To be fair, Pauling advocated Vitamin C (a water-soluble vitamin), whilst Vitamin E is fat-soluble and accumulates in fatty body tissues. Dose makes the poison and all that.

Your warning about Nobel-Prize winners is well offered, though.

Pauling was an advocate of massive doses of Vitamin C -- a water-soluble vitamin that is essentially harmless because it gets eliminated rapidly. Vitamin E is a fat-soluble vitamin that can accumulate. I don't remember Pauling cheerleading for Vitamin E, but I certainly take your point about Nobel prizes, as long as it is limited to the peace prize winners.

Jinx. Okay, Bruce, that is frightening. We essentially said the exact same thing at the same time, although you win the word economy sweepstakes.

!!!!

The article also stated the study was performed on heart patients age 60 and older...the relationship between their travails and younger consumers of Vitamin E is not known.

I will say that most drugs and Vitamins have an inverted-U dose-response curve. Some is good, more is better, (up to a point) and then the benefits fall off again as unwelcome side-effects dominate. The minerals iron and selenium are excellent examples of this, being necessary in small doses and extremely poisonous in moderate doses. It is plausible that the benefit limit has been exceeded for Vitmain E.

Melissa/Bruce:

I can't go far in undertsanding too much of the chemistry, but reading this from his institute and comparing dosages for some things makes me think there is an overlap. Certainly a difference in tone and an absence of caution.

"One book that is crying out to be written is the story of the misery and madness inflicted on the world by Nobel Prize winners."

From my side, much worse than Nobel Prize winners..."science beat" journalists. So who is going to write the book?

>Your warning about Nobel-Prize winners is well
>offered, though.

Arafat won a Nobel Peace Price in 19-whatever.

Off-topic, "Vitamin" had quite a different meaning in my college days (though such Vitamins were likewise being advocated by Our Enlightened Intellectual Betters):
* Vitamin A = Alcohol
* Vitamin M = Pot
* Vitamin L = Acid

OJ:

Just curious -- what other Nobel winners do you have in mind? I figure Arafat's an obvious choice, and you could arguably throw Einstein in there for the atomic bomb (and some lefties would include Kissinger), but most of the really screwy laureates (any number of literature and peace prize winners, some economics laureates, Pauling, etc.) didn't have any kind of real-life impact that I can see.

OJ just wants us to go back to the good old days when medical care amounted to amulets, incantations and going down to the barber for a good bleeding.

He might as well have, but never would have, said as much about preachers.

Matt -

William Shockley, for one. Steven Weinberg is another.

I didn't know Arafat was involved with Vitamin E, or was it Jimmy Carter?

Bruce:

Admittedly, Shockley was a racist nut, but I don't think his racial theories gained much headway and I think most people correctly saw him as a goofball. Weinberg's variety of leftism, meanwhile, can be found among thousands of his fellow elite professors; I don't think he qualifies as having a uniquely destructive impact (although his ideas, when put into practice, are certainly destructive.)

There are two other truly destructive Nobel laureates I can think of: Philip Lenard and Johannes Stark, both of them extreme Nazis who gave scientific credence to Hitler's appalling racial ideology.

"One book that is crying out to be written is the story of the misery and madness inflicted on the world by Nobel Prize winners."

Not to mention that caused by Alfred Nobel himself.