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LE Magazine May 2002
Vindication
For Linus Pauling
A new government study says that radioactive fallout from
nuclear weapons testing has caused at least 15,000 cancer
deaths in the United States. This report was prepared as a
joint effort by the National Cancer Institute and Centers for
Disease Control and Prevention. Here is a chilling revelation
from this report:
“Any person living in the contiguous
United States since 1951 has been exposed to radioactive
fallout, and all organs and tissues of the body have received
some radiation exposure.”
For those who don’t know, more than 2,000 nuclear
tests have been conducted worldwide since the first nuclear
bomb was built. The latest government report considered only
above-ground tests that took place between 1951 and 1962. This
study uncovered intense radioactive “hot spots” in
the continental United States all the way from California and
Washington to Vermont, New Hampshire and North Carolina.[1]
This report of 15,000 cancer deaths, however, is but
preliminary. The full study is still being withheld from the
public. Critics are accusing the Federal government of slowing
the release of this information to minimize the
consequences.
For decades, the Federal government contended that
radioactive fallout from nuclear testing was harmless.
Government propaganda films in the 1950’s even showed
American children playing in fresh radioactive ash to
demonstrate that it was as “safe as snow”.[1]
Now that the lethal consequences of the government’s
deceit are being exposed, we commemorate the scientist who
risked imprisonment for organizing protests that eventually
caused the United States and [the former] Soviet Union to ban
above-ground nuclear testing.
Linus Pauling: The scientist
Linus Pauling is the only person to ever win two undivided
Nobel Prizes. The New
Scientist magazine ranked Dr. Pauling as one of the
twenty greatest scientists to ever live, an honor shared with
such figures as Albert Einstein, Charles Darwin and Isaac
Newton.
Dr. Pauling’s research focused primarily on physical
chemistry. In 1939 he published The
Nature of the Chemical Bond and the Structure of Molecules and
Crystals and was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry
in 1954.
During World War II, Pauling participated in scientific
enterprises deemed vital to the protection of the country.
Early in the war he was a consultant to the National Defense
Research Commission and later became a member of the Research
Board for National Security. For his contributions, which
included work on rocket propellants, on an oxygen deficiency
indicator for pressurized space, such as that in submarines
and aircraft, and on a substitute for human serum in medical
treatment, he was awarded the Presidential Medal of Merit in
1948.
Pauling’s interest in the “behavior” of
molecules led him from physical chemistry to biological
chemistry. Dr. Pauling’s research into amino acids
resulted in the development of the first substitute for blood
plasma.
In 1950, Dr. Pauling constructed the first satisfactory
model of a protein molecule, a discovery that has implications
for the understanding of the living cell. He studied and
published papers on subjects as diverse as the effects of
blood cell abnormalities, the relationship between molecular
abnormality and heredity, the possible chemical basis of
mental retardation, the functioning of anesthetics, the
relationship of vitamin C deficiency to heart disease,
etc.
Many of today’s scientific and medical breakthroughs
emanate from Linus Pauling’s pioneering research in the
fields of both physical and biological chemistry.
How Linus Pauling got into trouble
Linus Pauling knew that radioactive fallout-generated free
radicals would cause cancer and other diseases in humans.
Pauling joined with Albert Einstein and five others to form
the Emergency Committee of Atomic Scientists. Their mission
was to inform the public about the dangerous consequences that
nuclear weapons and nuclear testing held for civilization.
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Comment from The New York Times, February 28, 2002
Dr. Linus Pauling’s warnings of the increased
incidence of cancer due to the fallout from atmospheric
atomic weapons testing & the emissions of
fission reactors were largely ignored by the mainstream
media during his lifetime. Finally, in 1997, 40
years after his petition to the United Nations
was denounced as “pro-communist,” the US National
Cancer Institute announced that large numbers
of people, especially children, were exposed to
dangerous levels of radiation from fallout. The
damage done by the US, British, & USSR testing
until 1963, of testing by France & China and,
more recently, by Pakistan, India, et al, dispersed
vast amounts of long-lived radioactive materials
into the atmosphere. Since much of this consists
of elements such as Iodine, Cesium, Strontium,
etc. which falling into the oceans, are ingested
by oceanic organisms such as algae, plankton,
etc. &, falling onto the ground, are taken
up by grazing animals such as sheep & cattle,
it becomes increasingly concentrated the higher
it goes up the food chain. While we have until
now managed to avoid the catastrophe of nuclear
war, it appears that those responsible for protecting
the security of our respective nations have, in
fact, poisoned life on Earth for thousands of
years to come.
