Second Opinion: The Lie of Americas War on Cancer | SettingBrushFires
Summary
Transcript
Derived from apricot pits, has been banned in the United States since 1963. The Food and Drug Administration says it’s harmless, but also worthless in fighting cancer. Its benefits, if any, purely psychological. But in Mexico, it’s legal. Every one of us standing here has somebody that we love and care for. We’re not doing it for ourselves. We’re going through hell, smuggling it across borders, bootplagging it, doing things we’ve never done in our lives because we love someone so deeply that we want them to live.
There are many patients in this country for whom we know we have effective therapies, and they are abandoning these kind of therapies in pursuit of scientifically unproven methods. Everybody who’s looked at this problem is to a degree affected by the fact that it’s a political as well as a scientific issue. You can’t get away from that. When you go home to Canada, where leotril is not available, what will you do? I guess I’ll die.
I can’t get it. Would you be prepared to buy illegally obtained laotryl in order to have it? I’d steal it. Do you plan to take any leotril with you when you leave, even though it’s illegal? Yes. Dr. Robert Good, president of the Sloan Kettering Institute, one of the world’s biggest and richest cancer research centers, said layotrol does not prevent cancer, nor cure cancer, nor stop cancer from spreading.
My impression of leotroph was that this was sort of another example of the madness and delusion of crowds, you know, that under the pressure of this terrible disease, otherwise sensible people might become desperate and turn to something that was patently worthless or false and showed the gullibility of people in the face of disaster. In the year 1977, Newsweek estimated that 70,000 Americans went across the border to get leotrol in Mexico.
70,000. It was about a 10th of the cancer population at that time, and maybe a fifth of all the people with terminal cancer actually making the trek to the different Tijuana clinics to get laertral. And this came at a time when the official war on cancer really was in a tremendous amount of disarray. So it was almost like the public, whose hopes had been raised for a quick cure for cancer in time for the bicentennial, had given up hope on the established medicine and the established science and had shifted their allegiance, a good portion had shifted their allegiance to this unconventional treatment.
And there’s this age old war between quackery and conventionality, if you will, in medicine and more than any other time in history, the weight of public opinion seemed to have shifted over to this quackside, and you had something like 19 different states had enacted legislation to legalize layetrol. This was a big, tremendous change in the public’s attitude. I was born in Brooklyn, New York. Long story short, I wound up majoring in classics and went to Stanford University on a national Defense Education act fellowship.
So I spent three years plus at Stanford in the late sixty s and then taught classics for a while. Went back to New York in the early seventy s, more or less to be nearer to my family and my wife’s family. She and I have been together since we were in high school. I was new in the school, Abraham Lincoln High School in Brighton. It was between Brighton and Coney island on Ocean Parkway.
And I was going up the downstairs and he was coming down the downstairs. So he stopped and said, I don’t know you. I said, well, I’m new. My name is Martha Bunum. And I said, maybe someday it’ll be moss. Just like that. That made an impression on me, obviously, and we’ve been married now almost 50 years. Being aware of current events was very important to my parents. We would sit around and watch the news every night.
And of course, during the early seventy s, the Vietnam War was still going on. And every night it seemed as though there was a deep frustration with what I’m sure many people experienced as a sort of a sense of powerlessness, an inability to be able to affect a change. So I wound up hearing about a job that was opening up at Memorial Sloan Kettering. I was working at Hunter College on 60 Eigth street in Manhattan and memorials on the same street.
And so it was just kind of a stray thought that I should go and apply for this job. It was in public relations, public affairs, and the job title was science writer. Now, I didn’t have any qualifications or training in science writing, but my basic appeal to them was that I was a reasonably bright and well educated guy. I had no background in science, much less in cancer.
But I thought that I could see things the way that the average layperson would see things and ask the questions about their research, that any outside person, including, let’s say, potential donors, would ask one interview after another after another, writing endless samples of his work. And finally he got the job. I started work on June 3, 1974, and it was a tremendously exciting time. This was, in some ways, the best job that I ever had, certainly had ever had up to that point.
And in a sense, that I ever had, because it was an opportunity for me to, quote unquote, go back to school and learn this whole amazing world of biology and medical science that I had only very peripheral involvement with up until that point. I remember the day my father was hired at Sloan Kettering. It was very exciting that he got this job to fight a war that we all could get behind, the war on cancer.
That was a war that really felt like it was going to unite us all. And my father could put his passion for a social justice cause and his love for science and put that into something so important at that time. It was a very unusual moment, really, because with the launching of the war on cancer Memorial, Sloan Kettering had taken a very kind of radical turn. They had appointed a man by the name of Robert A.
Good, Bob Good, to be the president of Sloan Kettering Institute. And he then had appointed a man by the name of Lloyd J. Old to be the vice president of the institute. And there was another vice president, Chester stock. The president of the Overarching corporation was Louis Thomas. Dr. Goode, who was president of the institute. And I actually were discussing writing a book together. So we had dinner together.
We went out socially. Here I was, a 31 at the bottom of, really, of the totem pole, and I was befriended by and friendly with the top person in the institute. Very heady stuff for a young science writer. Bob Good was the most, I think, to this day, the most published biologist in the world ever, I think, 1200 papers. Around the time that I was hired, he had this terrible thing happen.
