 All right. Let's get started today. Thank you all for coming. We're here to honor Linus Pauling and official Linus Pauling Day here in the state of Oregon. It was 119 years ago Linus Pauling was born in Portland. He became clearly one of the most famous chemists of all time but also one of the most influential scientists in history. He's a native of Oregon. He went to the bachelor's degree in chemical engineering here at Oregon State University and then went on to earn his PhD at Cal Tech where he spent much of his career. Linus Pauling is noted for being the only person to receive two unshared Nobel Prizes. There have been a few other folks who've been honored with two but he didn't have to share his with anyone. So his first degree or first Nobel Prize was in chemistry in 1954 for his work on the nature of the chemical bond and how atoms are put together to form molecules, small molecules, crystal instructors and also his work with the structure of proteins and large biological molecules. And that began his interest in biology as well which in part led to the founding of the Linus Pauling Institute. His next Nobel Prize was in peace in 1962. It was actually announced in 1963 the day after an anti-proliferation nuclear treaty was signed to ban nuclear testing of atmospheric testing of nuclear weapons between the USSR and the United States. With his interest in chemical structures, in biology and biochemistry started investigating how vitamin C and other micronutrients can help prevent disease and maintain health as we get older. And he founded the institute that we down today called the Linus Pauling Institute. So the institute originally began in California and we're going to be able to hear today a little bit of the history from Steve Lawson who was there and worked with Pauling at the institute in Menlo Park before it moved here after Pauling passed away in 1994. The institute formally came here in 1996 and after Pauling passed away the governor of Oregon declared this an official state holiday. We still have to go to school or go to work but every year since then this has been Linus Pauling Day in the state of Oregon. So I want to thank Chris Peterson from the Valley Library. He's going to do an interview with Steve and I mentioned Steve Lawson as someone who came with the institute from California when it moved here to Oregon State University in 1996. I also want to thank Larry Landis of the Valley Library for all the work they do in curating the papers of Linus Pauling. Organizing Linus Pauling online so you can find out much about his life and research and history. We can also visit the Valley Library to do so. Thank you. So yes, I don't know if there is anybody that has an association with the institute that matches Steve's nearly 40 years and he and I got together in 2011 to document this stuff in the form of oral history interviews we did eight hours worth and it's all online. If you're interested you can Google it. We've got 20 minutes today so we're going to talk really fast. So we'll start Steve. You joined the LPIS in 77, 78 about four years after its founding. What was happening at the institute at that time? The institute had two major research programs at that time. One was in metabolite profiling which today would be called metabolomics and the other one was in vitamin C and cancer. The metabolite profiling program began I think when Pauling and Art Robinson sort of founded the precursor of the institute at Stanford University in the late 1960s and they were very interested in learning whether or not metabolites present in urine could be used diagnostically. So the idea was by using gas chromatography or mass spectrometry and later a volcano source field ionization mass spectrometer which is a real group Goldberg type apparatus. Urine samples could be taken from different groups of people diagnosed with a specific disease or physiological status sex age or whatever and you could try to find out if there was a certain pattern of metabolites in urine that correlated with a particular physiological state or pathological state. The idea they had was that if this could be developed in a really sophisticated way then it could be used diagnostically to detect very subtle biochemical changes in the body before the onset of symptoms and of course if there is a therapeutic intervention available then applying that intervention before full onset of symptoms would be very advantageous to the patient. The other major program concerned vitamin C and cancer as early as 1971 which was two years before the founding of the Institute. Ewan Cameron who was chief of surgery at Vale of Love and Hospital in Loch Lomondside Scotland. I think it's a 440 bed hospital in Scotland. Contacted Linus Pauling because he had read an account of Linus Pauling's talk in the New York Times and thought that vitamin C might be useful in treating cancer. It's kind of a long complicated biochemical story that I don't have time to develop fully but Cameron had written a book called Hyaluronidase in Cancer which was published I think in 1966. His idea was that if you could inhibit the release of hyaluronidase from rapidly dividing cells then you could slow down the growth of solid tumors. So his idea was managing cancer not necessarily eradicate cancer and he thought that vitamin C might function as a physiological hyaluronidase inhibitor or prompt the synthesis of a physiological hyaluronidase inhibitor in the body. So the idea was that cancer cells are proliferating very rapidly. They're secreting lots of this hyaluronidase which breaks down the ground tissue in the body. If you could interfere with that process then you might be able to encapsulate tumors and prevent them from growing rapidly. So he contacted Linus Pauling and brought up this concept and Pauling got very excited and together they decided that Cameron could start giving high dose vitamin C to terminal cancer patients hospitalized in Scotland. Most of these patients were expected to live only weeks or months. Many