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In 1957, Pauling wrote a scientific appeal petition calling
for a nuclear test ban treaty and distributed it throughout
the scientific community. He soon gathered over 9,000
signatures from 49 countries including 2,000 American
scientists. In 1958, Pauling presented the petition to the
Secretary-General of the United Nations, announcing that it
represented the general consensus of the world’s
scientists and their plea for a ban on future nuclear
testing.
Pauling gave hundreds of lectures against nuclear weapons
testing and war. Unfortunately, he toured during a time of
heightened Cold War suspicions and was marked a Communist
supporter. The Federal government refused to give Pauling a
passport, thus denying him the opportunity to attend
international scientific conventions. Pauling was twice
subpoenaed to appear before congressional committees
investigating anti-Americans activities to declare that he was
not a Communist. On October 11, 1960 Pauling was threatened to
be held in contempt of Congress because he refused to reveal
the names of those who helped circulate his petition to ban
nuclear testing.
Despite unrelenting governmental oppression, Pauling
remained undaunted and continued his crusade by writing a
draft resolution for a nuclear test ban treaty. He sent
letters and copies of his resolution to both President Kennedy
and Premier Khrushchev. The two superpowers agreed on a
limited test ban treaty, one that was strikingly similar to
Pauling’s. The treaty went into effect on October 10,
1963, the very day it was announced that Pauling was to
receive his second Nobel Prize.
Too far ahead of his time
By disseminating his knowledge about the lethal dangers of
radioactive fallout, Pauling became a target of government
harassment, harassment in the press and charges of working for
the enemy. He could have been jailed for refusing to provide
Congress with the names of those involved in gathering more
than 9,000 signatures for the scientific petition to ban
above-ground nuclear testing.
We are now learning that the government knew about the
effects of above-ground nuclear testing, but covered it up. In
the 1950’s for example, government officials notified
suppliers of photographic film of expected fallout patterns so
they could protect their film, but did not share the
information with milk producers. Many children drank this
radioactive contaminated milk.
A 1997 report by the National Cancer Institute indicated
that farm children who drank goat’s milk in the
1950’s in high fallout areas were as severely exposed as
the worst exposed children after the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear
plant accident. Death rates from leukemia and other cancers,
and diseases caused by the Chernobyl accident, are estimated
to kill tens of thousands in the future.[2]
Environmental groups are calling for the U.S. government to
expand its compensation program for test site
“downwinders” to include hot spots thousands of
miles from the test sites, and to formulate and implement a
comprehensive response to the public health threat posed by
the fallout.
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| The only reason Linus Pauling was
not thrown in jail for promoting the benefits of vitamin
C is that he did not sell it. Before 1994, the FDA
prohibited distributors of vitamin supplements from
making health claims. |
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This preliminary report about the lethal effects of nuclear
testing has alarmed some members of Congress, including Sen.
Tom Harkin of Iowa. “What we know is maybe the tip of the
iceberg here,” Harkin said. “We know that
there’s been upwards of perhaps 15,000 deaths that are
attributable to these nuclear tests.” Congress received
the preliminary report last August. The report was endorsed by
the prestigious Institute for Energy and Environmental
Research, but the government has yet to formulate a public
health response.
“People have a right to know if they were exposed,
where the big areas of fallout were, and they need to be
screened and told what to do to protect their health,”
Senator Harkin said.
It is interesting to note that what Senator Harkin
advocates today would have been considered heresy in the
1950’s, since the government’s official position at
that time was that radioactive fallout was harmless.
Forty-five years ago, Dr. Linus Pauling formulated a public
health response to eradicate this problem, but the Federal
government chose instead to persecute this brilliant scientist
and humanist so that the practice of raining radioactive
fallout throughout the United States could continue.
