Short Takes

New Times Laetrile Article: Dumb

Yes, folks, another dumb article on laetrile — this one in the February 18, 1977 issue of New Times, written, coincidentally, by one of the new Patterson Fellows, Richard M. Levine, who got his fellowship to study network television, not medical politics. I remember Levine. He picked my brain about laetrile last summer. I gave him some of my newsletters, introduced him to some of the people he needed to talk to and extolled the virtues of the Patterson Fellowships, about which he obviously became quite interested. Later I saw him in Tijuana.

I asked him how things were going on the story, and he said fine, except that the science of the whole thing was beyond him and so he was going to ignore that part of it and just concentrate on the politics. Now, I ask you, in a case like this, how do you separate the science from the politics? If you can’t come to terms with one, can you really cope with the other? Levine’s piece indicates that you cannot.

His article reminds me a bit of the Marci Macdonald piece in Macleans (“Cashing in on Cancer”) that I demonstrated to be so palpably false in almost all particulars in a previous newsletter. I pointed out this article to Levine as an example of bad writing on this subject. Marci’s vitriole etched an impression on Levine’s mind; apparently it was a favorable one.

I’m not going to dissect Levine’s entire article, but I will beat about the ample butt a few of his more egregious errors and journalistic lapses. When it comes to discussing “a multi-million-dollar-drug-smuggling conspiracy,” Levine doesn’t even bother to qualify all that thunder with the word “alleged.” (The trial, Dick, has only begun.) Likewise, Levine is able to write: “The Mexican connection has to be among the most bizarre international smuggling conspiracies any government has ever cracked.” Just precisely what “connection” is that? And “cracked“? Says who? Again, let’s wait for the outcome of that trial before we decide what, if anything, has been cracked — or even if any “conspiracy” is proved.

Next Levine identifies as one of the kingpins of the “conspiracy” one Jorge Del Rio, “a shadowy figure…who is, according to [prosecutor] Herbert Hoffman, ‘something of a Mexican mafioso.'” Given the fact that Levine follows this with absolutely zero evidence of “shadowy” or “mafioso” behavior, this is, to be charitable, sorry journalism. So is Levine’s constant harping on John Birch involvement of some of the pro-laetrilists. To hear him talk, everybody who has nice things to say about laetrile sees commies under every rock. It just ain’t so. I’ve met as many “left-wingers” as “right-wingers” in the laetrile movement; I’ve also met a lot of political moderates.

Then there’s this statement in Levine’s piece: “No one claims that Laetrile itself is dangerous, except in the very real sense that it shortens the lives of some cancer patients by keeping them away from conventional therapies.” This is where it is absolutely necessary for a writer to understand some science, for the fact is that the statistics indicate that those cancer victims who avoid the conventional therapies in favor of no therapy are, depressingly often, the ones who live longer. In any event, the number of patients who use laetrile without first exhausting the orthodox therapies (and all too often both their bodies and their bank accounts in the process) is, alas, extremely small — under one percent.

Levine’s characterization of the credentials of Ernst Krebs, Jr., the man who gave laetrile its name, is unfair. Levine says that Krebs’ doctorate is “an honorary degree from American Christian College in Tulsa, Okla.” He neglects to add that Krebs studied medicine and anatomy for three full years at the respected Hahnemann Medical College in Philadelphia and later biochemistry, bacteriology and graduate pharmacology at the University of Illinois, University of California and elsewhere. He also neglects to add that Krebs has been noted for a number of discoveries besides laetrile. One of these, pangamic acid, has been recognized as one of the B vitamins throughout much of the world; the Soviets have devoted much research to it and conducted a sizeable symposium on the subject of pangamic acid. The Soviets obviously believe that pangamic acid may be effective in a wide range of diseases.

And once again, in the Levine piece, we see trotted out all those tired, unsubstantiated accusations against Andrew McNaughton. As usual, there is no mention of the fact that despite all of the charges levelled against him over the years, NcNaughton has suffered only one conviction — and the sentence on that has never been imposed because McNaughton has documentary proof of prosecution perjury in his case, and the government would now like to forget the whole affair — if McNaughton will let them. Levine talks of McNaughton’s storied wealth, adding that “now he claimed to be flat broke, so broke that he had petitioned the San Diego Superior Court to appoint an attorney to defend him in the upcoming trial.” What he neglects to add here (though he knew it long before he sat down to write his article) is that the court looked into McNaughton’s finances and agreed — he isbroke.

