The First Mayo Clinic Trial: Pauling’s Head-On Collision with the Scientific Method?

Abstract

Early in 1977, Pauling heard that the NCI grant application would not be approved, and he stepped up the pressure on Dr Vincent DeVita, then Director of the Division of Cancer Treatment, and subsequently Director of the NCI. He disputed the NCI evaluation of the Vale of Leven data as not being of sufficient scientific quality to warrant further investigation and funding. In particular, Pauling confronted a written assessment of the Cameron-Pauling PNAS study of 1976, made by Dr Brian J. Lewis, Special Assistant to DeVita. Lewis had criticized the study on a number of grounds, arguing that had the article been submitted to a ‘more severely edited journal, it never would have been accepted for publication’. The study was not acceptably randomized, the determination of a patient’s status as terminal was ‘ill defined and unreproducible’, and the authors’ ‘vague description of the initial antitumor therapy of the cancer patients before they were entered into the study ... would make it impossible for any other workers in the field to do a comparable study.’ Lewis concluded his report with the recommendation that:

[T]he authors have violated two of the most essential tenets of sound scientific research: they have made it impossible for the reader to determine which variables were responsible for the longer survival of the treated group, and likewise their lack of specificity and consistency in the study design would frustrate any attempt to do a comparable experiment. (Lewis, 1976)

No vitamin-C benefit found in Cancer trial.

Dr Linus Pauling’s much publicized claim that vitamin C can prolong and improve the lives of terminal cancer patients has collided head-on with the scientific method.

Medical World News, 25 June 1979 (Anon. 1979b)

Mayo Study: Pauling Wrong on Vitamin C for Cancer

Post-Bulletin, Rochester, 12 September 1979 (McCracken, 1979)