half weren’t. They published their paper, titled “Failure of High-Dose Vitamin C Therapy to Benefit Patients with Advanced Cancer: A Controlled Trial,” in the New England Journal of Medicine. The title said it all; vitamin C hadn’t worked. Pauling was incensed. Surely Moertel hadn’t done the study correctly. Then Pauling found what he believed was the flaw in the experiment: Moertel had given vitamin C to patients who had already received chemotherapy, negating its wondrous healing properties. Pauling was now convinced that vitamin C worked only in patients who hadn’t received any chemotherapy.
Although he didn’t really see the point, Moertel was bullied into performing another study of vitamin C in cancer victims, this time in patients who had yet to receive chemotherapy. In 1985, he published his second study, again in the New England Journal of Medicine and again showing no difference. Now Pauling was really angry, accusing Moertel of “deliberate fraud and misrepresentation.” He considered suing Moertel, but his lawyers talked him out of it.
Linus Pauling had been so right for so long that he just couldn’t imagine that he could ever be wrong—even when he clearly was wrong. As described by biographers and colleagues, Pauling’s failures could have been predicted from his personality. “Linus Pauling is a classic example of a person who loves humanity but doesn’t care much for people,” wrote biographers Ted and Ben Goertzel. “He is generally without close friends. Politically, he is a crusader for his vision of truth with little tolerance for considering the viewpoints of others.” Like the Goertzels, Max Perutz—a colleague of Pauling’s who had also won a Nobel Prize in chemistry—praised Pauling for his breakthrough work, but also alluded to a darker side: “It seems tragic that [vitamin C] should have become one of Pauling’s major preoccupations during the last twenty-five years of his life and spoilt his great reputation as a chemist. Perhaps it was related to his greatest failing: his vanity. When anybody contradicted Einstein, he thought it over, and if he found he was wrong, he was delighted, because he felt he had escaped from an error. But Pauling would never admit that he might have been wrong. When, after reading Pauling and [Robert] Corey’s paper on the alpha helix, I discovered [a problem with their calculations], I thought he would be pleased. But no, he attacked me furiously, because he could not bear the idea that someone else had thought of a test for the alpha helix of which he had not thought himself.”
AMONG PAULING’S MISANTHROPIC dealings with those who dared to oppose him—dared to believe that he could ever be wrong—no story was sadder or more telling than that of Arthur Robinson.
In 1973, Pauling founded the Institute of Orthomolecular Medicine in Menlo Park, California, later to become the Linus Pauling Institute. His biggest supporter was the pharmaceutical giant Hoffman-La Roche, one of the world’s largest manufacturers of vitamins and dietary supplements. Pauling decided that if other researchers were unable to show that megavitamins were wonder drugs, then he would do it himself.
When Pauling founded his institute, he brought Arthur Robinson along with him. Pauling was president, director, and chairman of the board. Robinson, a chemist and one of the brightest students to have ever graduated from the University of California in San Diego, was vice president, assistant director, and treasurer. Robinson’s job was to provide experimental evidence for Pauling’s theories about vitamin C. It didn’t work out that way.
In 1977, Arthur Robinson evaluated a special breed of mice that suffered from skin cancer. To some he gave the human equivalent of 10,000 milligrams of vitamin C a day; to others, he didn’t give any extra vitamins. The results were alarming. Robinson found that high doses of vitamin C actually increased their risk of cancer.
Robinson knew that Pauling and his wife were taking large doses of vitamin C. Concerned, he told Pauling of his results. “At that time [1970],” recalled Robinson, “he had put himself and his wife on at least 10,000 milligrams a day of vitamin C, and they were on it for the next decade. I pointed out that she was bathing her stomach with an enormous amount of mutagenic [cancer-causing] material for ten years.” (Ava Pauling would later suffer from stomach cancer.)
Pauling refused to believe it, threatening to have the mice killed and demanding Robinson’s resignation. “He claimed that his famous name gave him the right to absolute control over all ideas and research at the institute,” recalled Robinson. “Linus informed me that he would have me fired disgracefully from all of my positions, including that of tenured research professor, and that he would take several other actions ruinous to my professional career if I did not agree to his demands.”
