Part VI Jeffrey Bland Bastyr Lecture June 2009

Well, here's some little vignettes of Linus and Ava. Helen Pauling. These are always very heartwarming to me, having spent a couple of years there. And Susan and I have the privilege of chauffeuring Dr. Pauling about the meetings and things. So there is Dr. Pauling, really, in his days at Caltech, coming out of Oregon State Teachers College, by the way, he got his PhD at 17. He was already teaching graduate courses at 15. So I had. Susan remembers this. We were driving, I think it was in Las Vegas, actually driving to the airport, and he was in the car with us. And. And I think back, of all the stupid questions I've ever asked in my life, which there are a lot of, this had to be the most stupid question of all. And I said, Dr. Pauling, do you feel like you were always really good in chemistry? And after I asked it, I immediately knew. It felt like that was really a stupid question. But he was very, very kind. He wasn't condescending. He said, yeah, you know, actually I did. When I was building explosives out of my dad's pharmacy back in southern Oregon when I was seven. I really had an interest in chemistry. So anyway, so that's his beautiful wife, Eva Helen. That was their family in San Marino, over by Pasadena. And then this is, as you probably know, Dr. Pauling is the only person who won two independent Nobel prizes, one in peace and the other kinsmen. Other people won two and one, two individuals. And he actually said in the later portion of his life that he shouldn't have won his second winter peace individual. He should have really been his wife. And him, she was principally the advocate for peace and challenged him and made him the social voice that he was about the nuclear test ban treaty and organized with Alfred Schweitzer. There's some beautiful pictures somewhere in my files of them at the Schweitzer Clinic in Africa around the table planning how to get 30,000 scientists signatures to do nuclear test ban treating. And as you probably know, he wasn't able to go and accept the second Nobel Prize because the State Department, this is the McCarthy era, took his visa away so he couldn't go to Stockholm to accept his. Because he was labeled as a dissenter because of his peacenik marching around the capital. And this wasn't a good time to be a voice against the endowment. In fact, they wouldn't allow him to give lectures in any other country. And his grants were cut off and he lost his faculty appointment at Caltech. He was think of Caltech. That's A defense industry, Pasadena, Southern California. A lot of money that exploited by defense industry benefactors. So he basically appointed early California, as you probably know, in the late 70s. So. And that's the textbook of chemistry that I studied out of. That is probably the most principally important chemistry textbook has ever been written. Because it changed the whole nature of thinking about structure and function. That was his whole principle. Structure and function are interrelated at every level molecular right up to social organizations and societies. You got to get them right. Structure and function. So in 1968 he authored this paper that's a landmark paper. That's a part of the lineage that I think every student should study because it changed our whole thinking. In 1968 he wrote this article, Orthodontist Psychiatrist in Science magazine, saying that the optimal concentrations of many nutrients per person differ greatly from the concentrations provided by the normal diet. Biochemical arguments support the idea that orthomolecular therapy. Orthomolecular means substances needed to the body. Not new to nature molecules, but substances natural body may be preferred treatment for many health problems. And as I was saying, this classic series of books that he wrote in 1967 and later in 1970 birthed the nutritional supplement industry. Suddenly everybody knew about vitamin C. And he came went from a small group of kind of health food devotees to everybody knew about vitamin C. And the sales went up huge and the industry was born. Going from little mom and pop shops to the new nutritional supplement industry. And there's a quote in this that I find interesting that I'll segue to. He says he had worked on the structure of complex molecules like hemoglobin and other proteins and the nature of antibodies. He's actually the father with Dr. Gelbrook of modern immunology. Believe it or not, they're the first people to actually discover the structure of antibody molecules and how they connect the antigens. He also is a father of modern anesthesiology, the first anesthetic drugs, a mechanism actually discovered by Lawless Paul. I could go on and on some of the things that he discovered. Anyway, he says, I became. On the nature of sickle cell anemia and other molecular diseases. And beginning in 1954, 1954, on the possibility that mental diseases often have a molecular basis. His son Linus Pauling Jr. Is a psychiatrist, head of the psychiatric department, University of Hawaii School of Medicine today. So he birthed a person who became a psychiatrist. He goes on to say, I became interested in the vitamins when I learned that Dr. Gabriel Hoffman and Dr. Humphrey Osman in this way Back out back. Saskatchewan Mental Health Clinic had begun treating schizophrenic patients with large doses of niacin or niacinamide. I was astonished to read that they recommended the use of between 3,000 and 18,000 milligrams of niacin or niacina per day for the treatment of schizophrenia. Now, you all know what the RDA is for niacin, right? 3 milligrams. So we're talking about 100 times minimum. 100 times the RDA. This is diversion of pharmacology or orphan molecular therapies. Now, from that 1954 period on. Remember, I also showed you the dates of Roger Williams, 1950. Here are three people. And then we have Adele Davis. This is the light being penetrated with some of the three major scientists publishing. And then later Dr. Hoffer in Canada, who was at one time the chief psychiatrist for the Government Health Service in Canada. He was the first guy to do protein psychotherapy. He was the first guy to do electroshock therapy. He trained psychiatrists in all the principal mental hospitals in Canada. And what was his concern? We're not having very good success with the best of treatments. Even with the development of the new psychotropic drugs that came out in the early 60s, still not very good. Success was very schizophrenia. There must be a better way. And because he had a PhD in what food chemistry. And he understood from the 30s the development of Pelagar's dementia, diarrhea, dermatitis and dementia. Dementia being the third D of the three Ds of pellagra. He said, I wonder if there's something about niacin and the needs that these people have given biochemical individuality that might be related to their disease. So his logical thinking and understanding that the landscape of the time led him into this with Humphrey Osmond in the development of what became the Hod test in psychiatry. Hoffman, Hoffer, Osmond diagnostic test, Hod test. And from that then a patient can be assessed for their potential of. And by the way, this was the year of the psychotropic drug discoveries and try to damage schizophrenia using lsd. Timothy Leary later popularized this. As you know, Hoffer and Osman were one of the first guys to use LSD and to record the effects of the drug on their mental acuity, in which they had schizophreniform responses. And they said, well, hold up. The structure of my surgic acid diamond LSD looks a lot like medicine. I wonder if there's a relationship here to receptor sites. This is way before these receptors are even understood. I mean this is just creative thinking. So unfortunately last week Dr. Hufford passed away. I think in some ways all of us wish our lives will go like this. He practiced psychiatry, saw his last patient the week before he died at 91. And the next week he didn't feel well. He went to the hospital with his son and daughter and passed away in Tuesday. But his book as a autobiography is just a fascinating discovery of how we become illuminated with an idea and the battle to keep the elimination alive. Because it wasn't easy for a psychiatrist to be in the early physiology. This is his more recent book the General Public or the Molecular Medicine for Everyone co authored Andrew Salt, who's with the moleculars that come or psychologist. And then this is his son who is now the chief of research at the McGill University Lady Davis Institute for Medical Research. An MD, PhD and it turns out to show you how world was small that our medical director that I hired for Metagenics down in Gig harbor is Bob Lerman. Bob lerman was a 23 years medical school professor at Boston University Medical School. He's an introduction cardiologist and he went back to get his PhD in nutrition at MIT in the 70s and his classmate was none other than John Leonard Hoffer. So you know, these things are really interesting how they weave themselves together. And so John Hoffer was reviewing his father's work over the course of the last 50 years in this recent article in the Journal of Psychiatric Related Science.