As is too often the case, when the government makes a
criminal accusation against a political dissident (in this
case Linus Pauling), history later shows that it was the
government itself who was involved in the sinister activities.
What could be more anti-American than inflicting cancer on
15,000 innocent people?
Linus Pauling’s theory about vitamin
C and heart attack
Linus Pauling never stopped taking controversial positions.
In the 1960’s, he began to investigate the role that
vitamin C played in human health. Pauling postulated that a
cause of atherosclerosis is a life-long vitamin C
deficiency.
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| Linus Pauling's last book |
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One of the great misfortunes of human evolution, Pauling
explained, was when our human ancestors lost their ability to
manufacture vitamin C. Ever since proto-humans moved out of
fruit-and-vegetable-rich habitats, Pauling said, they have
suffered great deficiencies of vitamin C. Pauling recommended
that people make up for this deficiency with daily doses of
vitamin C much greater than the 60 mg recommended by the
government.
Pauling laid out a molecular basis to explain vitamin
C’s connection with lipoprotein-a, a substance whose
levels in the blood have been linked to cardiovascular
disease. Lipoprotein-a is also a major component of the
plaques found in the blood vessels of atherosclerosis
patients.
Pauling has published studies asserting that lipoprotein-a
is a surrogate for vitamin C, serving to strengthen blood
vessel walls in the absence of adequate amounts of the vitamin
in the diet. Pauling noted that animals that manufacture their
vitamin C have very little lipoprotein-a in their blood.
Pauling was convinced that high doses of vitamin C could
help prevent the onset of cardiovascular disease, inhibiting
the formation of disease-promoting lesions on blood vessel
walls and perhaps decreasing the production of lipoprotein-a
in the blood.
Linus Pauling’s position on vitamin C once again put
him under intense criticism; this time from the medical
establishment who asserted that vitamin C had nothing to do
with heart attack risk.
Linus Pauling again exonerated
Over the past 12 years, a large volume of published studies
has supported Linus Pauling’s position on the role of
vitamin C and heart disease. Many of these studies look at the
beneficial effects that vitamin C has on the arterial wall,
but what is most impressive are human epidemiological studies
showing that people with high levels of vitamin C live longer
and suffer fewer heart attacks compared to those with low
vitamin C.
One of the first human studies that substantiated the
benefits of vitamin supplements was announced in 1992 and
showed that men who took 800 mg a day of vitamin C lived six
years longer than those who consumed the FDA’s
recommended daily allowance of 60 mg a day. This ten-year
study, published in the journal Epidemiology,[3] showed that high vitamin C intake
extended average life span and reduced mortality from
cardiovascular disease.
A compelling report that high-potency supplements extend
life span in humans was published in the August 1996 issue of
the American Journal of Clinical
Nutrition. This study involved 11,178 elderly people,
who participated in a trial to establish the effects of
vitamin supplements on mortality. When the effects of vitamin
C and E were compared, overall mortality was reduced by 42%.
What made these findings significant was that the study
compared people who took low potency “one-a-day”
multiple vitamins to those who took higher potency vitamin C
and E supplements. Only the participants taking high dose
vitamin C and E supplements benefitted.[4]
A study published in the British
Medical Journal evaluated 1605 randomly selected men in
Finland aged 42 to 60 years between 1984 and 1989. None of
these men had evidence of pre-existing heart disease. After
adjusting for other confounding factors, men who were
deficient in vitamin C had 3.5 times more heart attacks than
men who were not deficient in vitamin C. The scientists’
conclusion was, “Vitamin C deficiency, as assessed by low
plasma ascorbate concentration, is a risk factor for coronary
heart disease.”[5]
In a study published last year in The Lancet, researchers at
Cambridge University in England looked at serum vitamin C and
how long people lived. People who had the lowest levels of
vitamin C were twice as likely to die compared to those with
the highest serum vitamin C levels. This study was based on
the findings from over 19,000 people.[6]
Does vitamin C cause kidney stones?
Linus Pauling came under attack by medical doctors who
asserted that vitamin C caused kidney stones. Based on Dr.
Pauling’s molecular knowledge of chemistry, he
meticulously rebutted these unfounded allegations. What Dr.
Pauling lacked in the 1960’s and 1970’s, however,
were human studies to validate that vitamin C did not increase
kidney stone risk.