Following Pauling’s orders, the board of trustees withheld Robinson’s salary, suspended him from the institute, and locked his files. Robinson didn’t go quietly, suing Pauling and the institute for $25 million. The lawsuit dragged on for five years, costing the institute $1 million in legal fees. The case was eventually settled for $500,000.
ARTHUR ROBINSON’S FINDINGS weren’t limited to mice. Soon other researchers found that megavitamins increased the risk of cancer in people, too.
In 1994, the National Cancer Institute, in collaboration with Finland’s National Public Health Institute, studied 29,000 Finnish men: All were smokers and all were at risk of lung cancer. The men were given large doses of vitamin E, beta-carotene (a vitamin A precursor), both, or neither. The results were the opposite of what had been expected. Those given megavitamins were actually more likely to die from lung cancer, not less.
In 1996, investigators from the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle studied 18,000 people who, because they had been exposed to asbestos, were—like those who smoked cigarettes—also at greater risk of lung cancer. Participants were given large doses of vitamin A, beta-carotene, both, or neither. The study ended abruptly when the safety monitors realized that those taking megavitamins had a dramatically higher rate of lung cancer (28 percent greater than those not receiving vitamins) as well as heart disease (17 percent greater).
In 2004, researchers from the University of Copenhagen reviewed 14 randomized trials involving 170,000 people given large doses of vitamins A, C, E, and beta-carotene to see whether they had a lesser incidence of intestinal cancers. As had been true for lung cancer, vitamin recipients were more likely to have intestinal cancer than those who didn’t take supplemental vitamins.
In 2005, researchers from Johns Hopkins School of Medicine evaluated 19 studies involving more than 136,000 people who had taken megavitamins and found an increased risk of early death in vitamin recipients. In the same year, a study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association evaluated more than 9,000 people who took high doses of vitamin E to prevent cancer. Again, vitamin recipients were more likely to develop cancer and heart disease.
In 2008, a review of all existing studies of more than 230,000 people who had taken megavitamins found an increased risk of cancer and heart disease.
In 2011, researchers from the Cleveland Clinic published a study of 36,000 men who took vitamin E, selenium (a mineral), both, or neither. Those who took megadoses of vitamin E had a 17 percent greater risk of prostate cancer.
LINUS PAULING WAS WRONG about megavitamins because he had made two fundamental errors. First, he had assumed that you cannot have too much of a good thing.
Vitamins are critical to life. If people don’t get enough vitamins, they suffer various deficiency states, like scurvy (not enough vitamin C) or rickets (not enough vitamin D). The reason that vitamins are so important is that they help convert food into energy. But there’s a catch. To convert food into energy, the body uses a process called oxidation. One outcome of oxidation is the generation of something called free radicals, which can be quite destructive. In search of electrons, free radicals damage cell membranes, DNA, and arteries, including the arteries that supply blood to the heart. As a consequence, free radicals cause cancer, aging, and heart disease. Indeed, free radicals are probably the single greatest reason that we aren’t immortal.
To counter the effects of free radicals, the body makes antioxidants. Vitamins—like vitamins A, C, E, and beta-carotene—as well as minerals like selenium and substances like omega-3 fatty acids all have antioxidant activity. For this reason, people who eat diets rich in fruits and vegetables, which are rich in antioxidants, tend to have less cancer, less heart disease, and live longer. Pauling’s logic to this point is clear; if antioxidants in food prevent cancer and heart disease, then eating large quantities of manufactured antioxidants should do the same thing. But Linus Pauling had ignored one important fact: Oxidation is also required to kill new cancer cells and clear clogged arteries. By asking people to ingest large quantities of vitamins and supplements, Pauling had shifted the oxidation-antioxidation balance too far in favor of antioxidation, therefore inadvertently increasing the risk of cancer and heart disease. As it turns out, Mae West aside, you actually can have too much of a good thing. (“Too much of a good thing can be wonderful,” said West, who was talking about sex, not vitamins.)