One of his young associates, William Summerlin, had claimed that he could transplant tissue, skin from one unrelated mouse to another unrelated mouse. And he proved this by allegedly taking skin from a black mouse, soaking it in some special solution, transplanting it onto a white mouse, and making it stick. And they demonstrated these mice all over the world. A lab, a technician at Sloan Kettering, noticed as they were going up to make one of these presentations, he was carrying the cages with the mice, and he hmm, those transplants look like they’re in a slightly different place than they had been yesterday.
And he went back to the lab, he took some alcohol, rubbed on the transplants, and off they came. There was the white mouse underneath. A renowned research hospital, the memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer center in New York said today one of its scientists has admitted he put out phony research results. He’s Dr. William Summerlin, 35, an expert in immunology. A review committee said Summerlin painted dark patches on the skin of two white mice, so it appeared he had successfully transplanted skin between animals genetically incompatible.
And this Summerlin had had the audacity to actually paint these black splotches onto these white mice with a magic marker. I mean, talk about nerve. And here, good had co authored these papers. Good had promoted him, literally promoted him to be a full member of the institute, which is like, full professor. And the whole thing blew up in his face. I mean, of all ironies, of ironies. I walked in on this very flawed, very cris ridden institution.
The day that I found out I was going to get the job, I was riding home. I lived in Brooklyn, and I was riding home on the subway, and I glanced over the shoulder of one of the other strap hangers on the subway, and I see mouse scandal rocks sloan Kettering. And I thought, oh, no, my luck. I just hired on as the third mate on the Titanic.
That’s how things started for me and kind of went downhill from there. On the very first day of my job in public affairs, I was handed a big portfolio of letters from the public. This was part of the sort of the unwanted part of the job that nobody else wanted to do. And there were all kinds of strange letters from the public. Like one, I remember one woman who insisted that the cure for cancer was water that had drained or run underneath pine trees in Maine.
And if you recovered that water, that would cure cancer. And there were many other folk remedies and so forth that people were proposing to us as part of their contribution to the war on cancer. But at least half of the letters had to do with a substance called layatrol or amygdalin. And they were often in the form of complaints why we weren’t examining this or what do you think of this? Or sometimes, why are you covering this up? And of course, this wasn’t the part of the job that I was most looking forward to, but it was part of my responsibility to answer these letters.
Latril is labeled mandela latril, beta glucoside. And the enzyme that breaks this up is the beta glucosidase. And then hydrocyanic acid is liberated, and it comes down here and hits the tumor and kills the tumor, because there’s plenty of beta glucose in the tumor, put there by nature. Then that’s the end of the tumor. Then the cyanide sugar molecule releases cyanide gas. Since cyanide is a deadly poison, why doesn’t the cyanide kill the patient? If any of the cyanide gets out in normal tissues, well, then you have the enzyme rodinase, which changes the cyanide into thiocyanate and is excreted into the urine, and therefore there’s no toxicity from the trial treatment.
We had a form letter that had been drawn up before I got there about leotrol, and it was fairly neutral. And it just basically said, we’re investigating this, and when we have results, we’ll announce them to the public. There was nothing particularly negative or positive in the letter, and I would send that out to the person who was communicating with us and be done with it. I went up to the Walker laboratory in Rye, New York, which was then a division of Sloan Kettering.
I went up for a different purpose, to interview a different scientist. But I had lunch with Dr. Chester Stock, who was the vice president of Sloan Kettering, in charge of the Walker lab, and Dr. Kanumatsu Seguyura, who was this 80 something scientist at Sloan Kettering, and was kind of an oddity in the sense that he was, I think, the oldest working scientist in the institute, maybe second oldest person in the entire center out of 4600 employees.
And so we had a nice lunch, and Dr. Stock, on the way back to New York City, agreed with me, or maybe suggested to me that I should write a little biographical article about Dr. Segura and his distinguished 60 year career in cancer research. I like that idea. I kind of liked Dr. Seguri. He was sort of a grandfatherly figure. And so I made the appointment and I went back to interview him.
And then in the course of that interview, towards the end, I asked him what he was currently investigating, because I knew he was there the whole day. I mean, he came early in the morning and stayed the whole day to do research. And he said, with his thick japanese accent, I’m studying amygdalin. And it took me a minute to sort of decipher that. Amygdalin, that was the same substance as the latral, the quack remedy that I was writing to people about back in my office.
And I said to him, well, what is there to investigate if it doesn’t work? This is my firm conviction. And he got up and he took down, he had a uniform series of lab books, and he opened it up, and he showed me that when he gave the laotrol or amygdalin, that the tumors would stop growing for a number of weeks. After a while, they’d start growing again.
So I was being very young and inexperienced. I was quite amazed at this. And he said, but that’s really not the important thing. The important thing is this. And he showed me the lab books. And you could see clearly that in about 80% to 90% of the animals that only got saline solution, salt water solution, which is an inert substance, that there was metastases or secondary growths in the lungs of these animals.
And in the latral treated animals, only between ten and 20% had metastases. And Segurian, his very characteristic low key way, said, well, it would be very interesting if it prevented it completely. He was a little disappointed that he hadn’t completely prevented the occurrence of lung metastases. He said, but laotrol, it’s not a cure for cancer. It is a good palliative drug based upon, of course, only on his laboratory experiments.
He didn’t know about, to my knowledge, didn’t know about or care about what was going on in Mexico. Was very vaguely aware of anything outside the lab. I would say it was hard to disbelieve him in any sense because he had no axe to grind. He would sometimes tell me for hours what his day was like on and on, describing his impressions of Kanematsu, Sugura. And Sugyura had told him that leotrol worked, that it stopped metastases in 80% of the mice, and it should be tested further to see if this is a useful drug for human all, you know.
