Force of Nature- The Life of Linus Pauling

by Thomas Hager

  But Pauling was nothing if not an optimist. He next prepared with Robinson two of the largest grant requests he had ever made. Robinson was to be the primary investigator on the first: a $5.8 million plan to work with the Kaiser-Permanente health-care system to set up a national bank of tens of thousands of urine and blood samples linked to clinical data. Pauling was leading the charge on the second, a request to the National Cancer Institute (NCI) for $2.5 million "to support basic studies on vitamin C, animal work, and controlled trials with patients" in Scotland.

  The basic strategy was simple: If funding agencies thought that his institute was too small to support major studies, he would ask for enough grant money to make it bigger. Being turned down four times in a row hadn't seemed to deter him. As one incredulous National Institute of Health (NIH) researcher said, "The guy doesn't give up. He just keeps coming at you."

  With an air now of inevitability, both grants were turned down in early 1977. Pauling's was rejected in part because of what the reviewers saw as inadequate controls and a description of treatment methods too vague to reproduce. Both were faulted for being overambitious: Asking more than $8 million for an institute that had administrative and funding problems and numbered only four full-time researchers— counting Pauling—was simply asking too much.

  The grant rejections made news. "Like other aging scientists, Pauling doesn't want to wait," explained John Kalberer, NCI's program planner. "He doesn't want to go by the protocols—the building-block approach to scientific investigation—that he would have abided by earlier in his career." Albert Szent-Gyorgyi had attempted to get NCI funding for research on the health benefits of vitamin C as well, and Kalberer was no kinder to him. "I would love to give Linus Pauling or Albert Szent-Gyorgyi money, but we just do not have money for grand old men," he said, "and they refuse to submit an application that is reviewable."

  Pauling responded by sending copies of his proposal and a letter about its rejection to two dozen members of Congress, including Senators Ted Kennedy and George McGovern, respective heads of subcommittees on health and nutrition. He and Robinson contacted a lawyer about the possibility of suing the NCI for bias but were counseled that Americans had not been awarded the legal right to get a grant request funded. The lawyer advised them that their chances of success in suing a federal agency were "less than slim."

  But Pauling's activities were beginning to make an impression on at least one person who mattered: the head of the NCI, Vincent DeVita. "It is my opinion, which has grown stronger and stronger during the past four years, that the use of ascorbic acid in controlling cancer may well turn out to be the most important discovery about cancer that has been made in the last quarter century," Pauling wrote DeVita in early 1977. At first as disdainful as most of his peers about the value of vitamin C—DeVita's own background had focused on the development of chemotherapeutic treatments for cancer—the NCI head began to think it might be good to put the issue to rest once and for all with a carefully controlled clinical trial. "Dr. Pauling began contacting me personally," he remembered. "He wrote me a couple of times and came to visit me. He convinced me that his data are suggestive. . . . Dr. Pauling can be a very persuasive man."

  Public opinion also may have played a role in persuading the NCI to give vitamin C a trial. DeVita commanded the much ballyhooed "War on Cancer," a campaign that had brought hundreds of millions of federal dollars to the NCI. But he was, according to a number of critics, short on victories. As Pauling delighted in pointing out, mortality rates for the most common and deadly forms of cancer had not budged appreciably in years. DeVita knew that if he continued to ignore Pauling entirely, the venerable scientist's public pressure, congressional lobbying, and attacks on the NCI would continue.

  In March 1977, DeVita wrote Pauling that he was arranging to give vitamin C the test Pauling wanted. The investigator would be an authority beyond reproach: Charles Moertel, professor of oncology at the Mayo Medical School and director of the Mayo Comprehensive Cancer Center. In April, Pauling visited the NCI to discuss the way in which the tests would be carried out. The trial would be double-blind, include a significant number of late-stage cancer patients, and involve high doses of vitamin C. In correspondence with Moertel, Pauling stressed the importance of using patients with intact immune systems (patients who had not received heavy doses of chemotherapy or radiation beforehand) in order to maximize vitamin C's immune-enhancing abilities, and of continuing the vitamin C therapy until the patients died. This last point would avoid a rebound effect that Cameron and others had observed when high-dose vitamin C was suddenly cut off and the blood level of C, instead of merely returning to normal, dropped much lower. The rebound effect, Pauling worried, might kill patients taken off vitamin C. Moertel seemed open to his suggestions.