Levine continues. McNaughton, he writes, “drove a battered Toyota and dressed modestly, but I had heard talk of other, more expensive cars and a Mexican villa overlooking the ocean. If they existed, he clearly had no intention of showing them to me. ‘How would you like to continue this discussion over drinks at your place?’ I asked innocently as I could. ‘I’d hate it,’ McNaughton said.”

Aha! McNaughton is hiding something!

It is to giggle, dear friends. In the first place, McNaughton himself told Levine and all the rest of us about his beach house (the modest value of which I’ve already discussed in a previous newsletter). McNaughton has nevertried to conceal the existence of that damned house. And Levine, in this passage, is simply being dishonest. In the second place, McNaughton, whom I have known and observed closely for some months now, does not drink, save for a little wine on rare occasions and so would, of course, hate to discuss anything over drinks. Third, McNaughton may have been telling Levine that he was not finding this conversation very stimulating.

Levine hits bottom, however, when he describes a patient at one of the Mexican clinics, a young man with advanced cancer who leaves the clinic feeling much better than when he arrived. Levine goes to talk to the boy’s doctors and says, “I…quickly felt less sanguine about his prospects. One [doctor] spoke no English at all and the other spoke it haltingly. They put Brent’s ‘before’ and ‘after’ X-rays on the spectroscope and it was obvious even to the untrained eye that the white fibrous mass in the middle of his thigh had not changed throughout the treatment, a fact that the English-speaking doctor did not seem reluctant to admit. ‘Is important you understand the result is only in symptoma,’ he told me. ‘In this estudy the swolling has gone down, in the mooskles, in the fat. But tumora is same.”

What is the point of this? In the context of the piece it seems that Levine is extrapolating from this one isolated case the notion that patients are not being helped by laetrile — except, perhaps, to the extent that they are made to feel better, something Levine makes light of, ignoring the formidable pain that so often characterizes advanced cancers. Incredibly, he also seems to be making fun of these doctors and their imprecise English — as if their competence as medical practitioners is thus compromised. (If Levine’s confidence in these doctors is shaken by their broken English I suggest that he interview them in Spanish.) It apparently never occurs to Levine to say to himself: “My God, these doctors, who Herb Hoffman and the ACS tell me are quacks, aren’t at all afraid to bring up their failures; in fact, it seems they are going out of their way to point out to ignorant chaps like myself, whom they might easily have deceived, just exactly where they sometimes fail.” But, no. Instead, this highly instructive honesty is given only passing reference and then it is characterized as an “admission.”

Sometimes I wonder what it will take for the truth to penetrate the mooskles in some reporters’ skulls.

Second Opinion at Sloan-Kettering

Meanwhile, back at Sloan-Kettering, where laetrile testing has been proceeding for years (as researchers there try desperately to produce as many negative results as positive ones), an “alternative” newspaper called Second Opinion has surfaced, and it’s a dandy. It advertises itself thus:

Second Opinion wants to be the voice of the rank-and-file employees of Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center. It presents news and opinions of the Center and the cancer field from the employees’ point of view. The paper is put out by the rank-and-file employees of the Center, the Hospital and the Institute, and is distributed free to employees by the paper’s supporters.

We believe that very basic changes must be made at MSKCC and in the “war on cancer” in general. Our basic aim is to help MSKCC employees get organized.…In cancer, we favor putting prevention first; making research relevant to human disease; [fostering] an open-minded policy towards new and unorthodox methods; making the best treatment available to all people; taking the profits out of cancer.

Hear! Hear! My faith in mankind is almost restored. Anyway, one fervently hopes Second Opinion survives, flourishes and, indeed, metastasizes itself throughout the Sloan-Kettering body politic. One lengthy story in the first issue of the publication is: “Laetrile Cover-Up Continues at SKI.” This article relates the many positive laetrile tests of longtime cancer researcher Dr. Kanematsu Sugiura of SK. SK administrators, Second Opinionobserves, have “refused to release any of the [laetrile] data, favorable or unfavorable. Instead, it has conducted a four-year public-relations campaign, especially designed to cover-up and discredit Sugiura’s results.” The article continues with news that should be of considerable interest to those who read DMR-2, which related my own investigation of SK’s handling of the laetrile issue:

This summer a “definitive” study was conducted by SKI and the Catholic Medical Center to settle the question of whether or not Laetrile stopped metastases [as Dr. Sugiura has steadfastly maintained]. It has ended in a fiasco.

