PAULING IS STILL TAKING ON THE 'OLD GUYS'

Author: By Bruce McCabe, Globe Staff

Date: Tuesday, March 11, 1986
Page: 29
Section: ARTS AND FILM

It's the sprig of parsley.

"Someone told me that when they put parsley on your plate it raises the price $2.50," he says.

The commonplace has never escaped Pauling's eye. He says he can still recall his piqued curiosity as a child at the turn of the century. "At an early age I was interested in the world," he said. "I remember as a boy with an umbrella looking at street lights -- they were arc lights then -- and seeing rainbows and defracting patterns. I know all about it now but I can remember then wondering what those things were.

"Eventually, I became interested in structure. Years later an English physicist named Eddington would articulate the issue for me. He said that the search for the nature of the universe in the study of physics should be a search for structure, not substance.

"When scientists were looking for new particles -- electrons, protons and neutrons -- Eddington pointed out that it's the way these things interact with each other that determines the nature of the world, not that they exist."

Pauling describes himself as a "multifaceted crystal with many dimensions."

His scientific quests and discoveries have made him one of the pre-eminent scientists in the world. He graduated from Oregon Agricultural College (now Oregon State University) with a BS in chemical engineering in 1922 and went to California Institute of Technology in Pasadena where he enjoyed a long, fruitful career as a teacher and researcher.

He is a two-time Nobel laureate -- he won the Nobel Prize in chemistry in 1954 and the Nobel Peace Prize in 1963 -- and holds more than 40 honorary degrees from colleges and universities in the United States and abroad.

He is no stranger to controversy. He first came to the notice of the nonscientific community in the '50s when he helped force a public debate in Congress and elsewhere on nuclear testing, a debate which eventually led to the suspension by the United States and the Soviet Union of the testing of nuclear weapons in the atmosphere. For his role in compelling the debate, Pauling's citizenship was impugned and his passport was lifted for a time by the State Department. When he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1963 for his efforts on behalf of halting nuclear tests, the award was characterized by Life magazine as a "Weird Insult from Norway."

For the past dozen years Pauling's crusade for a better understanding of
nutrition and the enhancement of health has embroiled him in controversy with organized medicine and associated rear-guard nutritionists whom he contemptuously dismisses, without a trace of irony, as "old guys." The ire of the medical establishment has been focused on Pauling's suggestion that vitamin therapy, particularly the use of vitamin C, will help prevent colds, assist in the treatment of such diseases as cancer and help people to live longer and better.

The argument is elaborated upon in his latest book, "How to Live Longer and Feel Better."

Pauling says his interest in nutrition grew out of his closeness to his wife, Ava Hellen Miller, a home economics teacher with a knowledge of
nutrition who died four years ago. "Up to 20 years ago I didn't pay any attention to nutrition. I didn't do any cooking. I just ate what my wife fed me. It was a good diet and tasty."

"In 1969 I was invited to speak for 10 minutes at the opening of a new medical school in New York, Mount Sinai," Pauling recalls. "I asked them what they wanted me to talk about. They said 'anything.' So in my remarks I said that I take vitamin C three times a day to stop getting colds."

Pauling says his remarks precipitated a storm of controversy. "This professor in New York, Dr. Victor Herbert, wrote me a vituperative letter calling me a quack and calling vitamins a placebo. When I found four studies which supported me and recommended them to him, he said he was too busy to read them. So I sent him Xeroxed copies. The inventor of Xeroxing was a student of mine, by the way. Then Herbert told me the studies were of no value
because the ages of the children referred to in the data were missing. I looked up the ages in a medical textbook and found that they had been misrepresented. My pursuit of the truth, however, does not interest Dr. Herbert who continues to testify against me to this day."

Pauling sees Herbert's position on his research as characteristic of the US medical establishment, which he refers to as "the sickness industry."

''They have taken to calling themselves the health profession, health centers and health companies. This is a misnomer," he writes in his book. ''If, as a result of reading this book, you see that even a decision to consult a doctor is a serious and potentially risky one, that it requires some estimate of potential risks as well as potential benefits, you will have spent your time well."

Pauling draws a fascinating distinction between scientists and doctors.

"A scientist is trained to have respect for the truth, for the facts," he says. "Practicing physicians don't have time to read the literature. They have to rely on one another. A lot of their teachers are not very smart. They're lazy and they don't do a good job. They're biased old guys, teachers of medicine or nutrition, who got their reputations recommending that people take small amounts of vitamins to avoid scurvy. Now that things have changed they don't want to admit they were wrong. And it doesn't seem to be
worthwhile for doctors to find out if they're wrong.

Pauling says that his penchant for skeptical inquiry was a legacy of his father, a druggist, who died when Pauling was nine. Before he died, Pauling's father had written a letter to the editor of the Portland Oregonian, the home town newspaper, in which he sought the editor's advice on books that his 9- year old son could read. "Don't say the Bible or Darwin's 'Origin of The Species,' " wrote Pauling pere. "He's already read those."

Pauling began working his way through his own reading list. "I learned entomology at the age of 11 by reading a book about it," he says. He started high school at the age of 12, in the middle of the year. "Teachers liked me," he recalled. "I was a quiet, docile child."

He was pointed towards mathematics when his high school principal wouldn't let him take American History I and II at the same time. "When the principal said I couldn't take history, I signed up for college algebra and trigonometry. I could always read history by myself."

Pauling describes his mother after his father's death as "a harassed young widow with three children who ran a boarding house, taking in roomers."

At 16, he had a job in a machine shop with the promise of a series of raises, he recalls. "My mother wanted me to keep it. But the uncle and aunt of a friend of mine said my duty was to go to Oregon Agricultural College. As I look back on it, they must have been intellectuals. They were thoughtful people who perhaps had gone to college."

Pauling says many people are curious about his intellectual history and the way his mind works.

"I am constantly asked by students how I get ideas. My answer is simple. First, have a lot of ideas. Then, throw away the bad ones."

MCCABE;03/06,09:09 NKELLY;03/12,16:57 PLNG