Second, Pauling had assumed that vitamins and supplements ingested in food were the same as those purified or synthesized in a laboratory. This, too, was incorrect. Vitamins are phytochemicals, which means that they are contained in plants (phyto- means “plant” in Greek). The 13 vitamins (A, B1, B2, B3, B5, B6, B7, B9, B12, C, D, E, and K) contained in food are surrounded by thousands of other phytochemicals that have long and complicated names like flavonoids, flavonols, flavanones, isoflavones, anthocyanins, anthocyanidins, proanthocyanidins, tannins, isothiocyanates, carotenoids, allyl sulfides, polyphenols, and phenolic acids. The difference between vitamins and these other phytochemicals is that deficiency states like scurvy have been defined for vitamins but not for the others. But make no mistake: These other phytochemicals are important, too. And Pauling’s recommendation to ingest massive quantities of vitamins apart from their natural surroundings was an unnatural act. For example, as described in Catherine Price’s book, Vitamania, half of an apple has the antioxidant activity of 1,500 milligrams of vitamin C, even though it contains only 5.7 milligrams of the vitamin. That’s because the phytochemicals that surround vitamin C in apples enhance its effect. Then there’s the plant goldenseal, which contains a powerful antibacterial substance called berberine. If you eat goldenseal, berberine isn’t toxic. But if you purify berberine away from the other phytochemicals in goldenseal, and eat the same amount of berberine that was in the plant, it is toxic. Other phytochemicals in goldenseal protect against berberine’s toxic effects. Another example would be the powerful antioxidant lycopene, which is present in tomatoes and used to hawk everything from ketchup to marinara sauce. Studies of rats with prostate cancer showed that tomato powder (which contains all of the phytochemicals found in tomatoes) could reduce the size of the tumors to a much greater extent than large quantities of purified lycopene. In short, Linus Pauling’s appeal to all things natural was anything but.
PAULING’S ADVOCACY GAVE BIRTH TO a vitamin and supplement industry built on sand. Evidence for this can be found by walking into a GNC center—a wonderland of false hope. Rows and rows of megavitamins and dietary supplements promise healthier hearts, smaller prostates, lower cholesterol, improved memory, instant weight loss, lower stress, thicker hair, and better skin. All in a bottle. No one seems to be paying attention to the fact that vitamins and supplements are an unregulated industry. As a consequence, companies aren’t required to support their claims of safety or effectiveness. Worse, the ingredients listed on the label might not reflect what’s in the bottle. And we seem to be perfectly willing to ignore the fact that every week at least one of these supplements is pulled off the shelves after it was found to cause harm. Like the L-tryptophan disaster, an amino acid sold over the counter and found to cause a disease that affected 5,000 people and killed 28. Or the OxyElite Pro disaster, a weight-loss product that caused 50 people to suffer severe liver disease; one person died and three others needed lifesaving liver transplants. Or the Purity First disaster, a Connecticut company’s vitamin preparations that were found to contain two powerful anabolic steroids, causing masculinizing symptoms in dozens of women in the Northeast.
LINUS PAULING’S LEGACY IS MIXED. He was the first to marry quantum physics with chemistry, the first to link the fields of molecular and evolutionary biology, and one of the few who stood up to McCarthyism and nuclear proliferation. But later in his life Linus Pauling was indistinguishable from the country fair hucksters and snake-oil salesmen of a century before—the father of a $32-billion-a-year vitamin and supplement industry. “Linus Pauling paid for his extraordinary gifts with his failure to appreciate where they rightfully ended,” wrote historian Algis Valiunas. “One cannot but think what a marvelous legacy would have been his if he had just known when to quit.”
How could a man who was so devoted to the rigor, hard work, and hard thinking required to achieve what he had achieved be at the same time unwilling to look critically at studies that consistently showed he was wrong, including those performed in his own institute? Sadly, Pauling’s not the only one. Other brilliant, award-winning, internationally recognized scientists have also succumbed to hubris—with disastrous results.
Two of those scientists were associated with the AIDS epidemic.
