"Then, at the peak of his prestige and renown, instead of settling into a comfortable elder statesman role, Pauling shocked his friends and admirers by launching a crusade to prove that vitamin C would cure the common cold... While Pauling quickly recognized his error on DNA, accept­ing it as the kind of mistake any scientist can make and more or less dis­carding his previous ideas about vitamin treatment of schizophrenia, he never abandoned his claims about vitamin C and the treatment of cancer, and in the last years of his life he felt vindicated when a national medical conference gave him a standing ovation, claiming that "Pauling was right all along.""