Episode Details

Linus Pauling won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his work on chemical bonding and the Nobel Peace Prize for his campaign against nuclear testing — the only person to win two unshared Nobel Prizes. Then he spent his final decades championing massive doses of vitamin C as a cure for everything from the common cold to cancer, and the medical establishment that had once celebrated him dismissed him as a dangerous crank.

This episode traces Pauling from his Oregon childhood through the chemical bond breakthroughs, the peace activism that won him a second Nobel, and the vitamin C crusade that turned a scientific hero into medicine's most famous cautionary tale about genius and overconfidence.

• Pauling's revolutionary work on the nature of the chemical bond and the first Nobel Prize
• The anti-nuclear activism, the passport battles with the State Department, and the Peace Prize
• The vitamin C megadose claims and the clinical trials that repeatedly failed to support them
• The legacy debate — two Nobel Prizes versus the quack label that followed him to the grave