Steve Marble in the Los Angeles Times:
And so it went for years, the breakfast orange juice nothing more than a mere vehicle for delivering a massive shot of vitamin C.
My father was an early disciple of Dr. Linus Pauling, who was one of his Caltech colleagues. Pauling was a chemist; my dad a physicist. I don't know that their paths crossed regularly, but it is a small campus and a place where big ideas and extreme theories are discussed freely.
Pauling was convinced that vitamin C, taken in mega doses, would prevent the common cold. And for my dad, usually not one to go on blind faith, that was all the proof he needed.
I somehow imagined that this guy Pauling worked amid a battlefield of test tubes and beakers in some dank basement laboratory, cooking up this miracle drug and that folks like my dad would swoop by every so often to check out the progress and pick up a batch.
Pauling was already a deeply respected and widely known man of science, but vitamin C made him a bit of a rock star. He gave rise to a generation that embraced vitamin C as a mighty shield that would deflect a good many of the bad things in life, the common cold being at the top of the list.
More here.