The new study was “blind,” that is, Dr. Sugiura was not told which animals were receiving the Laetrile, and which were receiving only a saline solution. The only persons who knew which mice received Laetrile were Dr. Daniel Martin, a CMC surgeon, and his assistants. Dr. Martin is a well-known opponent of Laetrile, who even told reporters before the current experiment began that he knew in advance that the results would be negative!

Nevertheless, Sloan-Kettering decided to collaborate with Dr. Martin on this crucial experiment.…The results were quite predictable to anyone who has followed the Laetrile controversy. First, Dr. Martin’s group at Catholic Medical Center completely botched the experiment, whether by accident or design, killing about one-quarter of the mice prematurely. As Dr. C. Chester Stock, vice president of SKI, told Sciencemagazine, the experiments “went badly because of clumsy injection procedures.” (Science, 10 Sept. 1976) These injections were given by the “honest and skillful” Dr. Martin and his staff. [Dr. Martin had been thus described by the president of SKI, Dr. Robert A. Good, whose star has been in decline ever since his principal protégé was caught faking lab results at SK.]

Second, although the test was “blind” Dr. Sugiura surmised which mice were being treated with Laetrile and which were receiving the inert saline solution. [Dr. Sugiura, over the years, had seen so many cancerous mice improve on laetrile therapy that it would have been difficult for him not to correctly guess which mice were getting the laetrile.]

Dr. Sugiura evaluated the mice in each group and said that he found far fewer metastases in the laetrile-treated mice. This observation was subsequently confirmed by microscopic studies carried out by the MSKCC Pathology Department. But Dr. Martin, using his own bioassay techniques, declared there was no difference between the two groups. Neither Dr. Sugiura nor anyone from SK participated in the bioassay tests. And, in any event, Dr. Stock decided to declare the entire experiment invalid because, he claimed, of Dr. Sugiura’s correct surmise, which rendered the test “non-blind.” Now another “blind” and “definitive” test is in the works, Second Opinion reported.

The newspaper castigated SK administrators for repeatedly failing to make good on its promises to publish all of its laetrile data. “The record shows that the top leaders of SKI are terrified of reporting any positive results with Laetrile, even if these are modified by more negative findings. The issue is no longer whether Laetrile works, but the political and economic embarrassment these men and their colleagues will feel if Laetrile turns out to have even a shred of value…. SKI has grown and thrives on its many connections with big business. The fact that Lewis Thomas, Robert Good, James Fisk and other MSKCC Trustees are themselves directors or top consultants to cancer-drug companies proves the close connection.”

Later in the story:

Does Laetrile work? We do not know. It may turn out to be a hoax or an illusion. We are not advocating its use. But, on the other hand, we strongly urge SKI to release all of its data on Laetrile.…This will allow outside scientists to make their own judgments…and possibly attempt to reproduce the experiments themselves. Not to release the data, or to release it selectively, or to lump positive and negative results together [see DMR-2 for examples of this at SK], constitutes the suppression or misrepresentation of scientific work, which is intolerable.

Dr. Good has said, “I have never exerted pressure as a scientist to publish or not publish any information obtained from scientific inquiry.” Fine words. Why then has not Dr. Sugiura’s scientific paper, submitted to Dr. Stock over six months ago, been released by the SKI Administration for publication?

Could it be that the SKI Administration, like the FDA official quoted recently in Science, believes that legalized Laetrile would cause “total chaos in the medical marketplace?”

In the second edition of Second Opinion (published in February, 1977) there is more news on the laetrile controversy at SK. The news is that in December of 1976 SK finally published its 1974 “Sloan-Kettering Institute Annual Report,” containing some data that tends to confirm at least part of the hypothesized mechanism by which laetrile is said to selectively attack cancer cells. According to Dr. Krebs and others cancer cells are supposed to contain an enzyme that “unlocks” deadly cyanide from amygdalin. Normal cells, so the theory goes, have a protective enzyme which renders cyanide harmless. SK has long denied the validity of this theory. One official there, for example, told a science writer from The New York Times (7/21/75) that the Institute “found no special ability of can cells to release cyanide.”

Yet, in the 1974 annual report, the experiments of Drs. Morton Schwartz, Jerome Nisselbaum and Lloyd J. Old, Jr. are related and appear to contradict that 1975 statement. The summary of those experiments (the results of which have never been published in any scientific journal) clearly states that the liberating or unlocking enzyme was observed and that levels of same “in many cases” were “higher in cancerous than in…normal tissues.” Cyanide was released from prunasin, a form of laetrile, by “the following mouse tumors,” according to the SK summary, “129, meth A, spontaneous mammary tumor, C1498 myeloid leukemia and 591 melanoma.” Cyanide was similarly released from prunasin and amygdalin in the presence of other cancerous tissues, both animal and human.

