Lecture: Radiation (1956)

Now, that is a guk formula which won’t kick your teeth out. If you don’t take enough calcium, why, these other things begin to rob calcium out of various parts of the body — the bone, the teeth and so forth. And a lot of us have hurt our teeth on this stuff a long time ago. But this is the way you keep it from doing it. You got that now?

Now, you take a couple of those bombs a day, or one of those bombs a day, and you’re not liable to get very many nightmares.

Now, that is safe up to 75 milligrams of B-1. That is the top limit of B-1 in that dosage accompanied by 10 to 15 grains of calcium and 250 milligrams of ascorbic acid. That could be pushed ahead right up to 75. Less than 30, it won’t do you a bit of good, and over 75 you’re taking too little calcium, taking too little ascorbic acid.

It’s quite interesting, by the way, if you would omit the ascorbic acid and take this dose for two or three days, and then omitting the dose itself and — you see, that’s taking the dose without the ascorbic acid — you start to develop scurvy. Good, standard, polar-expedition scurvy. And if you were to take, then — after a person had taken this for a few days without ascorbic acid — if you were to take suddenly a 1000 milligrams of ascorbic acid, the effort to remedy that scurvy is so sudden and so violent that every tooth in the head starts screaming out loud until it rebalances. You got the idea? So you have to take that ascorbic with it.

Now, this dosage, you understand, is not a dosage which has been carried forward on a careful monitoring of a great many people. This dosage has been developed and moved around and is now being taken successfully by quite a few people, and there have been no complaints. That is the level of experiment that it is, you see? It isn’t a Ford Foundation, a-million-for-the-commies, a-hundred- thousand-for-the-laboratory sort of an activity. It’s just a straight, flat-out “there’s a lot of people taking this stuff, and that seems to be about its dosage, and they’re not getting in any trouble.” Got the idea?

Well, you take one of those packages a day; that would be sufficient to carry you through on this nicotinic-acid experiment. Now, nicotinic acid is simply nicotinic acid. It isn’t any fancier than that. It is niacin, it is lots of things, but just remember it’s nicotinic acid. Why remember it’s nicotinic acid? Because you yourselves can make the stuff with cigarettes. It’s just nicotine, you understand, nicotinic acid. It is not, then, a rare drug. It can be synthesized.

The mere fact of your smoking, by the way, tends to titillate the amount of gamma that you have already been exposed to by having been a citizen of Earth since Franklin Delano ’45. See, I mean, just a little bit of smoking is liable to bring you down into an apathetic feeling or a little bit of stomach upset. Just barely restimulate it so you’d hardly notice it. All right.

I’m not trying to back up the hearse; this is a fact.

All right. Now, nicotinic acid is taken more or less — and believe me, it’s “more or less,” because this is the least-exact series that has ever been run by anybody. This series is more inexact than the best series’ of the AMA. Now, what do you like that? I mean, this is inexact. Now, get that. I’ll tell you when a datum is a stable datum and when it’s not, and this is not a stable datum. It’s what we’ve been getting away with lately. Got it?

The series on this is not very long. But remember, to this we can add all of our 1950 guk experience. And we experimented with niacin back then, not knowing what it was running out, but thinking it was running out only sunburn.¹

Notes