Wednesday, August 27, 2008

The Nobel disease

n.

an affliction of certain Nobel Prize recipients which causes them to embrace strange or scientifically unsound ideas, usually later in life.

David Gorski, blogging at Science-Based Medicine, examines Linus Pauling’s descent into pseudoscience as part of a discussion about the lack of evidence for vitamin C as a cancer treatment.

1 comment:

phyzzixprof said...

An excellent article on Linus Pauling. In my view Pauling's basic problem was egomania; he claimed he'd discovered the alpha-helix when it was really the work of the black scientist Herman Branson; he tried to claim sole credit for the paper "Sickle-Cell Anemia: A Molecular Disease' when all the real work was done by Harvey Itano and Jonathan Singer
The best treatment of all of this is Anthony Serafini's LINUS PAULING: A MAN AND HIS SCIENCE, the definitive biography of Pauling