Second Opinion comments: “We believe that these experiments tend to confirm and support the Laetrile theory, but it is admittedly hard to know from such a brief summary. This work should be fully published without delay, to enable other scientists to share this information and try to duplicate the results.”

Second Opinion was even more startled, however, by information that the 1974 report omitted:

During 1974, Dr. Kanematsu Sugiura carried out some of his most important work on the effects of Laetrile in mice with spontaneous mammary tumors. In general, he found that Laetrile inhibits the spread of cancer, stops the growth of small tumors and leads to a general increase in health and well-being. Yet, all of this work, still unpublished, is mysteriously missing from the 1974 SKI report, which is supposedly a complete record of the hundreds of projects performed that year. This raises some serious questions about the honesty and intentions of the SKI Administration.

We must repeat what we said in the last issue of Second Opinion: we believe there is a cover-up of Laetrile experiments at SKI. The reason for this cover-up is the long-standing hostility of the drug companies towards this and other substances which are cheap and plentiful, non-toxic, easy to manufacture and non-patentable. The SKI Administration, intertwined with the corporations for whom cancer is big business, has been hamstrung by Sugiura’s surprisingly good results in Laetrile tests.

A ranking researcher at Sloan-Kettering told me not long ago: “The Trustees are the real power, and that’s where the difficulty arises when it comes to laetrile or anything else innovative and threatening. They’ve got their vested interests, both in ego and in money, and they simply won’t hear of laetrile or anything like it.” Insiders at SK tell me that the Trustees are “comfortable” with the fact that one-time boy-wonder Bob Good had been so badly “compromised” by the “Patchwork Mouse” affair. It made him one of the boys, so to speak — instead of the independent reformer. That sad tale reminds me of a situation that existed and may still exist at Columbia-Presbyterian. Some years ago, as an eager young science reporter, I was carted about by a young doctor intent upon introducing me to all of the people who were behind a “marvelous” and “revolutionary” new cigarette filter, one that would take all the risk out of smoking and none of the pleasure. I was nearly sold on it, but not quite. Others, including some very prominent names in medicine, weren’t so lucky. They gave their names and their prestige to this product which ultimately turned out to be useless and, it appeared, possibly fraudulent. What happened to the earnest young doctor? He got kicked upstairs to become acting dean of Columbia’s medical school. And there he languished, according to a department head, who told me that everybody was quite delighted to have so compromised and tractable a fellow in that key slot.

Second Opinion deserves the support of all those who would see science well served at Sloan-Kettering, an institute, alas, increasingly undeserving of the honors that have been bestowed upon it over the years. Subscribe or make contributions to:

Second Opinion
C/0 Alec Pruchnicki
2800 University Ave.
Bronx, New York 10468

Make checks payable to Alec Pruchnicki.

And, by the way, since the critics of laetrile are always seeing fit to paint Ernst Krebs Jr. as the consummate racist (which he is not, please note that in its first two editions Second Opinion has carried some fascinating stories indicating that Sloan-Kettering Institute is guilty of racial bias in its graduate admissions policy. The case in point involves a foreign student who was the subject of a racial slur and seemingly discriminatory actions, a whole series of them, ending in his expulsion from the graduate program under extremely odd circumstances. This action came after three years of good work at SKI. The case has now been taken up by the Sloan-Kettering-Cornell Student Council which is demanding some explanations for the whole, apparently quite disgraceful matter.

