The Lie of America’s War on Cancer

Video Transcript:

Leia Trill 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. It's 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, bootlaking 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 Leia Trill 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 Leia Trill in order to have it? I'd steal it. Do you plan to take any Leia Trill with you when you leave even though it's illegal? Yes. Dr. Robert Good, president of this phone-cattering institute, one of the world's biggest and richest cancer research centers said Leia Trill does not prevent cancer, nor cure cancer, nor stop cancer from spreading. The My impression of Leia Trill 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, a 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 Leia Trill in Mexico. 70,000, it was about a tenth 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 Leia Trill. 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, you know, unconventional treatment. And is this age old war between quackery and commensuality, 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 lesion to legalize Leia Trill. 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 60s and then taught classics for a while, went back to New York in the early 70s, 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, an ocean parkway. And I was going up the down staircase and he was coming down the down staircase. So he stopped and said, I don't know you. I said, well, I'm new. My name is Martha Buneum. And I said, maybe someday it'll be more. Just like that. They 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 70s, the early 70s, 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 and 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 68th Street in Manhattan and Memorials on the same street. And so it was just a kind of a strafe 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 lay person 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, got the job. I started work on June 3rd, 1974. And it was a tremendously exciting time. This was, in some ways, the best job that I ever had, certainly I'd 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 E. 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. Good, 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, you know, at bottom of the really of the totem pole, and I was befriended by and friendly with the top person in the institute, very head he 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 Somerlin, 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 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 thought, 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 Somerlin, 35, an expert in immunology. Review committee said Somerlin painted dark patches on the skin of two white mice. So it appeared he had successfully transplanted skin between animals genetically incompatible. And this Somerlin had had the audacity to actually paint these black splotches onto these white mice with a magic marker. I mean, talk about nerve, you know. 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, I wore ironies, I wore ironies. I walked in on this very flawed, very crisis-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, slow and hittering. And I said, oh no, you know, my luck. I just hired on, you know, 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, you know, nobody else wanted to do. And there were 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, you know, folk remedies and so forth. The people were proposing to us as part of their contribution to the war on cancer. But the, at least half of the letters had to do with a substance called leotrol or amygdalen. And they were often in the form of complaints why we weren't examining this or what do you think of this or why, 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. The 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 rodonase, which changes the cyanide into thysanate and is excreted into the urine and therefore there's no toxicity from the triad 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 at charge of the Walker lab, and Dr. Kanematsu Siviora, 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 the second oldest person in the entire center at a 4,600 employees. 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. Siviora and his distinguished 60-year career in cancer research. I like that idea. I kind of liked Dr. Siviora, 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 Amigdalene, and it took me a minute to sort of decipher that Amigdalene, that was the same substance as the Leitroll, you know, 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 Leitroll or Amigdalene 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, and 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 percent 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 Leitroll treated animals only between 10 and 20 percent had metastases. And Sigerin is very characteristic, Loki, where he said, well, it would be very interesting if it prevented it completely. It was a little disappointed that he hadn't completely prevented the occurrence of lung metastases. He said, but Leitroll, 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, very vaguely aware of anything outside the lab, I would say. It was hard to disbelieve him in any sense, because he had no ax to grind. He would sometimes tell me for hours what his day was like, on and on, describing his impressions of Kanematsu-sugiura, and Sugiura had told him that Leitroll worked, that it stopped metastases in 80 percent of the mice, and it could be, should be tested further to see if this is a useful drug for human beings. That's all, you know. So, I came away quite astonished, really, running back to my office and told my boss, Jerry Delaney, about this. 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 be friend, Dr. Sugiura, 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. Sugiura. I don't want to say I was a spy, but, you know, 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, you know, I became close to Dr. Sugiura. 