On June 5, 1981, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) published a report of an unusual outbreak: Five previously healthy gay men in Los Angeles had developed a rare form of fungal pneumonia (Pneumocystis carinii) typically seen only in cancer victims or in people with severe immune deficiencies. These men, however, had all been previously healthy. The report also included the story of another seemingly unrelated cluster of gay men in New York and California who had developed a highly aggressive form of cancer called Kaposi’s sarcoma.
One month later, the New York Times reported 41 more cases of Kaposi’s sarcoma, again all in gay men. By the end of the year, another 270 similar cases in gay men were reported; 120 of these men had died. The press called it “the gay plague.”
On September 24, 1982, CDC officials gave the disease a name: AIDS, for acquired immunodeficiency syndrome. Then, they set up a task force to find out what was causing it. Clues started to accumulate. On December 10, 1982, the CDC reported the first case of AIDS in an infant who had received a blood transfusion. The following week, the CDC reported another 22 cases of unusual infections in infants.
On January 7, 1983, the CDC reported the first cases of AIDS in women who had had sex with men who had AIDS. The following month, Robert Gallo, a researcher at the National Institutes of Health (NIH), predicted that an unusual virus called a retrovirus was causing AIDS. Gallo’s prediction was surprising; up to this point, retroviruses had been considered to be benign viruses that didn’t cause diseases in people. The CDC agreed with Gallo, believing that the disease was likely caused by a virus that was transmitted sexually or by exposure to blood. On May 20, 1983, Luc Montagnier found the cause: a virus he called LAV for lymphadenopathy-associated virus.
On April 23, 1984, Margaret Heckler, secretary of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, announced that Robert Gallo and his colleagues at NIH had also discovered the cause of AIDS: a virus they called HTLV-III for human T-cell lymphotropic virus. Heckler predicted that a vaccine to prevent AIDS would be available in the next two years. (That was more than 30 years ago.) Researchers soon realized that LAV and HTLV-III were the same virus, and settled on a third name: HIV for human immunodeficiency virus.
In 1985, the FDA licensed the first commercial test to screen blood and blood products for HIV. In 1987, the FDA licensed the first anti-HIV drug called AZT (zidovudine). By 1989, 100,000 people in the United States were infected with the AIDS virus.
Since those initial reports, much has been learned about HIV. Researchers have determined that HIV reproduces itself and eventually kills immune cells called helper T cells, the most important immune cells in the body. Helper T cells help other immune cells make antibodies or kill virus-infected cells. In addition to paralyzing the immune system, HIV constantly mutates during a single infection. In essence, victims are infected with hundreds of different types of HIV, making it virtually impossible to neutralize the virus with antibodies or to make an effective vaccine. The good news is that as researchers better understood how HIV reproduces itself, they made highly active antiviral drugs. Although these drugs don’t cure AIDS, they at least have changed the disease from one that was invariably fatal to a chronic infection.
In March 1987, Duesberg published an article in the journal Cancer Research, claiming that AIDS wasn’t caused by HIV—which he considered to be a harmless virus—but by long-term use of recreational drugs like heroin, cocaine, and amyl nitrate (poppers) by gay men. His hypothesis failed to consider babies or hemophiliacs who had received contaminated blood transfusions, homosexual men who didn’t use recreational drugs, or women who had acquired the disease from AIDS sufferers. Normally, the research community would have dismissed this kind of poorly reasoned article as coming from a crank who had ventured far from his field. But Peter Duesberg was no crank. And viruses were his field. Trained in Germany, Duesberg was a full professor in the Department of Cell and Molecular Biology at the University of California at Berkeley, receiving full tenure when he was only 36 years old. His meteoric rise was because, in 1970, he became the first scientist to identify a specific viral gene that caused cancer. For this remarkable achievement, in 1986, Peter Duesberg was elected to the National Academy of Sciences. That same year, he received an Outstanding Investigator Research Grant from NIH and was made a Fogarty Scholar in Residence.