Recent Laetrile Victories

• Indiana is promising to follow Alaska in legalizing laetrile for specific use against cancer. Legislation to do just that passed the Indiana House by a vote of 85-10, despite strong opposition from AMA, ACS, etc. More opposition is building now, to head things off in the state Senate, but it is clear, by that House vote, that the times are changing quickly. Meanwhile, prospects for Alaska-type legislation are even better in Nevada, and similar bills are coming up with some strength in five other states. If Nevada legalizes laetrile, as now seems likely, the backing has already been found for a large laetrile clinic there.
• And in the wake of that appeals court decision in Denver, which said that the FDA could not prohibit judges from authorizing cancer patients to import laetrile into this country until and unless it proves that laetrile is a “new drug” or a “dangerous substance,” which things, the court ruled, FDA has never done, several more judges have begun issuing orders enabling patients to import laetrile into this country for their own use. Also in the wake of that appeal decision, the FDA has been obliged by court order to begin listening to public testimony on laetrile and its alleged efficacy.
• Many of the opponents of laetrile claim that the substance is not only worthless but fraudulent, as well. It would be consistent with this line of thinking to believe that the makers of laetrile are, in fact, dispensing sugar tablets or, at least, a cheaply produced, impure or otherwise adulterated product. If the substance is purely fraudulent, why would the makers of it bother to put out a pure-amygdalin product? Quacks and frauds are not noted for observing such niceties as quality control. Recently the Free Press in Detroit took it upon its enterprising self to obtain some laetrile from the black market. It then had the tablets, which had been manufactured in Mexico, analyzed at a major Detroit laboratory via spectrographic examination. These tests showed that the tablets were “100 percent amygdalin, which is the chemical name for laetrile. The pills were actually 50 mg. heavier than advertised.” In other words, the quacks are not only producing an absolutely pure product, they are also giving their buyers more for their money than they have to.
• One of the fundamental problems of getting a substance like laetrile approved in this country has to do with the fact that “mainstream” researchers are still not attuned to drugs that make patients feel better, that ease their pains — even if they don’t dramatically or immediately shrink their tumors. But that may be changing, if only ever so slightly. A recent issue of The Cancer Letter reports on an interesting exchange that cropped up while an FDA advisory committee, chaired by oncologist Dr. Michael Shimkin, was considering the merits of a new drug for which Bristol Laboratories was seeking approval. The drug, Methyl-CCNU, had shown some anti-tumor activity, but one of the doctors who had tested it said that it had failed in another respect: it did not extend the survival rates of animals on which it had been tested.

Shimkin called the survival element’s introduction into the deliberations “a breath of fresh air” and asked the doctor from Mayo Clinic who had done much of the testing, “Okay, is there enough evidence presented to recommend its use as requested?”

“None whatsoever,” the doctor replied. “The prime interest of the American public in supporting cancer research is the lengthening of survival. The evidence is crystal clear; there is no increase in longevity with MeCCNU. There is toxicity, with carcinogenesis as a possibility. The fact that you may get 40 percent vs. 20 percent tumor shrinkage is not important.” Later he added: “Are we looking for something tangible? Are we meeting the expectation of the patient when he pays for a drug? His expectation is that he will live longer.”

“I can’t argue with you,” Shimkin replied. “You did the biggest study. But this does represent a change in our thinking.”

When the committee voted not to approve the drug for further testing, Shimkin commented: “This is music to my ears. I never thought that 21 percent vs. 17 percent tumor shrinkage was enough evidence to justify putting out another poison.”

NCI, however, which has been shepherding this new substance and others very similar to it, said it was not discouraged and would go on with its own studies of the drug, whether FDA approved it or not. An NCI spokesman, moreover, said he did not think “that the survival rate would become the dominant factor over tumor response in the development and approval of a new [cancer] drug,” Cancer Letter reported, adding: “The committee’s vote is an advisory one, and FDA is not required to follow the recommendation in deciding whether or not to approve” the drug for further testing.

There’s a lot to ponder in all this. Imagine: NCI is so locked into its present protocols, which demand tumor shrinkage and ignore the health and longevity of the patient, that they go blindly on insisting on the old way — and the patient be damned. Naturally, they hope and trust that life-extension will not become the prime requisite of new anti-cancer drugs. If it does, they are in big trouble, given the fact that almost all of the drugs they’ve pumped millions of our dollars into are the sort that shrink tumors. That’s all they’re designed for. They usually don’t make the patient live any longer; in fact they often make him/her sicker than he/she was before. And they may very well shorten life spans. Substances that make people with cancer live longer are hard to come by; substances that shrink tumors are relatively easy to find. It’s easy to understand why millions have been vested in the tumor-shrinking category. Not so easy to understand why, in the face of ever mounting evidence that these drugs do little if any good, NCI persists in putting all of their (actually our) eggs in this awful basket. These are vested interests with a vengeance and a killing interest-rate .

Rauscher Farewell

When Frank Rauscher left his job as head of NCI he had little to say about his pet viral theory of cancer — the one on which he has been lavishing so many of our tax dollars, despite the overwhelming evidence that cancer has no viral origin. Under Rauscher, environmental factors, noxious gases and other pollutants that scientists say contribute to the majority of cancers were largely ignored at NCI. Nutritional factors got a few monetary scraps, barely visible under a budgetary microscope. Like so many administrators who suddenly get honest in their final days in office (like sinners who declare their love for the Lord with their final breath), Rauscher’s final report at NCI contains this passage:

A strong case is being made at the present time to assign highest priority to research aimed at minimizing human exposure to environmental chemical carcinogens and to determine their relevance to human cancers. Clinical research to evaluate new therapeutic techniques is a continuing high-priority area. Research into the role of diet and nutrition in cancer is receiving renewed emphasis among scientists.