So I came away quite astonished, really. Went running back to my office and told my boss, Jerry Delaney, about this. And Jerry, who probably knew more about this situation than I realized, told me something very unusual at that point. I mean, very strange in a way. He said, I want you to befriend Dr. Segura and be aware of exactly what’s happening with his work because I need to know as head of public affairs, public relations, what is going on up there, because this thing could blow up and blindside us.
And it was a fairly reasonable request, I think, for a PR director. And I had sort of an entree now with Dr. Segura. So I don’t want to say I was a spy, but it was a sincere interest on my part. It also was sanctioned by my boss to do this. So over the next few years, really, I became close to Dr. Segura. One took place in 74 and the other took place in 75.
Sloan Kettering, especially in the first meeting, pleaded with the assembled powers that be in the medical field. That’s to say, the FDA, the National Cancer Institute, the NIH and the American Cancer Society. So they pleaded with them to allow them to do human clinical trials. They presented, in a very fair way the layer tril data that had been accumulated to that point. July 2, 1974, you had the top leaders of memorial slunkettering go down from New York down to Washington for this meeting.
And then you had, from the NCI, you had four of the top figures. And from FDA, you had about a dozen people. It’s unprecedented, unheard of. So here you had Lewis Thomas, never really friendly towards leotrol. Never said a good word, really, but he was there. Bob Good, who vacillated. Chester stock, who I think believed in Segura’s results, and Lloyd old, who really was the driving force and who co chaired the meeting.
One funny statement is Dr. Old has written to several world users of leotrope. He found two groups. One, those who used it and found it of value, and two, those who had not used it and did not believe in it. He feels that amygdalin is as nontoxic as glucose. And then he summarized Segura’s results. Bone Kettering tested tumor bearing animals. 100 treated with amygdalin. 25 showed lung metastases.
100 not treated with amygdalin, 75 showed lung metastasis. You flip the numbers by using the amygdalin stone. Kettering group believes their results show that amygdalin used in animals with tumors shows a decrease in lung metastases, slower tumor growth, and pain relief. And Dr. Stock thinks studies on amygdalin should be made, particularly regarding pain relief and reduction of lung metastases. That’s the message that Louis Thomas, Bob Good, Lloyd old, and Chester stock went to Washington to deliver to the FDA.
Here’s a letter from the office of the president and director of Sloan Kettering Institute, dated January 24, 1975, to Dr. Mario Soto. De Leone later has something. It’s not the magic bullet, but it has helped a lot of patients that were already sent home to die. And it’s from Lloyd old, vice president and associate director of Sloan Kettering. It says, dear Dr. Soto, it was indeed a pleasure to have you and Dr.
Sanon visit our institute and share with us your clinical experience with amygdalin in cancer patients. I was pleased to hear from Dr. Sanon that our proposed collaborative control trials have the approval of your hospital. We are looking forward to a fruitful exchange of information. My best wishes. Sincerely yours, Lloyd J. Old. So this shows you, I mean, beyond a shadow of a doubt that the Sloan Kettering leadership was actually trying to set up its own clinical trial in Mexico.
They’re excited about it. The results are coming out positive. They like some aspects of the theory behind it. They think they might be able to produce drugs along the lines of cyanide release that are even better than laetrol. And the bottom line was, we think that we should do clinical trials the next year. They went back to the second meeting, March 4, 1975. Now, this is at the NCI.
This was a higher level meeting. We’ve got Frank Rousher, who is the director of NCI, and a lot of other very, very famous figures from the NCI in those days. This is a who’s who of the NCI. And from Memorial Stone Kettering, we’ve got old Thomas stock. And then right below, Dan Martin from Catholic Medical center and people from the american cancer site. Now, what had happened is that Dan Martin, Daniel S.
Martin from the Catholic Medical center in Queens, had joined the discussion, and he had been the person who created, I guess you’d say, the CD eight f one mouse, which was the main animal model that Segura had used. And he had become an adamant opponent of leotroph because of his belligerent personality. Dr. Dan Martin’s career was at a dead end. He had lost a big lawsuit against his own institution and had been relegated to an abandoned and graffiti covered hulk of a building in Queens.
The National Cancer Institute had abruptly turned down all of his grant requests. He had no customers for his CD eight f one mice. Then, in mid 1975, NCI suddenly gave him a million dollars, 4 million today, to breed mice, quote, to see whether Segura’s initial findings at Sloan Kettering might not have been right. So Martin exploded from his utter isolation in an obscure corner onto the national limelight as a supposed expert on leiatril, touring the country, speechifying, writing op eds, shouting that latril was worthless and dangerous.
I think it is more than coincidental that Martin launched this hate campaign at the very moment that NCI gave him a grant of $1 million. To take a position against quackery, I think, is very self justifying on the part of some people within the medical community. It makes them feel better about themselves and about their profession. And it’s also a quick road to success, because everybody in the establishment likes the knight on the white horse who’s going to come and save the world from the danger of quackery.
So it was seen as, within their circles, as a popular thing to do. Suddenly, the statements that they were making, each of the top leaders, not old but good Thomas and stock, became increasingly negative. They ranged from misrepresentations to what I would say were egregious lies. And it built over time, in the beginning of 75. And it built and built. Each one seemed to get emboldened by the other one to make a more definitively antilayatal statement, which was od, because nothing was happening at that point scientifically to trigger those comments.