In the 1990s, as more research continued to implicate HIV as the cause of AIDS, Duesberg modified his hypothesis. Now, he claimed that, in Africa, malnutrition caused AIDS; in wealthy Africans, anti-HIV drugs caused the disease; and in hemophiliacs, some as yet unidentified contaminant in transfused blood was the problem. The event that was probably the hardest for Duesberg to explain occurred when three laboratory workers were inadvertently infected with a highly purified clone of HIV. None of the workers were gay, used recreational drugs, were hemophiliacs, were malnourished, or lived in Africa; one developed a severe form of AIDS. Duesberg said that because the other two workers didn’t develop AIDS, HIV still hadn’t been proven to be the cause. (Duesberg wasn’t alone among famous scientists who had become AIDS deniers and conspiracy theorists. When evidence supporting the notion that HIV caused AIDS was clear, Nobel Prize–winning Kenyan ecologist Wangari Maathai said that scientists had created HIV in the laboratory for biological warfare. And Kary Mullis, who had won the Nobel Prize in chemistry for his discovery of the polymerase chain reaction [PCR], also stated that there was “no scientific proof” that HIV caused AIDS.)
Scientists eventually stopped listening to Peter Duesberg and his unsubstantiated rants. But Duesberg was not to be denied. In 2000, one year after taking over the presidency of South Africa from Nelson Mandela, Thabo Mbeki convened a Presidential AIDS Advisory Panel. He asked Peter Duesberg to head it. At the time, South Africa had more people living with HIV than any other country; 1 in 5 South African adults were infected with the virus. Mbeki, like Duesberg, believed that AIDS science was flawed and that anti-HIV drugs were poison, likening scientists to Nazi concentration camp doctors. Duesberg gave Mbeki the intellectual heft he needed to deny anti-HIV drugs to South Africans suffering from AIDS; as a consequence, more than 300,000 South Africans died needlessly from the disease.
Duesberg remains unrepentant. “I had all the students I wanted and I had all the lab space I needed,” he said. “I got all the grants awarded. I was elected to the National Academy [of Sciences]. I became California Scientist of the Year. All my papers were published. I could do no wrong…until I started questioning the claim that HIV [was] the cause of AIDS. Then everything changed.” But the problem with Peter Duesberg wasn’t that he questioned the contention that HIV caused AIDS; it was that he continued to deny a mountain of scientific evidence showing that it did. Like Linus Pauling before him, Duesberg simply refused to believe that he could ever be wrong.
Peter Duesberg didn’t limit his denial to HIV. He also didn’t believe that human papillomavirus (HPV) caused cervical cancer—an association that Harald zur Hausen proved and for which he won the Nobel Prize in 2008.
RECENTLY, ANOTHER FORMER Nobel Prize winner has also swerved from science: Luc Montagnier, the French researcher who, along with Françoise Barré-Sinoussi, had won the Nobel Prize for his discovery that HIV caused AIDS. In 2010, two years after he won the Nobel Prize, Montagnier—like Linus Pauling and Peter Duesberg before him—made a series of embarrassing public declarations.
First, Montagnier said that DNA molecules could be teleported from one test tube to another (presumably, in a manner similar to the way people were teleported in the television series Star Trek).
Then, Montagnier claimed that homeopathy made sense. Homeopathy is based on the now disproved belief that if you dilute a substance to the point that not a single molecule remains, the water in which it was diluted will remember that the substance was there. “I can’t say homeopathy is right in everything,” said Montagnier. “What I can say now is that high dilutions are right. High dilutions of something are not nothing. They are water structures which mimic the original molecules.” (Given that there is a limited amount of water on Earth, you don’t want it to remember where it’s been.)
Finally, Montagnier joined the long list of those claiming a cure for autism. Montagnier said that when he took the blood of patients with autism—and diluted it to the point that not a single molecule of the original blood remained—he could detect electromagnetic waves indicating the presence of bacterial DNA. Autism, it appeared, was a bacterial infection. And it wasn’t just autism that was caused by bacteria. Alzheimer’s disease, Parkinson’s disease, multiple sclerosis, rheumatoid arthritis, and chronic fatigue syndrome were bacterial infections, too.
In 2011, at the age of 78, Luc Montagnier left France to head a new division at the Jiao Tong University in Shanghai, China. Intent on proving that he was right, Montagnier studied a group of 200 children with autism, finding “spectacular” results in those who had received antibiotics. “[We] have observed that a long-term therapy consisting of successive antibiotic treatments with accompanying medications induced in 60 percent of cases a significant improvement, sometimes even a complete resolution of symptoms,” crowed Montagnier. “These children can now lead a normal school and family life!”