And not a word about those beloved old viruses. But the fact is: a strong case was made for substantially increasing NCI funding into nutritional and environmental factors contributing to cancer a long time ago — back when Frank Rauscher was saying he wasn’t going to give a penny of his virus money (which was the lion’s share of the total cancer budget) to any of those “off-the-wall” approaches to cancer control. Frank has gone on to his just desert: a job with the American Cancer Society.

Salk and Swine-Flu

Remember the swine flu fiasco. I could tell you I told you so — and I just have. There have been a lot of columns that have been awfully wise in hindsight on this issue lately. What amuses — and piques — me is that so many of these appear in the same papers and magazines that promoted the swine flu vaccine back when our health officials were telling us it was wonderful stuff, eventhough there was plenty of evidence to the contrary available, if only one dared stray a tad from government press releases to do a little honest reporting. The new head of HEW, one of Carter’s boys, has revived the junk but I doubt that there’s anybody dumb enough left to avail himself/herself of it. The swine flu vaccine is now widely regarded as a definitely undesirable substance, though those of us who called it that only a few short months ago (see DMR-3) were called “irresponsible.” We ought to learn something from all of this, though I doubt we will. One thing we might consider: our scientific “experts” often speak from arrogance rather than real knowledge. Recall, for example, the words of Dr. Jonas Salk, “father of the polio vaccine,” another substance that was never anything like it was cracked up to be:

I’m enthusiastic about the nationwide [swine-flu] vaccination program. It affords us the opportunity to close the immunity gap, which makes us vulnerable to an epidemic of flu due to a virus that has not been in circulation in the human population for about 50 years.…It is a kind of breakthrough of which advantage should be taken if ever influenza is to be brought under effective control.

The vaccine, he proclaimed, is “absolutely” safe. Now if somebody could just bring people like Salk under effective control and/or fill their various gaps we’d all be better off.

Give to the Let’s-Lobotomize-Dr. Freedman Fund

This item has nothing to do with cancer politics but it does have to do with medical and sexual politics and, anyway, I’m throwing it in for comic relief. My old granddaddy used to say that “many men of power and authority are thin as piss on a slate rock.” He was talking about real substance. And I’ve often been reminded of his comment in the course of these investigations. I was reminded of it again when I came across the following statement made by Dr. Walter Freedman, known among his admiring colleagues as “the Dean of Lobotomy”: “Women of all ages make up the great majority of cases and the successes of psychosurgery. From the available evidence, it would appear that it is difficult for a man to support a family after a lobotomy, but it is easy for a woman to do housework.” Contributions may be sent care of this station.

The AMA Did Something Right

That’s right. And while I’m off the subject I might as well tell you about it. The AMA recently passed a resolution calling upon advertisers to stop sponsoring shows with a penchant for purveying gratuitous violence. There’s already been talk of the AMA advocating “censorship,” but that’s nonsense. What the AMA did was utterly laudable, as far as I’m concerned — and I’m delighted to finally be able to say something nice about the AMA. I’d be even happier, of course, if it would suffer a massive collective coronary, but failing that I’ll take what I can get.

More Pie-in-the-Sky Over Texas

Readers of DMR-1 (Losing the War on Cancer) will recall the optimistic, but unfounded, claims of progress that launched our poorly conceived National Cancer Plan a few years ago. The Congress was sucked into giving hundreds of millions of our dollars to the Plan on the basis of misrepresented past “progress” and on the basis of promised future rapid progress. Just a billion dollars a year for ten years and we’ll cure 90 percent of all cancer, raved Dr. R. Lee Clark, president of the M.D. Anderson Hospital and Tumor Institute in Houston, back in the late 1960s. Fellow Texan Ralph Yarborough, then a U.S. Senator, took the bait and persuaded his colleagues that a post-Apollo “spectacular” against cancer was not only possible but probable given adequate funding. The rest is history. It’s now 1977, however, and the Cancer Plan has yet to yield any palpable progress.