Very distressing. Very distressing. It culminated with a statement that Chester stock gave to David Leff of Medical World News in 75 saying, we have found layatril negative in all the animal systems that we have tested. So I think it was that point at which it crystallized in my mind that this was a cover up to say, we have not a scintilla of evidence or not a shred of evidence showing that Leotro is any effective in any animal system, period, which is the kind of thing that statement they were making.
That’s a lie, quite pure and simple, a lie. I had sort of set myself a goal of talking about leotrol to all the top administrators in the center. This was part of my. Sort of my checklist. And my message essentially was, we’ve got to publish Segura’s results with leotrol. And old’s response was different than any of the other leaders at the center. He did something and said something that I will never forget.
He got up from his chair. When I said all these things, he got up from his chair and he said to me, he said, do you want to know where we get all of our new ideas? Well, now you have to understand. Here’s the vice president of Sloan Kettering Institute talking to a fledgling science writer. I said, well, of know. And he kind of tiptoed behind me, behind the couch and went over to his bookshelf and took down a book and came back and he said, here, this is the Bible.
I took a look at this. It was the American Cancer Society’s book, Unproven Methods of cancer management. I had this book. It was the quack list. We were supposed to refer to this book so we’d know what was quackery and what was authentic science. I mean, this was the know, really, scientifically speaking, the most mind blowing moment of my life, because here’s the vice president of soul Kettering telling me that the basic source for new ideas within orthodox science came from what is regarded generally as quackery.
I mean, it was hard to comprehend. And I’ve told this story to people sometimes, and they think I’m exaggerating or maybe making this up. But no, I wasn’t. As I said, I had a little checklist of who to talk to about this. Sort of the. Let my people go moment. And I went to good, and I got nothing but bs from him. In other words, just the party line.
He wasn’t going to open up to me, much less say, we get all our new ideas from the quack list. We were worlds away from that. Good was a politician. He was always known as a politician. We called him a political scientist. All he said to me was, I’m just like you. I said, really? He said, yes, you can be fired, and I can be fired, too. And with stock.
I mean, I confronted stock and absolutely put it in his face that what he was saying wasn’t true. And he basically, I mean, his initial and I think most telling response was, just, go ahead and say it anyway. That’s when I lost all respect for him because I saw that he was playing the game. Whatever the pressure was, he was going to play the game. And I don’t think he had very many personal regrets.
And Thomas wouldn’t talk to me. Thomas wouldn’t talk to me. Very difficult. And night after night, he would come home and we were very upset because he was upset. There was a lot of anxiety over whether or not to act on his conscience and put the ability to provide for his family at risk, or whether to just keep his mouth shut and go along and maintain the status quo and do what they wanted him to do, which was essentially to lie.
I was really scared. I mean, I was scared in a lot of levels, younger than them, totally nowhere near them in terms of knowledge, trying, arguing the case for testing the most quackish of all the quack remedies, telling them essentially that they were doing something wrong. I mean, it was a textbook case of what not to do if you intend to pursue a career at an institution like that.
Here everything was going great for me. Said, you’re not the man that they want there. If they want somebody who’s going to lie, that’s not you. You’re not the one who’s going to be doing that. What do you do? You’ve got the best job you’ve ever had or may ever have in your life, and your boss is telling you to lie. So I didn’t know how to respond to this.
It really was a classic case of where your conscience is strained. And my response was to leak the documents. I wanted to have my cake and to eat it as well. I wanted my job, and I also wanted to have a clear conscience. So I guess this is why people leak documents all the time. This took a lot of doing to convince Segura to give me the actual photocopies of his lab notes.
I mean, that was really sticking my neck out, because what if they asked him? And on my birthday in 75, he gave them to me. He gave me all his internal memos and his lab notes March 1, 174 table two shows that repeated injections of 1000 milligrams per kilogram per day of amygdalin for two to 15 weeks failed to destroy the spontaneous cancer in mice. However, it caused an inhibition in about 50% of the tumors.
It also shows amygdalin or latril had a strong inhibitory effect on the development of new tumors and on lung metastases 11% in the laotrol treated animals against 89% in the control animals in mice. The general health and appearance of the amygdalin treated animals with tumors was much better than that of the controls. Panamatsu cigarea March 1, 1974 May 31, 1974 which incidentally was three days before I actually started my work at stone Kettering, Segura wrote the table results show repeated injections of 2000 milligrams per kilogram per day of amygdalin for four to nine weeks had a strong inhibitory effect on the development of lung metastases.
The detailed data it’s overwhelming and even the size of the lung metastases that were seen is noted for each animal. Every animal in every one of Segura’s experiments is accounted for. How many injections, what the duration of the experiment was, the growth of the tumor, the final size of the tumor, the number of lung metastases, and the termination of the experiment. One of the most interesting things they did and very clever thing was to try to see if they could prevent cancer with laotrol.
The present study shows that for the first three quarters of their lifespan, 21 months, the daily prolonged injections of amygdalin did not prevent the development of mammary cancer in mice completely. However, it had a definite reduction in development of mammary tumors. 70% in the controls against 48% in the amygdalin treated mice also shows amygdalin had a strong inhibitory effect on the development of lung metastases in mice 75% inhibition against 22% in controls.