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 leitril data that had been accumulated to that point. July 2, 1974, you had the top leaders of Memorial Sloan Kettering 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 Louis Thomas never really friendly towards Leitril, never said a good word, really, but he was there, Bob Good, who vacillated, Chester Stock, who I think believed in Sugiura's results, and Lloyd Old, who really was the driving force and who co-chaired the meeting. One of funny statements is, Dr. Old has written to several world users of Leitril. He found two groups, one, those who used it and found it a value, and two, those who had not used it and did not believe in it. He feels that Immigdalen is as non-toxic as glucose, and then he summarized Sugiura's results. Sloan Kettering tested tumor bearing animals, 100 treated with the miglion, 25 showed lung metastasis, 100 not treated with the miglion, 75 showed lung metastasis. He flipped the numbers by using the Immigdalen. Some Kettering group believes their results show that Immigdalen used it animals with tumors shows a decrease in lung metastasis, slower tumor growth, and pain relief. Dr. Stock thinks studies on Immigdalen should be made particularly regarding pain relief and reduction of lung metastasis. That's the message that Lewis Thomas, Bob Good, Lloyd Old, and Chesostock went to Washington to deliver to the FDA. Here's a letter from the Office of the President and Director of Sloan Kettering Institute. It is January 24th, 1975, to Dr. Mario Soto de Leon. 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. Sannon visit our institute and share with us your clinical experience with Immigdalen in cancer patients. I was pleased to hear from Dr. Sannon 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 and Sierra Leures Lloyd J. Old. So this shows you, I mean, beyond the shadow of it out, 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 Leotro. And the bottom line was, you know, we think that we should do clinical trials. The next year, they went back to the second meeting March 4th, 1975. Now this is at the NCI. This was a higher level meeting. We've got Frank Raucher, 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 Sloan Kettering, we've got Old Thomas Stock. And then right below Dan Martin from Catholic Medical Center and people from the American Cancer Society. 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 CD8F1 mouse, which was the main animal model that Segura had used. And he had become an adamant opponent of Leotro. Because of his belligerent personality, Dr. Dan Martin's career was at a dead end. He had lost the big lawsuit against his own institution. It 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 CD8F1 mice. Then, in mid-1975, NCI suddenly gave him a million dollars, four 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 Leotro, pouring the country, specifying writing op-eds, shouting that Leotro 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 one million dollars. 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 is also a quick road to success because everybody in the establishment likes the night on the White Horse who is going to come and save the world from the danger of quackery. So it was seen as a 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 anti-Leotal statement. It was odd because nothing was happening at that point scientifically to trigger those comments, very distressing, very distressing. It culminated with a statement that Justice Stock gave to David left of medical world news in 75 saying we have found lateral 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 centilla of evidence or not a shred of evidence showing that lay it draws any effect of any animal system period, which was the kind of thing the 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 layatril 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 segur as results with layatril. 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, what I said obviously, 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 who said, well of course, you know, and he kind of tipped toe 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 most, you know, really scientifically speaking, the most mind blowing moment of my life because here's the vice president of Sloan Kettering telling me that the source, the basic source, but new ideas within Orthodox science came from what is regarded generally as quackery. I mean it was hard to comprehend that I've told this story to people sometimes and you know they think I'm exaggerating and 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. I mean, you know, we were worlds away from that. Good was a politician. He was always known as a politician. We called him a political scientist, you know. 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, you know, 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 at 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, you know, 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, you know, 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. 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 and you 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, you know, 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 photo copies of his lab notes. I mean that was really sticking my neck out because what if? You know, they asked him and on my birthday in 75, he gave them to me. He gave me all his his internal memos and his lab notes. March 1st, 1974, Table 2 shows that repeated injections of a thousand milligrams per kilogram per day of a migdaline for two to 15 weeks failed to destroy the spontaneous cancer in mice. However, it caused an inhibition in about 50 percent of the tumors. It also shows a migdaline or a laetral had a strong inhibitory effect on the development of new tumors and on lung metastases, 11 percent in the laetral treated animals against 89 percent in the control animals in mice. The general health and appearance of the amiguin treated animals with tumors was much better than that of the controls. Panamaza Segura, March 1st, 1974, May 31st, 1974, which incidentally was three days before I actually was started my work at Sloan-Gettering. Segura wrote, the table results show repeated injections of 2,000 milligrams per kilogram per day of a migdaline for 49 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 determination 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 laetral. The present study shows that for the first three quarters of their lifespan, 21 months, the daily prolonged injections of amigiline did not prevent the development of mammary cancer in mice completely. However, it had a definite reduction in development of mammary tumors, 70 percent in the controls against 48 percent in the amigiline treated mice. Also shows amigiline had a strong inhibitory effect on the development of lung metastases in mice, 75 percent inhibition against 22 percent in controls. And again, tremendous detail. Here's this report on a different system, the Swiss Albino mice, spontaneous tumors in