Still, Texans are continuing to make big promises — and so are a lot of others. Just a couple months ago Dr. Emil Freireich, director of the department of developmental therapeutics at M.D. Anderson, predicted that within ten years (always the magical number) 90 percent of those regarded as terminal will be successfully treated, i.e., cured. And over at the Hahnemann Medical College in Philadelphia, Dr. Luther Brady, chairman of the department of radiation therapy and nuclear medicine, is allowing as how, in another ten years, natch, “cancer will be all but beaten.” Yes, folks, keep those cards and letters and greenbacks comin’. Not that I don’t think cancer couldn’t be beaten in another ten years. It’s just that I’m pretty sure it won’t be beaten in another fifty years so long as we continue to pump money into M.D. Anderson’s chemotherapeutic programs and into Dr. Brady’s antiquated radiation “therapies.”

Food for Naught

I’ve been gathering odd clippings, reports and confessions from here and there for a year now documenting the fact that many of our “leading nutrition experts” are academic prostitutes who have sold themselves to the giant food industry. These are the men and women who tell us that we don’t have to worry much about those silly old vitamins and minerals (“for heaven’s sake, you get those in your food, dummy”), about empty calories (“American’s are the best-fed people in the world, and if you don’t believe it, why don’t you ship out, commie?”), about food-additives and adulterations (“leave the technical details to us”) and so on. It would take me months to put all my material together, and I may eventually get around to doing just that. In the meantime, the November 1976 issue of The Progressive contains one of the best summaries of this sorry situation that I’ve seen so far.

The article is called “Professors on the Take” and is written by Benjamin Rosenthal (a U.S. Representative from New York) and Michael Jacobsen and Marcy Bohm of the Center for Science in the Public Interest in Washington D.C. If our diet is so good one wonders why all those high-powered academic types Rosenthal et al quote have to be so defensive. The answer is simple: our diet is rotten. The The Progressive authors cite evidence strongly suggesting that the high-fat, high-sugar, low-fiber content of the typical American’s food fare is directly related to a large number of diseases, including, of course, the Big C. They estimate that diet-related illness costs American consumers $30 billion annually. Not enough, alas, to outweigh the influence of the $200 billion food industry.

“At the most prominent universities, eminent nutritionists have traded their independence for the food industry’s favors.” Harvard University’s department of nutrition provides but one glaring example of this sell-out. As the authors of this article state, “one need go no further than the front door [of the Harvard nutrition department for the first indication — a wall plaque thanking General Foods for funding the research facilities” is attached thereto. A little digging beyond the front door reveals that the department is also funded by Amstar (sugar) Corporation, Beatrice Foods, Carnation Company, CocaCola, Continental Can Company, Gerber Products, International Sugar Research Foundation, Kellogg Company, Kraftco, Oscar Mayer & Co., Miles Laboratories, Monsanta, The Sugar Association and on ad nauseum. Harvard receives millions from these corporations.

And what is the effect of all of this? Well, among other things you’ve got Dr. Frederick Stare, longtime chairman of Harvard’s nutrition department, repeatedly telling us that what are widely regarded as “junk” foods are really quite wonderful. “Is there any reason for concern about food chemicals?” Fred chuckled recently, in his fatherly sort of way. “The answer is no.” On another occasion, he said, smiling sweetly: “Most people could healthily double their sugar intake daily.”

Then there’s Jean Mayer, until recently the best-known member of Harvard’s nutrition department. He also apologizes frequently for America’s lousy diet and declares various food additives, synthetics and the like completely harmless, while serving on the board of directors of Monsanto, Miles Laboratories (which make artificial food flavorings, preservatives, pesticides, synthetic “fruit bits,” artificial meats and the like) and so on. Both Mayer and Stare write nationally syndicated columns which proudly note their Harvard affiliations and scrupulously (or should I say inscrupulously) neglect to mention their corporate ties. Mayer, by the way, was recently appointed president of Tufts University, which was apparently looking to get its bread buttered, too.

Well. I wish Dante were alive today. I have a hunch he’d consign Stare, Mayer et al to the lowest level of his Inferno. As it is, I suppose the best we can hope for is that they take their own advice and eat all that garbage. The more of it they indulge in the sooner we’ll be shut of ‘em.

AND NOW!

The Latest American Cancer Society Science-Fiction Production:

“MAMMOGRAPHY, MON AMOUR”

Starring
Helene Brown (who once said: “In the cancer business, if you will, there are no absolutes.”)