  The Mayo study was scheduled to start later in the year.

  - - -

  The Paulings were now spending roughly equal amounts of time in Palo Alto, at the Big Sur ranch, and traveling. In the summer of 1977, Pauling and Ava Helen went to Iceland, where he had been made honorary president of a conference on the environment (he had continued to make a number of strong statements about the dangers of overpopulation, nuclear power, and environmental degradation); to a meeting of Nobelists in Switzerland; to Munich for lectures and a fiftieth anniversary of their first trip there; to London to visit Peter and talk with British scientists about vitamin C and cancer; and finally to the Vale of Leven for another visit with Cameron. Pauling was trying hard to talk his Scottish colleague into joining him in California, but Cameron continued to turn him down.

  Back at the institute, things were in their standard state of unrest. An investigative report published in the summer of 1977 in New Scientist magazine painted a picture of a research facility in disarray, with the NCI grants rejected, a staff dissatisfied with the autocratic Robinson—the fledgling medical clinic had shut down after only eight months, for instance, reportedly after its director squabbled with Robinson over who was in charge—and Pauling shying away from decision making.

  On the other hand, fund-raising was beginning to take off. A series of clever institute advertisements in financial periodicals like Barron's and the Wall Street Journal proved successful: "For Sale—One Thousand Mice with Malignant Cancer—$138 Apiece," one headline read; "Linus Pauling—Nobel Prize Chemistry 1954, Nobel Prize Peace 1963, Nobel Prize Vitamin C 19??," another. A professional direct-mail company was hired to supervise a series of appeals to target audiences like the readers of Prevention magazine, and these, too, were terrifically successful.

  The influx of donations made a sudden and profound change in the institute's financial picture. In 1977, just over half the institute's income came from nongovernmental funds; the next year, when the direct-mail campaign hit high gear, that figure rose to 85 percent. In 1978 alone almost $1.5 million flooded in from private donors.

  The sudden riches, instead of stabilizing the institute, tore it apart. Much of the fund-raising success was due to Hicks, but he and Robinson had never gotten along well, and their rift widened as Robinson began making plans about how to spend the money. With such a flow of income, Robinson thought, why not get out of their rented building and construct a place of their own, away from the increasing congestion of the South Bay area of California? He began talking with Pauling and the trustees of the institute about buying land in Oregon—a state that had recently declared a "Linus Pauling Day"—and building a great new research institution devoted to Linus Pauling's brand of medicine, a facility in Robinson's vision that would rival the Salk Institute or the Scripps Institute. He found a beautiful, rural two-thousand-acre site on a hill a few miles south of Oregon State University. He met with local hospital officials, who seemed agreeable to the idea of cooperating in clinical work. Meetings were held with the governor of the state. An earnest money agreement was drafted. Robinson saw his future suddenly become clear and grand. He would be the head of a large and respected research nexus. "We'd have a campus like
Stanford," Robinson said.

  But his dream was not shared by everyone. Robinson had recently married, and his visits with the Paulings had declined as a result; his relationship with them, which at one point had almost seemed to be that of another son, had cooled. He and Pauling were not communicating well. Robinson assumed, for instance, that Pauling was thinking about pulling back even more from the institute's day-to-day operations, retiring to the Big Sur ranch with Ava Helen, working on theoretical papers, and checking in only occasionally. It was not an unreasonable supposition. Pauling was, after all, seventy-six years old and had named Robinson the institute's president precisely because he wanted fewer administrative responsibilities. So Robinson felt free to take charge. The institute was his life. And now was his chance to take it to another level.