After Montagnier discovered what he believed was a cure for autism, he submitted a paper describing his findings to an obscure journal of which he was the senior editor; it was accepted for publication in three days. Then he traveled to Chicago to present his findings to a national festival of false promises known as Autism One. Taking the podium next to people who claimed that autism could be cured with hyperbaric oxygen treatments, bleach enemas, and chemical castration, Montagnier said that the only thing these children really needed was a prolonged course of antibiotics. Resistance from the mainstream medical community was, according to Montagnier, to be expected. Such is the life of a medical maverick. “In 1983, we were only a dozen or so people to believe that the virus we isolated was the cause of AIDS,” said Montagnier. “I’m just interested in helping these children.”
WHAT HAPPENED TO LINUS PAULING, Peter Duesberg, and Luc Montagnier—all brilliant scientists who had clearly lost their way—all wedded to theories that were completely and utterly disproved by scientific studies?
One possible explanation is that these men had been so right for so long that even in the face of strong opposition, they could never imagine being wrong. Another possible explanation is that there is a fine line between genius and madness. Or maybe they just wanted to make the next big splash—something that would again thrust them into the limelight. Whatever the reason, all three men did an enormous amount of harm: Pauling, because he had convinced people to take large quantities of vitamins and supplements that have only increased their risks of cancer and heart disease; Duesberg, because he indirectly caused hundreds of thousands of South African deaths from AIDS; and Montagnier, because he took advantage of parents’ desperate desire to help their children by offering a medicine that could not possibly help and, therefore, could only hurt.
THE LESSON IN THE LINUS PAULING STORY can be found in the movie The Wizard of Oz: Pay attention to the little man behind the curtain.
When first encountered, the Wizard of Oz was exactly as advertised: great and powerful. His voice was booming; his manner, intimidating; and his head, large, green, and oddly cerebral. But the Wizard wasn’t what he appeared to be. When Toto pulled back the curtain, the Wizard was just a rumpled old man with a high-pitched, irritatingly nasal voice. Exposed, the Wizard said, “Pay no attention to that little man behind the curtain.” But Toto’s revelation was impossible to ignore. Dorothy was appalled. “You’re a very bad man,” she said. “No, my dear,” replied the Wizard. “I’m a very good man. I’m just a very bad wizard.” In the end, the Wizard of Oz was successful because he was a good psychologist, not a good magician. The same applies to science: Don’t be blinded by reputation. Every claim, independent of a scientist’s reputation, should stand on a mountain of evidence. No one should get a free pass.
When Linus Pauling claimed that proteins folded in a certain manner or that sickle-cell hemoglobin had a different electrical charge, he had reams of biochemical data to prove it. But when he claimed that vitamins and supplements made you live longer, he had only the word of Irwin Stone, a man who had no scientific credentials, had never published a scientific paper in his life, and didn’t have a shred of evidence to back his contention.
Pauling counted on the “Wizard of Oz” effect to promote his belief that vitamins and supplements were miracle drugs. He hoped that people would ignore the little man behind the curtain (his lack of data) and pay attention only to the booming voice that came with having won two Nobel Prizes. Similarly, Rachel Carson was seductive because she was a dynamic storyteller: the most trusted science writer in America. Like Linus Pauling, Russell Portenoy’s claim that oxycodone could offer pain relief without addiction and Walter Freeman’s claim that lobotomies could cure psychiatric illnesses were persuasive because both men were respected members of the medical and scientific community. They were convincing because they wore the badge of academic success, not because they had reproducible data showing that they were right. Finally, Peter Duesberg’s claim that HIV wasn’t the cause of AIDS or Luc Montagnier’s claim that bacteria caused autism were granted full public hearings because both men were brilliant, highly acclaimed virologists. The point is that all scientists—no matter how accomplished or well known—should have unassailable data to support their claims, not just a compelling personality, an impressive shelf of awards, or a poetic writing style.