And again, tremendous detail. Here’s his report on a different system. The swiss albino mice spontaneous tumors in retired breeder mice amygdalin had a strong inhibitory effect on the development of lung metastases in mice 77% inhibition against 7% inhibition in controls 77 versus seven. The general health and appearance of the amygdalantreated animals were much better than that of the controls. Results obtained with mammary tumors occurring in swiss albinomyce are essentially the same as those obtained with mammary tumors occurring in CD eight f one mice cyan Kanamatsu Sigiora February 8, 1975.
And again, every mouse detailed notes. The first person that I took this to was Jane Brody at the New York Times, who was the health editor. And then I waited and waited, and she finally came down and interviewed everybody, the people she wanted to see. She gave them a checklist. I was in my boss’s office when he was talking to her about it, so I heard secondhand, as it were.
She didn’t ask to speak to Segura, so I felt terribly disappointed. And she wrote a very negative story. I couldn’t believe that positive data that I had presented her with had turned into kind of a typical antilayatral story on the front page of the times. It was a devastating blow because I think also I realized I can’t so easily convince the mainstream about this. So now I had my one route, the media route was more or less cut off from me, at least momentarily.
Then I decided in the middle of the summer of 75, I had to sort of go whole hog. And I packaged up a copy and sent it off to the Committee for Freedom of Choice in Medicine, which was the main pro leotral lobbying group that did sort of propaganda for freedom of choice, which was the rubric under which leotrill was being promoted. Cancer patient Steve Gadler, claiming he was cured by leotrill, said the issue boils down to freedom of choice, his right to use the processed extract of apricot pits over conventional therapies.
I plead with the FDA, give us the freedom to choose our own therapy. Why should I, an american citizen, have to go in the black market or smuggle something that I should have the freedom to choose? And the Committee for Freedom of choice, of course, ran with it. This was their dream come true, and they republished the data. The lateral movement was really, in some senses, an offshoot of the John Burke Society.
And this is like an extreme right wing group to the right of what we would now call the Tea Party. I mean, get the US out of the UN and all kinds of conspiracy. Eisenhower is a communist and all this kind of extreme, extreme right wing stuff. And I didn’t want to have anything to do with that. And I was looking for sort of to counteract or counterbalance that, because everything that was coming out about leotril was sort of tainted by its association with the Birch society.
Most of the people you read about in the leotral movement were either in the Birch society or affiliated with it or sympathetic to it. I wasn’t. And coming from out of the war movement, and even going back before that, I mean, my orientation was more left of center. And so there was this group called Science for the people. I had no particular interest in science for the people, but it seemed like a kind of an organizational format that I could use to maybe sort of interest the left in this.
This is a group that was active in the early to mid 70s, which was sort of a leftist, progressive organization that was involved in a lot of scientific issues. And I realized I found out that Ralph was doing something or other on cancer treatment and controversies involving cancer. And I figured, well, let me start working with Ralph and see if we have anything in common. I started to get into it more and more, and I realized that a lot of the work he was doing wasn’t just on controversies of cancer research, but also the interplay between big business and big cancer, essentially.
And the pharmaceutical industry, the corporate industry, the scientific controversies, all sort of overlapped. In fact, they still overlap. Anybody who sees some of the things going on today realize that these issues in one way or another, are still with us. And he became sort of convinced by my arguments about leotrill, although the majority was very skeptical. And I think if mean the double whammy was quack cancer remedy and John Burch society.
It seemed the like the perfect poison, the last thing in the world that a group like that would ever be sympathetic to or interested in. It was becoming very difficult. And then I said, look, we have to do know. Maybe you’re not ready to go out, know, foment a riot in the streets over this, but we have to do something. And because the people within the New York chapter of Science, or the people wouldn’t go any further with this, we broke away that committee and formed our own organization called second Opinion.
Of course, a second opinion is when you get a first opinion, such as that a person has cancer, and you want to find out if another expert would have a different take on that. We called our newsletter second opinion, because we felt that people were getting the first opinion from Memorial Sloan Kettering. But we had another diagnosis of the problem, as it were. We had another take on what really was going on.
The second opinion was largely anonymous. It was really written by and put out by, laid out by Sloan Kettering employees. A lot of them were people with grievances of various kinds about their treatment on the job. And so forth. So it became kind of an anonymous way for people to voice or air their discontents. In a large center, 4600 employees, there’s always going to be things happening that people are not happy with, especially the testing of latrol at Sloan Kettering.
So we started working, and we had a small group, and it turned out that, just out of coincidence, I was the only one who had no connection to Sloan Kettering. Everybody else was either at Sloan Kettering or could be identified. This was not an academic institution, so you had no protection of your freedom of speech. You would have been fired if you had associated yourself publicly. But I had no connection whatsoever.
I was at City University of New York at the. So, in fact, I became sort of the spokesperson for the group, the outside agitator, who was coming in and being the face of the group, because no one else could at the time, even though they were doing all the work. Ralph had all the inside information. And as we recruited more people, and we recruited them from inside Sloan Kettering and affiliated institutions, and it was all, like, literally cut and pasted.
My wife had some background in graphics, so she cut and pasted the issue together, and we had it mimeographed and stapled, and we handed it out at memorial. And there was a lot of interest in this. And so as people came into the organization, then they brought their own concerns, and some of those concerns were labor concerns. We became like the outlet, the clearinghouse for a lot of grievances within the institution, a firing that some people thought was racist in nature.
At least the person who got fired did. We had some patient complaints. We had complaints coming from the department of nursing about the chairman of nursing and a group. And more and more people came in to the group. So at one point, we had about 20 people, I think, in and had meetings and so forth. I kind of then wrote these articles about leotrol. So second opinion for a few years became enormously popular, to the point where we were printing 5000 copies of each issue, and we distributed them.