  Before charging off after his dream of a Stanford in the firs, however, Robinson failed to build a consensus about the wisdom of the move. Richard Hicks was not eager to uproot himself and move to Oregon. He liked the Bay Area, its big money and its social scene, and he wanted to stay. So did a good number of the staff and some key board members.

  Hicks and some board members began talking with Pauling about Robinson's shortcomings as president, his poor communication skills, and the wisdom of moving to Oregon.

  Pauling was irritated but did not want to be bothered. He wanted the people at the institute to work it out among themselves. By early 1978, when dissension at the institute was reaching its height, he was more interested in traveling with Ava Helen—to Scotland again early in the year, where he continued his efforts to lure Cameron to the United States, then to Cuba for a few days—than he was in getting into the middle of an administrative fight.

  - - -

  Then Robinson went too far, in Pauling's opinion. Robinson had been overseeing the mouse study on diet, vitamin C, and cancer that he and Pauling had designed. The idea had been to vary only the amounts of vitamin C among the various test groups (and, in one group, seawater). By 1978, however, Robinson had, on his own, expanded the scope of the experiment. The impetus came from talks he had with Arnold and Eydie Mae Hunsberger, a wealthy couple interested in alternative medicine. Eydie Mae had survived cancer, she was convinced, by putting herself on a diet of raw fruits, juices, and vegetables, an experience she related in a book, How 1 Conquered Cancer Naturally. The couple then started The Orthomolecular Institute in Santa Cruz to promote their ideas.

  Robinson decided to test the diet of raw fruits and vegetables with vitamin C in some of his mouse groups. When Pauling was told about it, he was not pleased, either with the association with the Hunsbergers, for whom he had little respect, or with the data Robinson was getting. Preliminary data from the mouse study indicated that very high doses of vitamin C, equivalent to a human dose of about 50 grams per day, were very effective in lowering the number and size of cancerous lesions in mice. But lower amounts, closer to a human dose of between 3 and 10 grams per day—levels that Pauling was recommending to prevent colds and treat cancer—appeared to do just the opposite, increasing the susceptibility to cancer, almost doubling its rate in one group. Robinson came up with an explanation, reassuring Pauling that this was probably due to the fact that mice synthesized their own ascorbic acid. When getting moderate amounts in their diet, they might shut down their internal production, leaving a net deficit unless the vitamin C added to their diet reached a very high level.

  More interesting to Robinson was the observation that the Hunsbergers' diet of raw fruits and vegetables seemed to work as an adjunct, increasing the protective effects of vitamin C alone. Robinson's relationship with the Hunsbergers grew closer. There was talk of promoting treatments for cancer based on these findings, dietary protocols that would carry the stamp of approval of the Linus Pauling Institute of Science and Medicine.

  When Pauling heard that, he hit the roof. "I called [Robinson] in and said, 'You can't do this—connecting the institute to people who are going to practice medicine in some unconventional way. You just can't do that, so you must withdraw your connection," he remembered saying. On top of everything else Hicks and others had been telling him, it now appeared to Pauling that his former protégé, the man he had made president of his institute, had taken a research project and turned it into something other than what Pauling had planned.

  On June 12, 1978, Pauling sent Robinson a memo asking that he consult with him and Hicks before making any substantive decisions. Within a few hours of reading it, Robinson fired Hicks.

  On June 19, in his role as chairman of the board of trustees, Pauling asked Robinson to resign his post as president and to leave the institute for a period of time in order to avoid interfering with the creation of a new administrative structure. Robinson asked for thirty days to consider his alternatives, which Pauling granted.

  In early July, Pauling issued a memo to the institute staff asking them to ignore any orders Robinson might issue and informing them that Richard Hicks was now the institute's chief executive officer. The next day, Robinson issued a memo of his own: "I am the chief executive officer under the Articles of Incorporation and the By-Laws of the Institute," he wrote. "Neither Dr. Pauling nor Mr. Hicks have any authority to remove me from my position."

  As rumors flew back and forth and lawyers were called in, on August 15 the institute board elected Linus Pauling president and director. The next day, Pauling informed Robinson that he was taking over control of the mouse study.