retired breeder mice. Amigiline had a strong inhibitory effect on the development of lung metastases in mice, 77 percent in inhibition against 7 percent in inhibition in controls, 77 versus 7. The general health and appearance of the amigiline treated animals were much better than that of the controls. Resultate pain with mammary tumors occurring in Swiss Albino mice are essentially the same as those obtained with mammary tumors occurring in CD8F1 mice, so I'm kind of out to secure a February 8th, 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 second hand is it where 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 anti-layer true 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 by one root, you know, the sort of the media root 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-layer true lobbying group that did sort of propaganda for freedom of choice, which was the rubric under which layertral was being promoted. Cancer patients Steve Gatler claiming he was cured by layertral 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 FDA. Give us a freedom to choose our own therapy. Why should I an American citizen have to go into black market or struggle something that I should have the freedom to choose. And the committee for free and a choice of course ran with it. This was their dream come true and they republished the data. The layertral 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 layertral was sort of tainted by its association with the Burke society. Most of the people you read about in the layertral movement were either in the Burke society or affiliated with it or sympathetic to it. I wasn't. And coming from out of the anti-vietnam war movement you know and even going back before that I mean my orientation was more left 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 work with Ralph and see what 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 were sort of overlapped. In fact they still overlapped anybody who sees some of the things going on today realized that these issues in one where another was still with us. And he became sort of convinced by my arguments about Lea Trull. Although the majority was very skeptical and I think if it you know I mean the double whammy was quack cancer remedy and John Birch society it seemed like you know the like the perfect poison the last thing in the world that a group like that would be ever be sympathetic to or interested in. It was becoming very very difficult and then I said look we have to do something you know maybe not ready to go out and you know for meant to ride in the streets over this but we have to do something. And because the people within the New York chapter of science where 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 the 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 memorials loan catering 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 catering 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 a anonymous way for people to voice or air their discontents in a you know large center 4600 employees there's always going to be things happening that people are not happy with especially the testing of lay atro at Sloan catering so we started working and we had a small group and it turned out that just out of coincensis I was the only one who had no collection to Sloan catering everybody else was either at Sloan catering or could be identified this is not an academic institution so you had no protection of your freedom of speech you would have been fired if you had associated so publicly so but I had no connection whatsoever I was at city university of New York at the time and and so in fact I became sort of the spokesperson for the group the the outside agitator who was coming in and 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 you recruited more people and we recruited them from inside Sloan catering and affiliated institutions and it was all like literally cut and pasted my wife had some background in graphics Sushi cut and pasted the issue together we had it mammia graft 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 and nursing about the chairman of nursing and a group and more and more people came in to the groups at one point we had about 20 people I think you know in and at meetings and so forth I kind of then wrote these articles about laertral so a second opinion for a few years became enormously popular to the point where we were printing 5,000 copies of each issue and we distributed them within hours there were only 4,600 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 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 out 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 are going to be named and 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 no no no this was so 60-ish and here we were now in 1975 76 but you know the 60s kind of lingered this was the era Nixon had just been kicked out of office and at the moment you know it was kind of it seemed like the right thing 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 you know 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 Seguro 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 there was something positive that couldn't be accepted I mean that science I don't think so it's it was a predetermined conclusion then they held their famous June 15 1977 press conference at memorial about a hundred reporters and all the 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 they've been tested with Lea Tril for four years today's known Kettering announced the result there they all were all the the top people Chester Stock our summary statement is we do not have evidence supporting taking a Michelin to clinical trial Bob good we tried to find out from scientific information available whether there was any real scientific evidence that the drug amygdalen or so-called Lea Tril had any effect on on cancer in any form and there was no such scientific evidence and Lewis Thomas there is no evidence in the several animal models that have been studied that Lea Trilow for a mingdalen 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 the fateful press conference in 1977 they announced that Lloyd was in Tahiti or someplace Segru was there and it was quite a high you know high point really a incredible tension word had leaked out that Sloan Kettering had some positive results was that this was the final nail in the coffin of Lea Tril you agree with the conclusions of the summary statement what the conclusion the conclusion that Lea Trilow's effect does not either cure all of it for that question I agree of course manager don't