of them were taking something called Brompton cocktail. Anybody ever hear of Brompton cocktail? It's a pain management technique that's used in Scotland. I don't know if it's still used but in those days it was used to manage pain for people with incurable cancer. Very often they suffered from skeletal metastases and other metastases that were very painful. So Brompton cocktail consisted of heroin, cocaine, and alcohol and this was the patient population that you and Cameron first started treating with high dose vitamin C. People that were hospitalized taking Brompton cocktail to alleviate pain and because these people were hospitalized it was very easy for him to give high dose intravenous vitamin C by continuous slow drip and he did that and recorded his observations and the outcome of the patients and together with Linus Pauling they published many papers on the clinical therapeutic use of high dose both oral and intravenous vitamin C and cancer. Cameron of course was very interested in the possible contra indication for vitamin C and cancer patients who were also taking chemotherapeutic drugs. Vitamin C can deal with free radicals pretty effectively and a lot of the cancer chemotherapeutic drugs generate free radicals which attack tumor cells. So Cameron was concerned that vitamin C in high concentrations in the body might interfere with chemotherapy. So we set up an experimental program to check the effect of vitamin C on chemotherapeutic drugs in fish. So one of my first experiments at the Institute was actually a fish toxicology experiment using fingerling trout that we put in distilled water that had been reconstituted with minerals and so salts and so forth and put in methotrexate 5FU other chemotherapeutic drugs and vitamin C and then observed the behavior of the fish. The idea being that if there were significant interactions between these two chemicals then we would detect that by changes in the way the fish were moving in the tank. So we had elaborate technology to measure that as well. So those were the main projects that were under way when I first started. In our teaching with students when we talk about oral history and part of its value, part of the value we comment to them is building historical empathy and I want to build a little historical empathy in the context of space. So we are in the Linus Pauling Science Center right now and this is still a relatively new and state-of-the-art facility. It was not always the case. Can you tell us about some of the spaces that LPISM was in in California? Sure. Pauling when he was a professor of chemistry at Stanford from 1969 to 1973 had already developed some pretty what he considered important ideas and what he called orthomolecular medicine, varying the concentration of molecules that are normally found in the body in order to achieve optimum health and to prevent and treat disease. However, he was really unable to interest the research office at Stanford into allocating enough research space to carry out this work. So he and Art Robinson decided to found an independent research organization off campus in which this research could take place. At the time it was located at 2700 Sand Hill Road just opposite Stanford Linear Accelerator. That area was mainly populated by publishing companies. I think Addison Wellesley had a building there. There were other no manufacturing facilities. Since we left, it has turned into a hub for venture capitalists in the Bay Area. So it's kind of like Silicon Valley is really concentrated particularly in the building that we vacated at 2700 Sand Hill Road. In the late 1970s, the building had subsided over time due to the lack of bedrock. So with the multitude of small earthquakes that you experience in California can cause shifting structures. And sometimes these shifts can result in fractures in the infrastructure and so forth. So the landlord decided that everybody had to get out of the building so that they could perform reconstructive renovations on the building. And in late 1980, the winter of 1980, 1981, we moved to a much less aesthetically appealing but much more functional building in Palo Alto on Page Mill Road. It was an old battery factory with cinder block construction. Nothing to look at. Far worse than the quarters that the Linus Pong Institute finds itself in today. But it allowed us to carry on research at a very low cost. I think at that time we were paying about 55 cents a square foot in Palo Alto, which now most of the rents in Palo Alto are probably up in 20, 25 dollars a square foot, maybe even higher in some buildings. So it was economical. The landlord liked the institute. So the lease was only increased by the cost of living every year, which was quite nice. You knew Pauling. You knew him as a colleague and as a friend. And he's obviously somebody who's very well documented in lots of different ways, but share some of your insights from knowing him as a person. Well, I guess I should start with the first time I saw Linus Pong, which was when I was an undergraduate at Stanford. I was going to class in the quadrangle and there was a gaggle of students and what appeared to be faculty outside the president's office. I think the president at that time was Richard Lyman. And there were two older gentlemen there, white hair. I didn't really know who they were. They looked like grandfatherly types to me. One was Linus Pong and the other one was Halstead Holman, who was dean of the medical school at Stanford University Medical Center. And they were protesting the firing of H. Bruce Franklin, who was a tenured English professor, an authority on Herman Melville and one who was one of the first people to propose that science fiction should be studied as a legitimate literary concern. But he was engaged with Vence Ramos and a couple of other kind of rabble-rousing political organizations and they were shutting down traffic on El Camino and there were a lot of demonstrations all over the Bay Area and in Palo Alto at that time, too, primarily anti-war