  Nine days later, Art Robinson sued the Linus Pauling Institute and five trustees, including Linus Pauling, for $25.5 million.

  - - -

  Why did the breach occur? Both sides later offered different reasons. Robinson pointed to the mouse study, saying that Pauling did not want any results published indicating that vitamin C had anything other than cancer-fighting effects. But Robinson himself had offered a possible reason for his results, and Pauling later published the mouse study with that explanation in place.

  Personality conflicts played a part, especially between Hicks and Robinson, and the fact that everyone viewed Robinson as a relatively poor administrator also entered in. "I think that the nature, the origin of the conflict, probably was in Art Robinson's authoritarian nature," said Emile Zuckerkandl, Pauling's collaborator on the molecular evolution papers and Robinson's eventual successor as president of the institute. "He wanted to make the main decisions concerning the institute himself. . . without involving Pauling enough."

  There may have been deeper reasons as well. The institute was Robinson's life and his future. As he was seizing the reins of the institute, he was taking control of his life, breaking free of Pauling's influence and defining himself in terms other than simply Pauling's second in command. If he had been a son to Pauling, he had now also become a rival. It was almost Oedipal, with Robinson pushing his father figure aside in order to take command of what they both loved: the institute.

  But no protégé was as important to Pauling as his reputation and his work. When it looked as if he were being pushed, Pauling pushed back. "Someone here pointed out that Art had gotten into the habit of thinking of the institute as his institute," Pauling told a reporter. "Perhaps he thought I had gotten to an age where I should be sitting under a tree smoking a pipe."

  - - -

  Once forced out of the institute, Robinson proved a formidable legal opponent. His lawsuits, often revised—eight in all, totaling at one point $67.4 million—dragged on for years. He devoted himself to them, making it his task to tear down the edifice he had helped create, to make Pauling and the board pay for ruining his academic and professional career.

  The institute might have thought that it would be possible to wear Robinson down, force him to give up his suits through sheer exhaustion of energy and money. But, like Pauling, Robinson just kept coming back. He turned the computers he had bought to use for his research toward making money, transforming them from instruments to track urinalysis patterns into tools for playing the commodities market. He made, he estimated,
a half million dollars this way over the next several years, enough to support him and his wife and keep their legal battle going.

  It was a disaster for the institute. Hundreds of thousands of dollars—much of it from the fund-raising success—went for legal fees. Coverage of the case in financial papers like Barron's and in the scientific press did incalculable damage to the reputation of the institute. And Robinson wouldn't give up.

  - - -

  It wasn't all bad news. Toward the end of 1978, Ewan Cameron, after years of invitations, finally arrived in California to take up a one-year visiting professorship at the institute. For many workers it was like a breath of spring. Robinson was gone, and with him much of the tension that had electrified the air. Cameron was by comparison gentle, gracious, and warm. He and Pauling had been busily revising their paper on Cameron's treatment of cancer patients with high-dose vitamin C; in response to criticisms, they excluded cases with poor matching controls and redefined the point at which they started measuring survival. Now the results looked even better than before. Patients taking high-dose vitamin C lived almost a year longer, on average, than similar patients who did not. Eight of Cameron's vitamin C patients were alive more than three years after being deemed "unbeatable"; none of the controls were. After the usual delay, the newly reevaluated results were published in the PNAS in September 1978, along with a critical comment by an editorial board member emphasizing that historical controls were not as valid as those from randomized double-blind trials.

  Then Pauling and Cameron began working to expand their ideas into a book, a project that helped take Pauling's mind off his ongoing legal troubles. Things outside the institute were looking up as well, with Pauling's status as a founding father of modern chemistry recognized by a new series of awards. Time magazine even credited Pauling in a special article in which notable Americans listed those leaders they thought most effective in changing life for the better. The historian Henry Steele Commager nominated Pauling, telling readers that he provided leadership "in an almost eighteenth-century fashion by combining great distinction in scientific inquiry and in the moral arena." Caltech president Lee DuBridge nominated the astronomer Carl Sagan.