Vitamin C: A 500-Year Scientific Biography from Scurvy to Pseudoscience

247 Pages·1.279 MB·English

by  Stephen M. Sagar

VITAMIN C
A 500-Year Scientific
Biography from Scurvy
to Pseudoscience
Stephen M. Sagar
Essex, Connecticut
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Copyright © 2022 by Stephen M. Sagar
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or
by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and
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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Sagar, Stephen M., author.
Title: Vitamin C : a 500-year scientific biography from scurvy to
pseudoscience / Stephen M. Sagar.
Description: Lanham, MD : Rowman & Littlefield, [2022] | Includes
bibliographical references and index. | Summary: “Vitamin C: A 500-Year
Scientific Biography from Scurvy to Pseudoscience is the compelling
story of the history and science behind vitamin C”— Provided by
publisher.
Identifiers: LCCN 2021060986 (print) | LCCN 2021060987 (ebook) | ISBN
9781633888265 (cloth) | ISBN 9781633888272 (epub)
Subjects: LCSH: Vitamin C—History.
Classification: LCC QP772.A8 S24 2022 (print) | LCC QP772.A8 (ebook) |
DDC 615.3/28—dc23/eng/20211220
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021060986
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021060987
The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of
American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper
for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.
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For Susan
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[R]esearch is not a systematic occupation but an intuitive
artistic vocation.
—Albert Szent-Gyorgyi,
“Lost in the Twentieth Century,” 1963
I don’t think anything is ever just science.
—Siri Hustvedt, What I Loved, 2003
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CONTENTS
PREFACE vii
INTRODUCTION xi
Part I Buccaneers and Bureaucrats:
The History of Scurvy
1 A DISEASE OF MARINERS 3
2 CATASTROPHE AND
ENLIGHTENMENT 21
3 AN UNLIKELY HERO AND A
PARTIAL VICTORY 37
4 STEPS FORWARD AND BACK 53
Part II The Chemists Take Over:
The Discovery of Vitamins
5 A DIFFERENT KIND OF NUTRIENT 71
6 THE VITAMIN HUNTERS 93
v
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COnTenTS
7 SCURVY FOR SCIENCE 107
8 NORMAL SCIENCE 117
Part III The new Buccaneers:
The Business of Vitamins
9 THE PASSION OF LINUS PAULING 131
10 VITAMINS, BUSINESS, AND POLITICS 149
11 LESSONS LEARNED 161
12 A GUIDE FOR THE PERPLEXED 167
APPENDIX: SELECTED FOOD SOURCES
OF VITAMIN C 181
NOTES 183
BIBLIOGRAPHY 201
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS 215
INDEX 217
vi
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PREFACE
If irst encountered pure ascorbic acid, the chemical name for
vitamin C, in 1977. Having just completed medical school and
residencies in internal medicine and neurology, I aspired to be a
clinician-scientist and went to work in a neuroscience laboratory in
Boston. In that job, I used ascorbic acid virtually every day. But I
was not interested in the compound; it was merely a substance to
prevent the oxidation of other reagents. I did not bother to weigh it
out, adding the few milligrams picked up on a spatula tip.
Vitamin C first piqued my interest in the early 1980s when it
earned me funding for a pilot research project. One of the Sackler
brothers invited my mentor to New York to discuss his laboratory’s
work. The Sackler family is now infamous for owning Purdue
Pharma, promoting OxyContin, and, in the minds of many, igniting
the opioid crisis. But that was before OxyContin. The family had
gotten rich advising big pharmaceutical companies how to promote
drugs directly to doctors. They devoted some of their wealth to a
foundation that supported medical research, and my mentor asked
his trainees for brief grant proposals to take to his meeting to try to
capture some of that wealth for his laboratory.
vii
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VITAMIN C
My proposal concerned the neurobiological actions of capsaicin
and, like most writings about capsaicin, contained a statement that
it is the active, pungent ingredient of Hungarian paprika and Mexi-
can chili peppers. The Sackler brother who perused the proposal
was not interested in capsaicin or in my science. He decided to
fund the grant because Hungarian paprika had been a commercial
source of vitamin C. Unbeknownst to me, his foundation was sup-
porting the research of Linus Pauling, the Nobel Prize–winning
chemist and most publicly visible proponent of megadose vitamin
C. My grant proposal had nothing to do with vitamins and nothing
of importance came of the project, but this small windfall was one
example of the serendipity that punctuated the history of vitamin C.
My research went in other directions and I had little more to
do with vitamin C until I switched tracks and entered the phar-
maceutical industry. In 2012, I prepared a talk for a job interview
at a small biotech company. The same mechanism that transports
one form of vitamin C into the brain also transports the drug that
I would have worked with at this company. This led me to inves-
tigate the neurological manifestations of scurvy and delve into the
history of that disease.
I did not take the job, but as I read more, the intriguing stories
and fascinating characters in the history of vitamin C convinced
me that it was a story worth bringing to a wider audience. The
five-hundred-year saga is rich with compelling stories and interest-
ing characters, with tales of courage and callousness, of brilliant
insight and folly, and of strokes of luck, both good and bad. The
protagonists include flamboyant personalities with conflicting
egos—swashbuckling sailors, Arctic explorers, penny-pinching bu-
reaucrats, scientists working in malaria-infested jungle laboratories,
and investigators utilizing the latest tools of molecular biology. The
story provides examples of our failure to learn from history and to
repeat the mistakes made by our ancestors hundreds of years ago.
viii
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PrefaCe
The history of vitamin C illustrates how medical science works
in the real world and how it has changed over the centuries. It
shows that the human brain can penetrate the mysteries of biology
but also can be led astray. It illuminates the fitful progression of sci-
ence as scientists struggle against the limitations of human intellect
while society attempts to deal with the implications of those discov-
eries. The COVID-19 pandemic convinced me even more of the
importance of looking to the history of science to better understand
our current dilemmas.
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