Within hours. There were only 4600 employees at the center. We would just stand there and we didn’t have to hawk it. We didn’t have to hand it to people. They came racing over to us on their way into work. People would take it. The workers would always take it. The nurses would usually take it. The low level administrators didn’t want to be seen touching it. But the high level administrators, they all wanted to see every single thing that was in it.
And Ralph used to describe how when it came out, every high level administrator was sitting at his desk, and nothing would get done in the hospital until they would read through every single line of the paper to see what scandal was going to come out, what controversy was going to come out, whose names were going to be named and what they had to do about it. And they, of course, provoked an uproar immediately.
Do you know anything? Everybody was asked, do you know anything about this? No. This was so 60 ish. And here we were now in 1975, 76. But the 60s kind of lingered. This was the era. Nixon had just been kicked out of office. And at the moment, it seemed like the right thing and the right way to do things. In the pre Internet era, we were trying to give the average person, or the person without specialized medical training, some insight into what was going on within one institution where evidence was accumulating of the effectiveness of a treatment.
But the top administration felt that it was perfectly okay to give people any bs that they wanted, because nobody would ever have a way of knowing that what they said wasn’t true. And they didn’t count on the fact that there were a few people inside who were not going to stand for that. And I think that sort of upset their plans. It started out just with segura running the experiment and coming up with, you know, very positive results.
Every experiment that was done that came out positive had to be redone and retested and rechecked, because every time it was something positive that couldn’t be accepted. I mean, that’s science. I don’t think so. It was a predetermined conclusion. Then they held their famous June 15, 1977, press conference at memorial. About 100 reporters and all the major media were there. The press conference was one of the strangest events I’ve ever been in in my life.
I helped to organize it. I wrote the press release for it. Laboratory mice at the Sloan Kettering Institute, one of the world’s biggest and richest cancer research centers, have been tested with leotrill for four years. Today, Sloan Kettering announced the result. There they all were, all the top people. Chester stock. Our summary statement is we do not have evidence supporting taking amygdalin to clinical trial. Bob Good. We tried to find out from scientific information available whether there was any real scientific evidence that the drug amygdalin or the so called latril had any effect on cancer in any form, and there was no such scientific evidence.
And Louis Thomas, there is no evidence in the several animal models that have been studied that leoprolo or amygdalin possesses any biological activity. With respect to cancer, one way or the other, Lloyd ran away. I mean, at the time, I wasn’t thrilled with that. The day of the fateful press conference in 1977, they announced that Lloyd was in Tahiti or someplace. Siguru was there, and it was quite a high point, really, an incredible tension.
Word had leaked out that Sloan Kettering had some positive results. So this was the final nail in the coffin of Laotro. Do you agree with the conclusion? What conclusion? The conclusion that does not either cure or prevent cancer. I agree. Of course, my results don’t agree, but I agree what our institute said. I don’t know why, but I think, good. Did you stick by your results? Yes, I stick.
I hope somebody able to confirm my result later on. It was just this electrifying moment you can’t even imagine. Maybe this was just my emotion. I felt such a surge of admiration for him, and it was such a poignant moment. Man was about, I don’t know, 87 or 89 years old, and here his whole career was on the line, and he was magnificent. And he didn’t care. I mean, he was not a proponent of Leiatra.
He didn’t care one way or the other. As far as that goes. Has any of you, any other of your results ever been disputed before in 40 years that you’ve been here? I’m here almost 60 years. Nobody dispute my work. Every paper I send to the publication always accepted, why not this? Why not this one, then? Why not these results? No. This result also accepted by the publication.
Journal of Surgical Oncology, Sloan Kettering did something incredibly clever in this. They took his data and they embedded it into the negative paper. It’s diabolical, because this is how they got him to put his name on the paper. In other words, they said, look, we’re going to have an overall negative conclusion on this, but to represent your position and your point of view, we’ll put your data into the paper, and then the world can always see that you had gotten these results.
We don’t agree with them, but at least they’re there. And this was the compromise, in a way, that he made in order, because he told me, I mean, he felt like it was more important that somewhere, someday, somebody could unearth this study and reconstruct it. From the paper that was eventually published in the Journal of Surgical Oncology, the scientific papers defining the. That are to be published defining this work are available to you.
I understand. And it is our interpretation from all of the evidence taken together, that there is no substantial evidence of effectiveness of amygdalin or late trill in any form of experimental cancer study. These were sent to the Journal of Surgical Oncology and have been accepted for publication probably at the beginning of 1978. That’s one reason we’re having the press conference today, to let you know the results in advance.
There was the paper, and then there was the sort of executive summary of the paper with all the negative conclusions. The COVID document and the COVID up document. I wrote that. Yeah, I got to write the fake summary of the data for Sloan Kettering. And then we had the paper, the one that Segura counted on everybody reading in order to extract the positive data. Jerry Delaney told me, take all those papers and put them behind the curtain in the other room and don’t tell anybody they’re there.
And so when you walked in, you got the summary, the ginned up summary of the supposedly negative results on the table, the two or three page summary, and the extensive paper preprint of the article from Journal of surgical oncology hidden behind a curtain in the adjoining room. Only give it to people who specifically ask for it. It was interesting. I don’t imagine our scientific publication will have any impact on the public.