Dr. Pauling was exonerated again by a report from Harvard
Medical School that showed no increased risk of kidney stones
when evaluating 85,557 women over a 14-year study period. This
report, published in the April 1999 issue of the Journal of the American Society of
Nephrology, showed that women who consumed 1500 mg a
day or more of vitamin C were no more likely to develop kidney
stones than women who consumed less than 250 mg of vitamin C a
day. The study did reveal that women who consumed 40 mg or
more of vitamin B6 were 34% less likely to contract kidney
stones compared to women taking fewer than 3 mg a day of
B6.[7]
The only reason Linus Pauling was not thrown in jail for
promoting the benefits of vitamin C is that he did not sell
it. Before 1994, the FDA prohibited distributors of vitamin
supplements from making health claims.
Can we stop persecuting today’s Linus
Paulings?
Those with new ideas often face fierce attack by the
establishment and the Federal government. A recent example was
the announcement that human embryonic stem cells had been
produced and that there is now an opportunity to cure many of
today’s lethal diseases.
You would think that the scientist who made this remarkable
discovery, Dr. Mike West, would be proclaimed a hero. Instead,
government leaders immediately vowed to pass new laws to make
it a crime to create embryonic stem cells for therapeutic
cloning purposes. In Senate hearings, scientists and people
afflicted with disease are appealing to lawmakers to not ban
therapeutic cloning research.
If concerned citizens fail to contact their Senators to
support therapeutic cloning, Dr. Mike West could join a
renowned group of scientific geniuses (such as Galileo) who
were persecuted and imprisoned based on their precocious
scientific knowledge.
Our concern is that only a miniscule number of brilliant
minds like Linus Pauling are ever born. When Linus Pauling
stated that radioactive fallout caused cancer in humans, he
was ridiculed, persecuted and almost incarcerated. Now 45
years later, Pauling has been proven right. This vindication
does nothing for the 15,000 Americans who have perished from
radioactive fallout-induced cancer.
Today, there are pockets of exceptional intelligence that
are stifled by bureaucratic red tape. In order to create the
scientific renaissance needed to radically extend the healthy
human life span, we must break down the barriers that suppress
implementation of new ideas.
I urge every Life Extension member to contact their Senator
and demand that no ban be placed on human therapeutic
cloning.
Urge
Senators To Oppose Bill To Ban Human Cloning
We as citizens and Life Extension members must protect
those brilliant minds (the Linus Paulings of today) who may be
too intimidated to risk their personal freedom to bring forth
the scientific truth.
For longer life,
William Faloon
References
1. CNN.COM/US Study: 1950s nuclear
fallout worse than thought March 1, 2002 Posted: 1:56 PM EST
(1856 GMT).
http://www.cnn.com/2002/US/03/01/nuclear.fallout/index.html
2. IAEA underestimates health effects of
Chernobyl published by WISE News Communique on April 26, 1996.
http://www.antenna.nl/wise/451/4457.html
3. Enstrom JE, Kanim LE, Klein MA.
Vitamin C intake and mortality among a sample of the United
States population. Epidemiology 1992
May;3(3):194-202.
4. Losonczy KG, Harris TB, Havlik RJ.
Vitamin E and vitamin C supplement use and risk of all-cause
and coronary heart disease mortality in older persons: the
Established Populations for Epidemiologic Studies of the
Elderly. Am J Clin Nutr
1996 Aug;64(2):190-6.
5. Nyyssonen K, Parviainen MT, Salonen R,
et al. Vitamin C deficiency and risk of myocardial infarction:
prospective population study of men from eastern Finland.
BMJ 1997 Mar
1;314(7081):634-8.
6. Khaw KT, Bingham S, Welch A, et al.
Relation between plasma ascorbic acid and mortality in men and
women in EPIC-Norfolk prospective study: a prospective
population study. European Prospective Investigation into
Cancer and Nutrition. Lancet 2001 Mar
3;357(9257):657-63.
7. Curhan GC, Willett WC, Speizer FE, et
al. Intake of vitamins B6 and C and the risk of kidney stones
in women. J Am Soc Nephrol
1999 Apr;10(4):840-5.
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