Looking back over Linus Pauling’s life—a long one (1901–1994), blessed with huge success and every public honor—one can’t avoid his aphorisms. He was a polished public speaker, a famous aphorist, more so as he grew older and broadened his range from mere solver of deep scientific problems—such as the three-dimensional structure of molecules—to international instructor on the abolition of war and disease. In his last decades, the aphorisms became vacuous. Let me illustrate.

During the 1960s, microbiologist Sol Spiegelman epitomized, in a good aphorism, the new developmental biology, formerly embryology, which was being transformed by molecular genetics. “Synthesize the right proteins in the right place, at the right time, and everything else follows.” This was sure to infuriate anti-reductionists, but it could nevertheless be tested; and it proved fruitful. If, for example, you stop the right protein being made at the right place, etc., or cause the wrong one to be made, development stops or goes wrong. The role of genes was correctly implied. It didn’t have to be that way: early development could in principle have needed no protein synthesis. But the advance of biomedical science since then testifies to Spiegelman’s prescience.

By contrast: Barbara Marinacci’s devoted editing of Linus Pauling’s words offers, as epigraph to its eleventh chapter (entitled “Vitamin Crusader”), the following “favorite maxim of LP in his later, orthomolecular years”:

Having the