Free Immortality by Stephen Cave

while traveling, he would not rest until he had worked through some sixty-six pounds of state documents per day. This control-freakery, they thought, was blocking the beneficial effects of their medicines.
    With the benefit of hindsight, however, we can take a different view. From near-contemporary sources we know many of the ingredients that were used by the physicians and sorcerers to make their elixirs. For those who could afford them, the core ingredients were such incorruptible elements as gold, mercury and jade. Other common components included sulfur, lead and orpiment, a compound of arsenic with a striking golden color. The First Emperor’s daily dose of vitamins and minerals would therefore have induced any of mercury, lead or arsenic poisoning, and possibly all three. Symptoms would have ranged from headaches, bellyaches, sweating and seizures to insomnia, irritability and paranoia—traits he seems to have demonstrated in abundance. It seems the only time his doctor successfully managed to extend the First Emperor’s life was when he blocked the Yan assassin’s knife with his medicine bag. Contrary to their promise, his potions had proven to be elixirs of mortality; it was the emperor’s quest to stay alive forever that killed him.
    •  •  •
    I T was to be another two thousand years before the search for the elixir of life was put on a firm scientific footing: many believe that now, for the first time in history, we stand before the prospect of defeating aging and disease. Our chances of staying alive indefinitely have never looked better. The man responsible sacrificed his double Nobel Prize–crowned career in the process yet profoundly shaped our health-obsessed age. It is to him we now turn.

3

THE VITAMIN CURE

S CIENCE V ERSUS THE R EAPER
    T HE doctors said she was dying. The cancer was eating Ava Helen from the inside out; the hemorrhages were becoming more frequent. But Linus Pauling believed he could save her. He was after all the inventor of molecular biology, the winner of two Nobel Prizes and author of the book
Cancer and Vitamin C
, arguing that megadoses of vitamins could slow, halt or even cure the Western world’s most dreaded disease. And Ava Helen was his wife. Now she had been diagnosed with stomach cancer; fate was daring him to test his theories.
    Ava Helen refused chemotherapy and, on her husband’s advice, increased her intake of vitamin C. Pauling’s views had been lambasted in both the scientific journals and the press. He had once been the star of American science, but as his claims for the benefits of vitamins grew ever wilder—that they could ward off cancer and help us live to 150—he found himself increasingly isolated. His scientific papers on the subject were rejected by the journals; his laboratory space was taken away; he was lampooned in the media as a senile old has-been.
    Pauling added raw fruits and vegetables to his wife’s diet; hemade fresh juice for her from tomatoes and carrots. Her hemorrhages were growing worse and she needed ever more blood transfusions, but he was convinced that the enormous doses of vitamins would work a miracle. They had to: his personal and professional lives—his whole world—were at stake.
    T HROUGH his enormous energy and intellect, Linus Pauling helped shape the century that his life spanned. From quantum mechanics to nuclear disarmament, from genetics to dieting, he was at the forefront of the developments that define the world we now live in. Yet his life was one of constant controversy and ended with very public accusations that he was nothing but a crank.
    As a young boy in Portland, Oregon, he watched his father at work in the back room of his drugstore. Herman Pauling made extravagant claims for his tinctures and ointments—that they could cure almost any ailment and even halt aging. But in 1910 medicine was far from an exact science, and the druggist was unable to heal himself: one day, Linus Pauling’s father