Killing Us Softly (18 page)

I
n the 1960s, Andrew Ivy promoted the next great cancer cure: Krebiozen. Ivy's rise was matched only by his fall.

Andrew Ivy was born in Farmington, Missouri, in 1893. He attended the University of Chicago and Rush Medical College, where he received his bachelor of science in 1916, master of science in 1917, PhD in 1918, and MD in 1922. During the next thirty-five years, Ivy published fifteen hundred papers in the fields of gastroenterology, aviation medicine, reproductive medicine, blood clotting, artificial respiration, cardiac pain, flash burns, and typhoid infections. By 1970 Ivy's work was cited more than that of any other scientist in the world. His textbook,
Peptic Ulcer,
written in 1950, is still a classic.

In recognition of his achievements, Ivy was made head of physiology and pharmacology at Northwestern University Medical School and vice president of the University of Illinois. But to most Americans, Andrew Ivy was the man who helped prosecute Nazi doctors accused of torture and murder—and the author of “The Nuremberg Code,” a manifesto on the ethics of human experimentation. (For his efforts, Ivy was awarded the
Certificate of Merit from the president of the United States.) Jonathan Moreno, in his book
Undue Risk: Secret State Experiments on Humans
, wrote “by the end of the war [Ivy] was probably the most famous doctor in the country.”

Then, in July 1949, after a visit from Stevan Durovic, Andrew Ivy began his uninterrupted fall from grace. Durovic, who had fled his native Yugoslavia for Argentina, believed he had a cure for cancer. While in Argentina, Durovic injected horses with a bacterium called
Actinomyces bovis
, collected their serum, freeze-dried it, and resuspended it in mineral oil. He called his new medicine Krebiozen. When Durovic came to the United States, he knew that Andrew Ivy was the man to see. For years, Ivy had studied dogs with cancer of the thyroid, believing they produced a natural anti-cancer substance; but he couldn't find it. Durovic, on the other hand, believed he had.

Before coming to Ivy, Durovic had tested Krebiozen on twelve dogs and cats with cancer, claiming that all had improved or been cured. Ivy was impressed, so he injected himself, a colleague, and one dog with the drug. Convinced of its safety, Ivy injected the first cancer patient on August 20, 1949. On March 27, 1951, after treating twenty-two patients, he announced his findings at a press conference at the Drake Hotel, in Chicago, inviting local doctors, potential financial supporters, the mayor of Chicago, two United States senators, and science writers from four Chicago newspapers. Ivy claimed that all his patients had experienced “dramatic improvement.” In truth, ten of the twenty-two were dead—all from cancer.

Ivy's international reputation spurred interest in Krebiozen. Within a few years more than four thousand cancer sufferers had been treated. In 1952, cancer specialists reviewed patient
records and concluded that Krebiozen was worthless. In 1961, the National Cancer Institute, after conducting its own study, reached the same conclusion. When FDA chemists finally analyzed Krebiozen, they found it contained mineral oil and creatine, a harmless substance found in muscles. Krebiozen was a hoax.

In 1964, Andrew Ivy and Stevan Durovic were indicted on forty-nine counts of mail fraud, mislabeling, conspiracy, and making false statements. After he was acquitted, Durovic moved to Switzerland, where he had deposited $2 million in a Swiss bank account. Ivy, shunned by his colleagues, died in 1978, still convinced that Krebiozen was a cure for cancer.

B
y the 1980s, Max Gerson invented a miracle cancer diet.

Gerson was a German-born physician who immigrated to the United States in 1936. Taking advantage of American's fear of environmental toxins, he offered a two-step cure: eat natural foods, consisting of a gallon of blended fruits, vegetables, and raw calf's liver, and remove harmful toxins with daily coffee enemas. Gerson's therapies also included liver extract injections, ozone enemas, “live cell therapy,” thyroid tablets, royal jelly capsules, linseed oil, castor-oil enemas, clay packs, massive doses of vitamin C, and a vaccine made from killed staph bacteria. In the mid-1980s, three naturopaths—wanting to believe Gerson was onto something—visited his clinic, in Tijuana, and followed eighteen patients for five years; seventeen died of their cancers, and one still suffered the disease. The National Cancer Institute also reviewed the records of eighty-six patients treated with the Gerson diet and found no evidence that it worked—a
finding that apparently didn't impress Steve Jobs when he chose Gerson's therapies instead of the surgery that might have saved his life.