agree but I agree what our institute said why if you're a doctor or I don't know why but I think it's good you stick by your results yes I stick I hope that somebody able to confirm my result of the Lea Trilow was just this electrifying moment I mean here you can't even imagine you know the whole I mean maybe this was just my emotion I felt such a surge of admiration for him and and it was so it was such a poignant moment man was a I don't know 87 or 89 years old and here his whole career was on the line and and he was magnificent and he didn't care I mean he was not a proponent of Lea Trilow he didn't care one way or the other as far as that goes as any other result that was disputed before in 40 years that you've been here I mean here almost 60 years nobody dispute my work every paper I sent to the publication or always accepted why not this why not this what is that why not these results no Jesus Jesus did that also accepted by the publication journal of the surgery oncology slow and catering did something incredibly clever in this they took his data and they embedded it into his 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 you know we're going to have an overall negative conclusion on this but to represent your position and your point of view will 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 this was the 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 that are to be published defining this this work are available to you I understand and it is our interpretation from the all of the evidence taken together that there is no substantial evidence of effectiveness of amygdalen or late trail 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 cover document and the cover 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's secure accounted 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 the the the the the the the ginned up summary of the supposedly negative results on the table the the the two or three page summary and the extensive paper preprint of the pay article from journal 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 I don't think they paid too much attention to scientific publications it's interesting you know I was learning I was still learning about the field of of scientific journalism journalism in general everybody more or less 99 out of 100 were willing to take some credit is word for it if you said that you know the moon is green then they would accept that the moon is green they said so and they're the experts they should know as I say doctor Seguro first obtained an experiment started a 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 controls 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 question at that point we were quite interested in what he had found normal scientific question which suggests that we get that confirmed which we attempted to do and I think our normal scientific question was reinforced by all the controversy surrounding the material we then asked dr. Martin who who had been providing all the CD8 F1 mice to try to confirm the results the first experiment actually was a cooperative experiment which we were trying a special study and then Dan Martin who was the person who kind of invented the CD8 F1 mouse got involved in the scene and they started to do some experiments but in the sort of the classic situation that I was mostly involved with in sense of being Seguro's confidant on this situation was where they had Martin was to help the key as to which were the treated and the untreated animals Seguro who was the blinded person in this experiment 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 lateral animals were had nice glossy coats they looked good they were healthy and the other mice were dropping dead I said dr. Seguro 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. Stok and I said please dr. Seguro this is not wise it's not you shouldn't do this because I saw the you know the writing on the wall my friends are looking very bad at the bands are looking me good mice you know I paired the chick under very weak but after injection of amigurta in in in afternoons become active and the minute that he told them the 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 stopping stop growing in the saline treated animals so there was something really screwy because it looked like the somehow the control animals were receiving a layer trope she one thing about the I like to mention here in the last experiment what we did on October 1976 called brand test uh the funny part funny thing happened that she I mean when inject amigurta into the animal small tumor suffered grow for one week or five weeks she and in the last experiment what happened in the control group had 42% tumor stopped grow for one week to five weeks were experimental only 27% now we people in chemotherapy we use the cellan solution for control of the other drugs because cellan had no inhibitory effect on tumor and it's in the half so it's something very peculiar if the facts are mutable based upon the needs of the moment and sciences dead you might as well pack up and and and give it up because there's not really going to be any honest reporting of what you know experimentation shows so he was fighting for I think a bigger thing which 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 you're finding very well these experiments of future day I'm hoping that somebody able to confirm my that 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 leotro in July of 77 and Louis Thomas was scheduled to testify and so they needed to come up with a counterveiling paper that would summarize and refute siguer is positive data they were terrified of the pro-layer trope people coming into that meeting waving the anatomy of a cover-up with all the raw data from Sloan Kettering showing this stoppage of metastases and the stoppage of smaller tumors because of course that would have left Thomas in a untenable position essentially Thomas would have at that point had to admit that indeed Sloan Kettering had had four years of positive testing with leotro the final conclusion on part of 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 without any effect at all it seemed almost you know diabolical because we couldn't believe that people would actually do this and lie about a promising treatment for cancer I had been principal author of the second opinion special report at leotro and 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 said you know here's a critique of Sloan Kettering's two papers on leotro 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 a clarification on what the second