Vitamin C is a water-soluble vitamin found in citrus and other fruits, berries and vegetables. It is also a generic prescription medication and in some countries is sold as a non-prescription dietary supplement. As a therapy, it is used to prevent and treat scurvy, a disease caused by vitamin C deficiency.
Linus Carl Pauling was an American chemist, biochemist, chemical engineer, peace activist, author, and educator. He published more than 1,200 papers and books, of which about 850 dealt with scientific topics. New Scientist called him one of the 20 greatest scientists of all time. For his scientific work, Pauling was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1954. For his peace activism, he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1962. He is one of five people to have won more than one Nobel Prize. Of these, he is the only person to have been awarded two unshared Nobel Prizes, and one of two people to be awarded Nobel Prizes in different fields, the other being Marie Curie.
A nutrient is a substance used by an organism to survive, grow and reproduce. The requirement for dietary nutrient intake applies to animals, plants, fungi and protists. Nutrients can be incorporated into cells for metabolic purposes or excreted by cells to create non-cellular structures such as hair, scales, feathers, or exoskeletons. Some nutrients can be metabolically converted into smaller molecules in the process of releasing energy such as for carbohydrates, lipids, proteins and fermentation products leading to end-products of water and carbon dioxide. All organisms require water. Essential nutrients for animals are the energy sources, some of the amino acids that are combined to create proteins, a subset of fatty acids, vitamins and certain minerals. Plants require more diverse minerals absorbed through roots, plus carbon dioxide and oxygen absorbed through leaves. Fungi live on dead or living organic matter and meet nutrient needs from their host.
Orthomolecular medicine is a form of alternative medicine that claims to maintain human health through nutritional supplementation. It is rejected by evidence-based medicine. The concept builds on the idea of an optimal nutritional environment in the body and suggests that diseases reflect deficiencies in this environment. Treatment for disease, according to this view, involves attempts to correct "imbalances or deficiencies based on individual biochemistry" by use of substances such as vitamins, minerals, amino acids, trace elements and fatty acids. The notions behind orthomolecular medicine are not supported by sound medical evidence, and the therapy is not effective for chronic disease prevention; even the validity of calling the orthomolecular approach a form of medicine has been questioned since the 1970s.
Orthomolecular psychiatry is the use of orthomolecular medicine for mental illness. Orthomolecular psychiatry has been rejected by evidence-based medicine and has been called quackery. The approach uses unorthodox forms of individualized testing and diagnosis to attempt to establish an etiology for each patient's specific symptoms, and claims to tailor the treatment accordingly, using a combination of nutrients, dietary changes and medications that are claimed to enhance quality of life and functionality as well as to reduce or eliminate symptoms and the use of xenobiotic drugs. Scientific studies have shown mixed results; although there are some promising results from nutritional psychiatry, some forms of orthomolecular psychiatry are ineffective.
Herman Russell Branson was an American physicist, chemist, best known for his research on the alpha helix protein structure, and was also the president of two colleges. He received a fellowship from the Rosenwald Foundation.
Megavitamin therapy is the use of large doses of vitamins, often many times greater than the recommended dietary allowance (RDA) in the attempt to prevent or treat diseases. Megavitamin therapy is typically used in alternative medicine by practitioners who call their approach orthomolecular medicine. Vitamins are useful in preventing and treating illnesses specifically associated with dietary vitamin shortfalls, but the conclusions of medical research are that the broad claims of disease treatment by advocates of megavitamin therapy are unsubstantiated by the available evidence. It is generally accepted that doses of any vitamin greatly in excess of nutritional requirements will result either in toxicity or in the excess simply being metabolised; thus evidence in favour of vitamin supplementation supports only doses in the normal range. Critics have described some aspects of orthomolecular medicine as food faddism or even quackery. Research on nutrient supplementation in general suggests that some nutritional supplements might be beneficial, and that others might be harmful; several specific nutritional therapies are associated with an increased likelihood of the condition they are meant to prevent.
Irwin Stone (1907–1984) was an American biochemist, chemical engineer, and writer. He was the first to use ascorbic acid in the food processing industry as a preservative, and originated and published the hypothesis that humans require much larger amounts of Vitamin C for optimal health than is necessary to prevent scurvy.
Molecular medicine is a broad field, where physical, chemical, biological, bioinformatics and medical techniques are used to describe molecular structures and mechanisms, identify fundamental molecular and genetic errors of disease, and to develop molecular interventions to correct them. The molecular medicine perspective emphasizes cellular and molecular phenomena and interventions rather than the previous conceptual and observational focus on patients and their organs.
William Bosworth Castle was an American physician and physiologist who transformed hematology from a "descriptive art to a dynamic interdisciplinary science."
Vitamin C megadosage is a term describing the consumption or injection of vitamin C in doses well beyond the current United States Recommended Dietary Allowance of 90 milligrams per day, and often well beyond the tolerable upper intake level of 2,000 milligrams per day. There is no strong scientific evidence that vitamin C megadosage helps to cure or prevent cancer, the common cold, or some other medical conditions.
