PUBLICATION:  National Post
DATE:  2001.02.06
SECTION:  News
PAGE:  A1 / Front
BYLINE:  Brad Evenson

ILLUSTRATION:Color Photo: Paul Sakuma, The Associated Press / Linus Pauling
was an early believer in vitamin C's power.

HEADLINE: New life for vitamin C as cancer treatment: Articles say early
studies of its value were prejudiced

Two articles published today in the Canadian Medical Association Journal suggest the cancer doctors failed to properly test the sugar-like molecule, partly because of a prejudice against "alternative" cures.

"In 1971, even saying that vitamin C could be useful was so outlandish that a conversation would stop between scientists and physicians," says author Dr. John Hoffer, a professor of medicine at McGill University.

"What's changed now is ... a commitment on the part of agencies to study alternative cancer therapies."

If the vitamin C theory is correct, it could restore the lustre to the reputation of the renowned American chemist Dr. Linus Pauling. A two-time Nobel Prize winner, Dr. Pauling died in 1994, embittered that the medical establishment had scorned the idea, which he had championed.

The controversy began in 1974 when two Scottish doctors reported that a handful of patients with advanced, "incurable" cancer had an extraordinary response to high doses of injections and pills of vitamin C. One of the doctors confessed he had never seen anything like it.

Dr. Pauling, whose 1970 book Vitamin C and the Common Cold set out his theory that megadoses of the vitamin could cure disease, urged medical scientists to test it on terminal patients.

However, two clinical tests at the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota found the vitamin did not alter the course of disease and the notion was abandoned. Dr. Pauling attacked the studies, arguing they were designed to fail.

"He felt that the failure to even examine the possibility reflected close-mindedness on the part of the medical establishment," says Dr. Hoffer, who knew Dr. Pauling.

Dr. Hoffer said his own speculation is the Mayo researchers "wanted a quick and decisive way to disprove the treatment."

Last year, at a research workshop in Montreal, scientists began re-examining the methods used to test high-dose vitamin C against cancer.

Experts suspect the Mayo Clinic, which tried the treatment for only 10 days, abandoned it too soon.

Another theory, proposed by U.S. molecular scientist Dr. Mark Levine, is that the Mayo Clinic erred by giving only oral vitamin C, instead of injecting it intravenously.

Taken orally, much of the vitamin is lost in urine instead of accumulating in the body's tissues.

"We should rigorously explore the anti-cancer effects of vitamin C, when administered intravenously at high doses, in patients with well-documented cancer," Dr. Levine writes in a separate article published today in the Canadian journal.

Molecular scientists think vitamin C might protect cells from free radicals, which are damaging chemicals that make the cells vulnerable to cancer.

In speeches, Dr. Pauling would draw a test tube full of the vitamin C a goat produces and uses every day. Humans produce none, which he argued may be why goats get less disease. "I would trust the biochemistry of a goat over the advice of a doctor," he said.

Dr. Pauling, who took [Ed. 18,000] milligrams of vitamin C daily, died of cancer at age 93.