The Gerson diet had other problems. Between 1980 and 1986, thirteen patients were admitted to local hospitals suffering from bloodstream infections caused by Gerson's liver extract injections. The Gerson Institute is still in operation.

I
n the 1990s, it was shark cartilage.

On February 28, 1993, CBS's
60 Minutes
aired a story claiming that shark cartilage cured cancer. The segment starred I. William Lane, a Florida businessman who owned a shark-fishing company. Lane had written a book titled
Sharks Don't Get Cancer
. During the program, correspondent Mike Wallace showed several Cuban cancer victims exercising, all claiming that shark cartilage had cured them. Wallace was impressed, gushing about the new drug, cleverly called BeneFin.

Within two weeks of the
60 Minutes
episode, thirty new shark cartilage products were on the market. Within two years, shark cartilage was a $30-million-a-year industry. In 1996, Lane wrote
Sharks Still Don't Get Cancer
. By the late 1990s, one in four cancer sufferers took shark cartilage.

In preparing his program, Mike Wallace had either ignored or was unaware of several facts. First, according to the Smithsonian Institution's Registry of Tumors in Lower Animals, sharks
do
get cancer, including cancer of the cartilage. Second, before the show, Lane had already enlisted a group of Belgian researchers to test his product. It didn't work. Third, even if shark cartilage did cure certain cancers, eating it didn't make
much sense. Acids and enzymes in the stomach destroy proteins contained in cartilage. (That's why diabetics don't eat insulin; they inject it.) Within a few years of the
60 Minutes
episode, thirteen studies showed that shark cartilage didn't cure cancers of the breast, colon, lung, or prostate. In 2000, I. William Lane and his company were banned from making unsubstantiated claims that shark cartilage cures cancer.

The shark cartilage fad took its toll, contributing to the possible extinction of the spiny dogfish shark and the blue shark, both of which are now at risk. Sadly, some people used shark cartilage instead of conventional therapies that would have saved their lives, most notably a nine-year-old Canadian girl with a brain tumor. After the tumor had been removed, doctors recommended a course of radiation and chemotherapy that offered a good chance of survival. Her parents opted for shark cartilage instead. She was dead in four months.

Shark cartilage is still available in drugstores and on the Internet.

You don't really understand human nature unless you know why a child on a merry-go-round will wave at his parents every time around—and why his parents will always wave back.

—William D. Tammeus, columnist,
The Kansas City Star

A
lthough many nonstandard therapies are available, the story of unproven cancer cures at the beginning of the twenty-first century has largely been the story of one man. A man whose early career was promoted by author Gary Null in
Penthouse
magazine, by Sally Jessy Raphael on her daily talk show, by Geraldo Rivera on ABC's
20/20
, and by Harry Smith on
CBS This Morning
. A man who, when hounded by the FDA, had the unsolicited support of hundreds of patients and several
United States congressmen. A man who, in 2010, was the subject of a feature-length documentary simply titled
Burzynski
.

B
illie Bainbridge was born on April 25, 2007, in the town of Exeter, England. When she was four years old, her mother, Terri, noticed that something was wrong. “We had a cuddle in bed while she had a nap and I thought she seemed really hot,” recalled Terri. “When she woke up, her head shook in like a mini-seizure and then she threw up.” The next day, Billie was fine. Then she worsened. “Over the next couple of weeks she started talking in a weird voice and I thought it was just her messing around and kept telling her to stop. But then a few days later her eyes seemed a bit droopy and she was starting to [drool]. I thought she was having a stroke.”

Two days later, Billie was taken to the Royal Devon and Exeter Hospital for an MRI of her head. The diagnosis: brainstem glioma, an incurable form of brain cancer. Brainstem gliomas are treated with radiation, which initially shrinks the tumor and improves symptoms. But the glioma invariably returns, eventually becoming resistant to radiation. Chemotherapy doesn't work, either. The doctors explained that Billie's chance of recovery was slim. In all likelihood, she would be dead in a year.