Mammography, X-raying of the breasts to detect cancer, continues to be a hotly debated topic. I reported earlier that some experts believe that routine mammography, along the lines being promoted by the American Cancer Society, may actually cause more cancer than it prevents. The best experts now say that only those women over 50 should have regular mammographies. Younger women should not have them unless they show symptoms. Yet the ACS goes on insisting that even these younger women should have routine breast X-rays, and all the evidence of risk be damned. Dr. Arthur Holleb, ACS spokesman, says there “is no reason for women to be frightened about having breast X-rays” and he adds that he deplores the “near-panic” caused, he claims, by the warnings of experts who are more than a little uneasy about women being exposed to all that radiation. Dr. Holleb would hate to see those very costly 27 national breast cancer “detection centers” his organization has so heavily funded go unused.

Those who have warned about the dangers of mammography in women under 50 include Dr. John Bailar III, a respected cancer epidemiologist and editor of the National Cancer Institute Journal, Dr. Lester Breslow, dean of UCLA’s school of public health and others of equal standing. The only “big gun” backing the ACS position has been Frank Rauscher, and his support of the ACS began to loom large about the time he decided to take a job with the ACS for $75,000 a year, about twice his government salary.

But then when you’ve got Helene Brown, do you really need anybody else? Ms. Brown, who has been quoted in my earlier newsletters, you will recall, has served as chairman of the ACS in California and has been a national spokesperson for the Cancer Society for many years. In the course of discussing another matter with me, Ms. Brown abruptly unleashed the following heavy artillery on the opponents of mammography. It began like this:

“In the cancer business, if you will, there are no absolutes. We have an argument ongoing relative to mammography. Nobody could present both sides of that story and go ahead and let the public take their choice because neither side is an absolute. People of very great responsibility and integrity are trying to make a decision and when you take something like that to the public and you oversimplify it and make it seem so simple that all you have to do is say here’s what this side says, here’s what that fellow said, now you make up your mind.”

Not quite sure yet what I’ve been hit with, I stammer: but, hasn’t the ACS already made up its mind? As I hear it, the ACS is telling women, even those under 50: get out there and get your breasts X-rayed at regular intervals.

“The point is,” Ms. Brown barrels on, “that there is no right and wrong. I think we have to wait two or three generations probably to find out.”

But we’re not waiting, I observe. It soon becomes clear that what Ms. Brown means is that we wait two or three generations before we stop giving routine mammographies, if it turns out that they are harmful.

I describe this reasoning as “insane.”

“Maybe it is in your view,” she responds. “In my view it doesn’t have to be that way. We do the best we can with the knowledge we have today. Right now today I am taking penicillin. It may prove to be — and this, you know, is just an oddball kind of circumstance — but it may prove to be in thirty years that a whole generation of penicillin takers or whatever drug you might want to say comes up with some odd and unknown disease that’s related to penicillin. Today, though, the benefits far outweigh the liabilities of what we can see now.”

I try to point out that the analogy, if you can call it that, is indeed an “oddball” one and certainly doesn’t hold water. Very detailed testing is required before drugs are approved for clinical use.

Ms. Brown ignores the comment and says: “What they’re saying is in one group that radiation causes cancer. Now we know that this is a fact. We know this from Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Those were radiation doses that were simply immense. At the same time what one party is saying is that the risks we are giving to women by exposing them to radiation, taking mammograms in a linear development of the fact that radiation causes cancer like at Hiroshima, that therefore over the next 20 years we will be, it is possible that we will be causing a number of cancers. That’s all theory worked out on this linear route from the fact that massive radiation causes cancer. You can give an analogy by saying that if you or I were to take a hundred aspirin it would probably cause bleeding in our stomach. But if we take ten aspirin we probably wouldn’t bleed at all. You probably wouldn’t bleed one-tenth as much, probably wouldn’t bleed at all. That’s what the argument boils down to relative to mammography.”

Oh. Well, why didn’t somebody say so before? I see it all clearly now. All right, you women, get out there and get your X-rays.

Coming Next

In my next, and final, newsletter I will address myself to the neglected genius of Manfred von Ardenne, relate some of the innovative and very promising work of Virginia Livingstone and take one last, still-doleful look at the cancer statistics, those “awful numbers” that persist in saying that we are losing our War on Cancer.

Received in New York on February 25, 1977

David M. Rorvik, a freelance writer, is an Alicia Patterson Foundation award winner. He is studying the politics of cancer research in the United States and elsewhere. This article may be published with credit to Mr. Rorvik as a Fellow of the Alicia Patterson Foundation. The views expressed by the author in this newsletter are not necessarily the views of the Foundation.