Why will it not have any impact on the public? I don’t think they pay too much attention to scientific publications. It’s interesting. I was still learning about the field of scientific journalism and journalism in general. Everybody, more or less 99 out of 100, were willing to take Sonkhedrin’s word for it. If you said that the moon is green, then they would accept that the moon is green. They said so.
And they’re the experts. They should know. And as I say, Dr. Segura first obtained an experiment started September of 1972. The result that caused us to do all the further experimentation. And in that experiment, he essentially found that the treated animals showed about 20% with lung metastases, and the control showed about 80% of the animals with lung metastases. This was followed up by five additional therapy experiments in which he obtained practically identical results as far as the lung metastases are concerned.
Normal scientific caution. At that point, we were quite interested in what he had found. Normal scientific caution would suggest that we get that confirmed, which we attempted to do. And I think our normal scientific caution was reinforced by all the controversy surrounding the material. We then asked Dr. Martin, who had been providing all these CD eight f one mice, to try to confirm the results. The first experiment actually was a cooperative experiment in which we were trying a special study.
And then Dan Martin, who was the person who kind of invented the CD eight f. One mouse got involved in the scene and they started to do some experiments. But in the classic situation that I was mostly involved with, in sense of being Segura’s confidant on this situation was where Martin held the key as to which were the treated and the untreated animals. Segura, who was the blinded person in this airmen, he’s the one who didn’t know which were the treated and which were the untreated.
He said, I know which are the treated animals because the latril animals had nice glossy coats. They looked good, they were healthy, and the other mice were dropping dead. I said, Dr. Segura, please don’t tell anybody this. Don’t tell them this. Oh, no. But I will tell them because it’s the truth and I know which are the treated animals and I’m going to tell Dr. Stock. And I said, please, Dr.
Segura, this is not wise. It’s not. You shouldn’t do this because I saw the writing on the wall. How did the mice appear to look better at? The benzemic mice appeared sick and very weak. But after injection of amygdarin in the afternoon become active. And the minute that he told them, these are the treated animals, they declared the test invalid. They declared the blindness aspect was gone. I love that phrase.
So then the solution to that was mix them up. And then, of course, he saw that tumors were stopped growing in the saline treated animals. So there was something really screwy because it looked like somehow the control animals were receiving layatrol. One thing, what Alex mentioned here in the last experiment, which we did on October 1976, called brand test, funny thing happened that when inject amygdaline into the animal, small tumor stopped grow for one week or five weeks.
Last experiment, what happened is in the control group had 42% tumor stop the growth for one week to five weeks, while experimental, only 27%. Now, we people in chemotherapy, we use serum solution for control of the other drugs because serum had no inhibitory effect on tumors. Now, this thing happened. So that’s something very peculiar. If the facts are mutable based upon the needs of the moment, then science is dead.
You might as well pack up and give it up because there’s not really going to be any honest reporting of what experimentation shows. So he was fighting for, I think, a bigger thing, which is something he had given his whole life for, which is that by doing experiments and then reporting them accurately and honestly, you advance human knowledge and therefore you advance the welfare of society. Doctor, are you then not convinced that your findings may very well be confirmed at some future date? Yes, I’m hoping that somebody able to confirm my result.
The reason that they rushed to have a press conference in June was because Senator Kennedy was going to hold his hearings on the banning of Leiatro in July of 77, and Louis Thomas was scheduled to testify. And so they needed to come up with a countervailing paper that would summarize and refute Segura’s positive data. They were terrified of the pro layeral people coming into that meeting waving the anatomy of a cover up with all the raw data from Sloan Kettering showing the stoppage of metastases and the stoppage of smaller tumors.
Because, of course, that would have left Thomas in an untenable position. Essentially, Thomas would have at that point, had to admit that indeed, Sloan Kettering had had four years of positive testing with leotrol. The final conclusion on part of the people in charge of these studies, and certainly it was my final conclusion on reviewing the data when it was pulled together for publication, was that lateral is without any effect at all.
It seemed almost diabolical, because we couldn’t believe that people would actually do this and lie about a promising treatment for cancer. I had been the principal author of the second opinion, a special report at Lechon Sloan Kettering. I had spent the summer of 77 mostly researching this paper, and I had found a number of very significant inaccuracies. And we sort of bundled this up with a cover letter and sent it off to a bunch of media and to all the trustees of the institution and to a lot of interested parties in the cancer field.
And we basically know. Here is a critique of Sloan Kettering’s two papers on Leia Troll. Then we decided to hold a press conference of our own at the New York Hilton. Alec was going to speak, and then I was in the office under my Sloan Kettering hat, as it were, when the calls started coming in from reporters to ask for a comment or clarification on what the second opinion report was.
Is there any validity to it at all? And so forth. And Jerry would, you know, there’s no names of anybody employed at Sloan Kettering on this. They claim to be a group that represents Sloan Kettering employees, but the only name we see is Alec Prashniki. And we’ve checked the records, and Alec Prashnicki doesn’t work here. We have no idea who he is. We have no reason to believe that anybody inside Sloankettering has anything to do with this report.
Somebody had to get up from Sloankettering to own the report, or else this would have had no impact at all. So I was still debating this point. And into the early evening, my son Ben, who was ten years old, said to me, I said, dad, you can’t work for them and against them forever. It’s just impossible. And I was, like, sort of devastated by this wisdom coming out of the mouth of a ten year old.