demonstrations. Stanford has always been fairly conservative and I think at one point they just had enough of H. Bruce Franklin and fired him and Pauling was out there protesting this firing because he said that tenure, the reason for tenure, was being violated. You have tenure to protect faculty who want to express their opinion, whether it's popular or unpopular. So that was my first viewing, if you will, of Linus Pauling. He wasn't teaching any undergraduate chemistry courses so I didn't have a chance to have him as a teacher. And then later, of course, when I was working at the Institute, my office was just off the hallway that he would use to get to his own office and he would stop in from time to time and chat with me and ask me to do things for him, like write reviews of books that had just been published so I had to furiously read books like Eveline Richard's book, Vitamin C, Medicine or Politics and write a review and then submit it to a nutrition journal. And a little bit later, he asked Zella Kerman who was a quantum chemist and me to set up a laboratory to carry out research and superconductivity. During this whole period when Pauling was very interested in orthomolecular medicine and vitamin C, he was continuing work in theoretical chemistry and physics. And one of his ideas concerned a novel way to fabricate superconductors and he wanted to get a patent for this invention and then hopefully license it and the revenue stream from the licensing of this invention would be used to support orthomolecular medical research at the Institute. But he really wanted to see whether or not we could fabricate the superconductive material the way he specified in his patent application. So one of my most enjoyable times with Pauling was at a little laboratory we set up in Stanford Industrial Park with a furnace and blow torches and borosilicate glass and tin and set about making this material which consisted of tin fibrils, as he called them, about 10 or 20 angstroms in diameter surrounded by non-conductive glass all bundled together. And it was just really a joy to have him come into the laboratory and put on goggles and lab coat and work in the lab with him and I think it was probably the very last experimental work he ever conducted, maybe the only experimental work he conducted in several years. And when we finally succeeded in making this material, Zella Kerman and I went to his apartment on the Stanford campus and showed it to him and he was just overjoyed and I had a glimpse into what it must feel like to be a brilliant person making an astonishing discovery and being so overwhelmed with joy at discovering something about nature. And that was really, really, really made a big impression on me. He was also extremely funny and charming in addition to being a thorough expert in chemistry, biology, physics, geology, statistics and having an amazing memory that I think uniquely suited him for making lots of discoveries. I think that we are probably running pretty close to the time, but the last question, sort of a wrap-up question might be if you could reflect on some of the work that came out of LPISM, some of the standout work. You talked about how things were at the beginning, how were they in the middle and the end, the things that really stand out to you? Well, I think of the work that really stands out, I would have to say the metabolite profiling work and also the vitamin C and cancer work. That's in the realm of ortho-molecular medicine, my own work, which stands out in my mind because I was involved in it, had to do with protein profiling. Emile Zucca-Condel, who was the president of the Institute through the late 1970s and into the early 1990s, had developed the field of molecular evolution with Linus Pauling in the early 1960s. I was working very closely with Emile on a program in protein profiling where we were trying to characterize proteins and therefore genes that might be responsible for the development of the metastatic phenotype in human cancer cells. There was a lot of instrument and technical development that went into that work because the technique was brand new at that time. Instrumentation was really crude and we were trying to develop new instrumentation and carry out experiments that would allow us to detect membrane proteins or regulatory proteins present in very, very small amounts that might be responsible for the development of the metastatic phenotype. Of course, the other work that I think was extremely important and kind of set the stage for work that is ongoing very vigorously today was the vitamin C and cancer work. Pauling and Karaman were disappointed that the professional and public response was not a little more welcoming to this idea. In particular, there were two male clinic studies that were carried out with controlled conditions that were purported to design to replicate Cameron's work in Scotland with placebo controlled and a placebo controlled clinical setting in the United States. Both of them failed to show any difference between vitamin C and placebo in these terminal cancer patients. And the reason for that was simply that these researchers gave vitamin C only orally and never intravenously. And if you give it intravenously, you end up with very high concentrations in the body that have specific anti-cancer effects or anti-tumor effects that are being well characterized now. So I think that the work that they did early on and the books that they published both for professionals and for the public were very important in setting the stage for work that is pretty vigorous today. And I should say that the metabolite profiling work now kind of morphed into metabolomics is also a leading topic among scientists today too. Okay, I think that we are up against our time. And my understanding is that Q&A is at the very end of all the presentations. So if you've got any questions for Steve, that's the time. Or you can go online and find seven hours and 40 more minutes of this. Thank you very much, Steve. Thank you, Chris.