But Sam and Terri Bainbridge weren't giving up. They had heard about a miraculous medicine in Houston, and they were going to do to whatever it took to get it. The cost, however, was astronomical, estimated at about £200,000, or $300,000. And Terri was having her own problems, having recently been diagnosed with breast cancer. The Bainbridges took their case
to their friends and neighbors. “I refuse to believe that Billie will die,” said Terri. “And I'm going to do everything I can to make sure she doesn't.”

Within weeks, everyone in England knew about Billie and Terri Bainbridge. Peter Kay, a British comedian and actor, staged a series of benefit concerts at the Blackpool Opera House. The band Radiohead donated a signed guitar, which sold for £9,000. Other bands, like Badly Drawn Boy, I Am Kloot, and Everything Everything, staged charity shows in Manchester. The Munchkins Day Nursery sold raffle tickets for £100, with a chance to win one year's tuition, worth £20,000. (The winners, Christian and Alex Brook, donated the money to the Bainbridges and continued to pay their son's tuition.) The local rugby team, the Exeter Chiefs, grew their sideburns, hoping to raise £2,000. A charity ball raised £12,000. Two cyclists raised more than £5,000 biking from Edinburgh to Exeter. A series of bake sales each raised £1,000. International celebrities like Anthony Cotton, Cheryl Cole, and Michael Bublé also pitched in. An anonymous philanthropist from the United States donated $25,000. In the end, the Bainbridges had raised £200,000. On September 17, 2011, only three months after Billie's first symptoms, the Bainbridge family was on a plane to Houston. “The Texas Clinic is our last hope,” said Sam. Soon they would meet its director.

S
tanislaw Burzynski was born in Poland in 1943. By the time he had graduated from the Medical Academy of Lublin, in 1967, he had published fourteen papers, a remarkable accomplishment. The following year he received a PhD for his thesis,
titled “Investigations on Amino Acids and Peptides in Blood Serum of Healthy People and Patients with Chronic Renal Insufficiency.” Burzynski had an idea. He believed that patients with long-standing kidney disease didn't get cancer as often as people with normal kidneys. And he believed the answer could be found in their urine. Burzynski reasoned that patients with kidney disease didn't get cancer because, unlike people with normal kidneys, they didn't excrete certain lifesaving substances that had an anti-cancer effect; he called these substances antineoplastons (literally, “against new growth”). Burzynski believed that if he could isolate these cancer-preventing peptides from the urine of healthy people, he could cure cancer.

After completing a residency in internal medicine in Poland, Burzynski traveled to Baylor Medical College, in Houston, where he rose from research associate in the department of anesthesiology to assistant professor. In 1974, he isolated a series of peptides (strands of amino acids smaller than proteins) that inhibited the growth of bone cancer cells in the laboratory. The National Cancer Institute, intrigued by his findings, gave him a three-year grant, which resulted in six publications—the last of which defined his life's calling. “According to our definition,” he wrote, “antineoplastons are substances provided by the living organism that protect it against development of neoplastic growth [without] significantly inhibiting the growth of normal tissues.” This was a major breakthrough. At last, cancer victims would no longer suffer the tortures of radiation and chemotherapy. They could be treated with antineoplastons, a natural product without side effects. The National Cancer Institute didn't see it that way, failing to immediately renew Burzynski's grant.

When he lost his funding, Baylor administrators gave Burzynski a choice. He could either stay in the department of anesthesiology and do research consistent with its goals (which weren't curing cancer) or he could leave. Burzynski left, renting a 2,500-square-foot garage in Houston that later became the Burzynski Research Institute. His first task was to isolate large quantities of antineoplastons. So in the heat of the Houston summer, Stanislaw Burzynski collected more than a hundred gallons of urine from public restrooms and local prisoners. From this he isolated antineoplastons that he called AS2.1 and A10.

Although Burzynski had no specific training in cancer, the FDA granted him permission to test antineoplastons in small clinical trials. He had no shortage of patients, including those with advanced cancers of the brain, colon, pancreas, breast, prostate, rectum, lung, kidney, and bladder—cancers so far gone, the medical establishment had given up on them, cancers that were a death sentence for their sufferers. But Stanislaw Burzynski wasn't giving up. He had faith in the power of antineoplastons.