Jerry, my boss, had told me to go to the press conference undercover for the public affairs department at Sloan Kettering. And spy on the conference to see who was going to show up. In the meanwhile, I felt duty bound to call him. And I called him, and I said to him, jerry, I can’t go to the press conference for Sloan Kettering tomorrow. Because I’m going to the press conference, and I’m speaking at the press conference.
And there was this dead silence. And for about 30 seconds. And then he said, I’ll get back to you. So we hung off, and now the die was cast. Okay, we decided, that’s it. Press conference is going to be out there. You’re going to tell the truth, get the reporters to come, get the papers to come. Journalists and the world will hopefully learn the truth, and maybe this will matter.
I said exactly the same thing I’m saying now. I just told this chronology of what the experiments were. And tried to accurately reflect what the pluses and minuses, what negative experiments had been done, and how it came to be that this was interpreted. The scientists involved had made what you could generously call errors in the report. The most glaring error was they said that all of the chemotherapy that is currently in use against human breast cancer could cure or cause objective anticancer effects in the mouse.
And that leotrol could not cause any anticancer effects in the mouse. So therefore, leotrol was obviously much worse than standard chemotherapy. This was an out and out lie. It could not have been a mistake, because the man who wrote the statement himself. Proved that no known drug could cure or even partially relieve cancer in this mouse. Their own papers prove that chemotherapy didn’t work in this system. There’s two implications to this.
If leotrol did indeed have the effect in mice, then leotrol is, in fact, better than all of a known anticancer drug. The other implication is that since known drugs were known to cure tumors in this mouse, and then they went ahead and tested leotrol in this same system, it seems pretty obvious that they expected leotrol to fail in this system. But leiatrol didn’t fail forefold. There were 20 positive experiments with leotrol done aspone Kettering between 1972 and 1977.
Leotrol alone never cured any cancers in mice. Aspone Kettering. Leotrol had certain positive effects in stopping the spread of the cancer. Segura said it was the best effects he had seen in 60 years. Because everybody wanted to know about the motivation of the people involved. Was there a conspiracy? And so on and so forth. And I answered this as best as I could. The Monday came, and I had to go into work, which was very strange, you know.
So I didn’t know if I had a job or not. And I somehow had convinced myself that nothing bad was going to happen. And that they wouldn’t dare fire me for telling the truth. And so this was sort of my kindergarten thinking that when you tell the truth, everything’s going to be okay, because it’s the truth. And the truth shall set you free. Well, it set me free, all right.
Set me free from my job. So I went in to Jerry’s office, and it was very suddenly, you know, he said, you’re fired, and we’re relieving you of your employment. And he gave me the official statement to read. And the official statement was, part of which was reprinted in the Times a few days later, was that I was being fired because as a member of second opinion, I had engaged in activities that were harmful to the institution.
And that I had failed to carry out my most basic job responsibilities. Which I took to mean refused to lie on behalf of my employer. And so in that sense, I guess they were right. If that was my most basic job responsibility, I did refuse to do that. I burst out crying when he told me this. It was a highly emotional moment. And it also seemed so unfair.
It seemed wrong. I mean, in an institution that was devoted to, ostensibly to seeking scientific truth, there was something terribly unfair about it. And that’s what I had been trying to find and to inculcate in that whole situation was fairness. Fairness towards segura, fairness towards leiatrol, fairness in the evaluation of a set of data. And, boy, were they not into fairness. They seized my filing cabinet, and they put it under lock and key.
They had a big padlock. They took it downstairs. They had these two burly guards come, armed guards. And they told me never to enter the building again. I think it was just a liberating feeling. The lid finally blew, and that’s a tremendous relief. I don’t know. The kids were. Had an emotional time crying. Upset kids do not like any kind of instability. And was trying to give him the greatest support I could to let him know that he did the right thing.
This is it. This is wonderful. I’m so proud of you. You have a great character, and I’m just proud to be your wife. The week of the second opinion report on Leiatrill came out. Alec and I received a letter from Segura. We had sent him a copy, and basically it said, your report is very well done and accurate. Please accept my sincere congratulations. And nothing could have meant more to me than to get that letter, because then I knew that I had accomplished my main objective, which was to save this honest work of this honest man from destruction and from obscurity, that at least it would go on record that the true story had been told.
Even to this day. What frightens people in the establishment about latral isn’t about. It has nothing to do, really with an apricot kernel extract. It’s about the loss of control, the loss of authority. The american oncologists in particular are locked into a mindset that’s determined by Big pharma, and that’s why they’re there, to hear what the latest protocol is ultimately from Big pharma. And there’s a million reasons for that, but that’s essentially the way the system works.
So the things that don’t fit in don’t, nobody’s interested in. And people who feel that they need to come up with conspiracy theories to explain the neglect of complementary medicine, of the more natural products, they don’t understand the way the system works. In the case of Laotrol, though, I think Laotrol became a major pain in the butt for the medical establishment, and therefore it was targeted for destruction.
The only way I can put it. My father was invited back to sloan Kettering to receive the grand rounds, which is something that they only really do for honored dignitaries who are visiting, maybe oncologists from another country, heads of departments from other countries, that type of thing. This was sort of part of my own personal healing process. Visa vis memorial, to be kicked out, I mean, by armed guards, and ordered never to set foot in the place again.
To being invited back as an honored guest 20 years, 20 od years later was quite a transition. I mean, they never came out formally and apologized to me for firing me. But I figured this is as close to an apology as I’m ever going to get. And as I’m mounting the podium, my good friend Bill fair whispers to me, don’t say anything about Leotro. .
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