opinion report was is there any validity to it at all and so forth and Jerry would say well 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 Prishnicki and we've checked the records and Alec Prishnicki doesn't work here we have no idea who he is we have no reason to believe that anybody inside Sloan Kettering has anything to do with this report somebody had to get up from Sloan Kettering 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 10 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 you know wisdom coming out of the mouth of a 10-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 and 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 it was this dead silence and for about 30 seconds and he said I'll get back to you so we hung off and now the die was cast okay we decided that's it you know press conference is it's going to be out there you're going to tell the truth get the reporters to come get the 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 degenerate recall errors in the report the most glaring error were they said that all of the chemotherapy is currently in use against human breast cancer could cure or cause objective angi-cancer effects in the mouth and a lateral could not cause any anti-cancer effects in the mouth so therefore lateral was obviously much worse than standard chemotherapy now this was an out-and-out lie it was it could not have been a mistake because the man who wrote the statement and just proved that known known drug could cure or even partially release cancer in this mouth their own papers prove a chemotherapy didn't work in this system and two implications today this layer of good indeed has the effect in my the lateral is in fact better than or of a known healthy cancer drug the other implication is that his known drugs were known to cure tumors in this mouth and then they went ahead and tested layer of in this same system it seems pretty obvious that they expected layers of the stale in this system but I was wrong didn't fail for a total there were 20 positive experiments with layers of gun at stone catterin between 1972 and 1977 lyrical loans never cured any cancers in life at stone catterin lyrical had certain positive effects in stopping the spread of the cancer to go and said it was the best effect you've seen in 60 years because everybody wanted to know about the motivation of the people involved was their conspiracy and so on and so forth and I I answered this is best this I could the Monday came and I had to go into work which was very strange you know as 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 you know my kindergarten thinking that you know when you tell the truth everything's going to be okay because it's the truth and the truth so I said you free well set me free all right set me free from my job so I went in to Jerry's office and it was very solemn and suddenly you know he said you're fired and we're relieving you your employment and he gave me the 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 of 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 I if that was my most basic job responsibility I did refuse to do that I burst out crying when he told me this it just I mean it was a highly emotional moment and also seemed so unfair it seemed wrong I mean in an institution that was devoted to ostensibly to seeking scientific truth uh 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 you're a fairness towards laetral 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 a 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 you know crying a lot you know upset kids do not like any kind of instability and I was trying to you know give him the greatest support I could to to let him know that he did the right thing this is it this is wonderful I'm so proud of you you have you know the a great character and I'm just proud to be a life the week of the second opinion report on laetral came out alica and I received a letter from secure 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 later 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 laetral 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 oncologist 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 from big for ultimately from big pharma and there's a million reasons for that but that's essentially the way you know the way the system works so the things that don't fit in don't nobody's interested in and you know people who feel that they need to come up with conspiracy theories to explain the neglect of complimentary medicine of the less you know the more natural products they don't understand the way the system works in the case of laetral though I think laetral 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 a something that they only really do for honored dignitaries who are visiting maybe you know oncologists from another country heads of departments from other countries that type of this was sort of part of my own personal healing process vis-a-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 odd years later you know quite a transition I mean they never came out formally and apologized to me for firing me but this is I figured this is as close to an apologies I'm ever gonna get and as I'm mounting the podium my good friend Bill Fair whispers to me don't say anything about laetral you They should for their own good, they should come clean about this because it's, you know, you can't live a lie whether you're an individual, you know, or an institution. That lie will weigh you down, it's tragic, and, you know, they should re-examine this, I think. Just for their own good, I don't think that's, I doubt if that's going to happen, but in any case, you know, it's a sad, very sad thing because, you know, the things that you do have repercussions to them, and they did something terrible. Coming out of the best of motives, they weren't able to follow through on, they didn't have the courage of their convictions, put it very, very mildly, they didn't have the courage of their convictions, and that's bad because then you've gotten yourself into something that, you know, you don't follow through on, and it's in a way worse than if they had had the sense to say, no, no, too hot, we won't touch it, you know, then they would have been left alone, but once you take it on, then you have to own it, and they didn't own it. So now they're all gone, Lloyd Old, and Bob Good, and Lewis Thomas, they all died of cancer. So, you know, it's quite ironic, you know, while they were fighting over this treatment, they also were incubating the tumors that were the conditions that killed them.