Harvey Akio Itano was an American biochemist best known for his work on the molecular basis of sickle cell anemia and other diseases. In collaboration with Linus Pauling, Itano used electrophoresis to demonstrate the difference between normal hemoglobin and sickle cell hemoglobin; their 1949 paper "Sickle Cell Anemia, a Molecular Disease" was a landmark in both molecular medicine and protein electrophoresis, though the use of electrophoresis to separate hemoglobin variants had been pioneered by Maud Menten and collaborators some years earlier.
"Sickle Cell Anemia, a Molecular Disease" is a 1949 scientific paper by Linus Pauling, Harvey A. Itano, Seymour J. Singer and Ibert C. Wells that established sickle-cell anemia as a genetic disease in which affected individuals have a different form of the metalloprotein hemoglobin in their blood. The paper, published in the November 25, 1949 issue of Science, reports a difference in electrophoretic mobility between hemoglobin from healthy individuals and those with sickle-cell anemia, with those with sickle cell trait having a mixture of the two types. The paper suggests that the difference in electrophoretic mobility is probably due to a different number of ionizable amino acid residues in the protein portion of hemoglobin, and that this change in molecular structure is responsible for the sickling process. It also reports the genetic basis for the disease, consistent with the simultaneous genealogical study by James V. Neel: those with sickle-cell anemia are homozygous for the disease gene, while heterozygous individuals exhibit the usually asymptomatic condition of sickle cell trait.
Randy Jirtle is an American biologist noted for his research in epigenetics, the branch of biology that deals with inherited information that does not reside in the nucleotide sequence of DNA. Jirtle retired from Duke University, Durham, NC in 2012. He is Professor of Epigenetics in the Department of Biological Sciences at North Carolina State University, Raleigh, NC, and Senior Visiting Scientist at the McArdle Laboratory of Cancer Research, University of Wisconsin, Madison, WI. Jirtle is noted for his research on genomic imprinting, and for his use of the Agouti mouse model to investigate the effect of environmental agents on the mammalian epigenome and disease susceptibility.
Ted George Goertzel, is an Emeritus Professor in the Sociology Department at Rutgers University–Camden. He is the author and co-author of books and articles spanning from social economy, politics, and conspiracy theories. He is the father of Ben Goertzel, with whom he co-authored the 1995 book Linus Pauling: A Life in Science and Politics.
Vitamin B3, colloquially referred to as niacin, is a vitamin family that includes three forms, or vitamers: niacin (nicotinic acid), nicotinamide (niacinamide), and nicotinamide riboside. All three forms of vitamin B3 are converted within the body to nicotinamide adenine dinucleotide (NAD). NAD is required for human life and people are unable to make it within their bodies without either vitamin B3 or tryptophan. Nicotinamide riboside was identified as a form of vitamin B3 in 2004.
Intravenous Ascorbic Acid or PAA, pharmacologic ascorbic acid, is a process that delivers soluble ascorbic acid directly into the bloodstream. It is not approved for use to treat any medical condition.
Franklin Church Bing was an American biochemist, advisor and archivist. He was born in the United States. He got his PhD in the physiological chemistry department of Yale University in 1930. After that he joined the Western Reserve University between 1929 and 1936 and became a faculty member in the department of Biochemistry. After many years of studying, in later career, he joined the American Medical Association (AMA) and became a scientific researcher from 1936. Then between 1943 and 1950, Bing worked for the American Institute of Baking in Chicago. From 1950 to 1952, he worked as an advisor to the Delaney Committee of the United States House of Representatives. Since then, he has become an independent food and drug advisor for private businesses and government agencies. In 1985, Franklin Church Bing became an archivist and worked for the American Institute of Nutrition. At the same time, he wrote several biographies for many nutritionists. Franklin Church Bing was a nutritionist, scientist and a chemist and he had studied and made many contributions to these related fields during his whole life.
Nobel disease or Nobelitis is an informal term for the embrace of strange or scientifically unsound ideas by some Nobel Prize winners, usually later in life. It has been argued that the effect results, in part, from a tendency for Nobel winners to feel empowered by the award to speak on topics outside their specific area of expertise, although it is unknown whether Nobel Prize winners are more prone to this tendency than other individuals. Paul Nurse, co-winner of the 2001 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, warned later laureates against "believing you are expert in almost everything, and being prepared to express opinions about most issues with great confidence, sheltering behind the authority that the Nobel Prize can give you". Nobel disease has been described as a tongue-in-cheek term.
Evan Vere Shute F.R.C.S.C. was a Canadian obstetrician, poet and writer best known for advocating vitamin E therapy to treat cardiovascular disease and many other diseases. His studies were not controlled and his results were not confirmed by other medical researchers.
