Did Anyone Continue Dr Krebs Ernst Experiment
WHY LAETRILE WON'T GO AWAY
See the article in its original context from
November 27, 1977
,
Page
223Buy Reprints
TimesMachine is an exclusive benefit for home delivery and digital subscribers.
About the Archive
This is a digitized version of an article from The Times's print archive, before the start of online publication in 1996. To preserve these articles as they originally appeared, The Times does not alter, edit or update them.
Occasionally the digitization process introduces transcription errors or other problems; we are continuing to work to improve these archived versions.
The Senate Health and Scientific Research Subcommittee, chaired by Senator Edward M. Kennedy of Massachusetts, seemed to generate an unusual air of excitement when it gathered last summer. For one thing, more than the usual number of reporters and TV crews were on hand, more than the usual number of uniformed guards were at the door, and, indeed, more than the usual number of spectators filled the small meeting room. The subject under discussion was the now wellinpublicized illicit anticancer chemical Laetrile (pronounced LAY‐uhintrill), an extract of the lowly apricot pit. The event could have been called the Great Confrontation — the Cancer EstablishHealers.
The unprecedented meeting had been called because 12 states had voted to legalize Laetrile, even though it is banned by the Federal Government from importation and from interstate commerce. The states had done it — and had given doctors the right to prescribe Laetrile for their patients — against the advice of such powerful and determined agencies as the Food and Drug Administration, the National Cancer Institute and the American Cancer Society all of whom had branded Laetrile as a worthless nostrum, the ultimate in quackery. What's more, a Federal judge in Oklahoma had slapped down the F.D.A. by ruling that terminallyinill patients could import Laetrile on a doctor's affidavit. In view of this grassinroots rebellion, the Senate subcommittee wanted to know whether there was anything worthwhile about this embattled drug and, if not, why so many Americans were committed to it in the face of so much established scientific and medical opposiThe top brass of the cancer Establishment took the stand with the weariness of people who couldn't quite figure out why they were there in the first place. Dr. Donald S. Fredrickson, head of the National Institutes of Health, spoke first. He was followed by Dr. Donald Kennedy, Commissioner of the Federal Food and Drug Administration, who rules over the approval of cancer drugs; Dr. Lewis Thomas, poetpresident of Memorial Sloan‐Kettering Cancer Center, and Dr. Joseph Ross of the University of California at Los Angeles, a veteran fighter against cancer quackery. Each witness came with a prepared speech, which, in effect, declared that There was not a scintilla of scientific evidence to indicate that Laetrile was effective against cancer.
This concentrated firepower from the leading figures in medicine was followed by pronouncements from the minions of the law, described by one observer at the hearing as the "hit men" of the cancer establishment. They included representatives of the Sacramento, Calif., prosecutor's office, who testified that some of the proponents of Laetrile had made considerable sums of money from the drug. They also testified that one of the more visible Laetrile doctors — Dr. John A. Richardson of Albany, Calif. ‐ had lost his license to practice medicine because of "gross negligence" in the treatment of cancer patients. To a man, they declared that Laetrile was useless and the people behind it were classic cancer quacks who were taking advantage of frightened cancer victims. Laetrile, they said, was no more than the spiritual descendant of a line of unproven cancer remedies that included turpentine, green frogs, Dr. Hoxsey's herbs and Krebiozen, which was the sensational cancer treatment of the 1950's and 60's, a drug that was derived from horse serum.
Then the Laetrile representatives read their prepared statements. With a j 'accuse flair they spoke of the medicalindrugincompany‐Government "conspiracy" to hold back a "valid" anticancer substance from the public; they condemned the Establishment for arrogantly denying cancer victims the right to freely choose their mode of treatment ; they argued that Laetrile is harmless and that in many cases it might do some good when taken as part of a total dietary and vitamin program. It induces, they said, wellinbeing, relief from pain, and creates even remissions from disease, and they said they had affidavits to prove it. One speaker went so far as to compare the advent of Laetrile in the cancer field to the Copernican revolution, which changed man's view his role in the universe.
Senator Kennedy, whose own son, Ted, had lost leg to cancer surgery, was by turns compassionate and stern, puzzled and authoritative, critical and firm. Finally, he looked hard at the representatives of both sides and said he'd make them a proposition. "Let us do human tests," he urged. "If it turns out that the results are affirmative, you will find no finer defender of Laetrile than myself." Then, turning the pro‐Laetrilists, he added: "If they prove to be negative, will you agree to desist telling the public about the prevention and control of cancer through Laetrile?"
Advocates on both sides, like puzzled old warriors confronted with the prospect of peace after years of infighting, were speechless for a moment. Then they agreed. The fourinhour play was over. An F.D.A. spokesman later said it was a good meeting because it. focused the public's attention on the "true" nature of Laetrile and its proponents; but another observer noted that the Laetrile people had won an extraordinary victory. After years of working the streets and town halls — being hounded and harassed for breaking the laws — they had come to Washington on virtually equal footing with the leading medical specialists of the day. "This is no small accomplishment for a group of people who are labeled as crooks and quacks."
How could an upstart substance like Laetrile create such a formidable challenge to organized medicine and its institutions? To answer this question requires some understanding of the unique disease (or perhaps group of diseases) known as cancer, which takes 380,000 lives a year in the United States and is the No. 2 cause of death, worldwide, after heart disease. Cancer is characterized by a mysterious, usually chronic, disorder in the growth and development of cells. It can affect any site in the body, any one of 70 trillion cells, but the way it does so and the subsequent course of the illness is as variable as each afflicted individual. Some cancers grow quickly and painfully, and metastasize (spread) to different parts of the body; others are localized and grow very slowly and insidiously, sometimes taking 20 or 30 years from the diagnosis to reach a lifethreatening condition. A few cancers disappear spontaneously. Others can be stopped in early stages. The N.C.I. says that one out of three cancer victims lives beyond five years after treatment, but when you add it all up, the majority of cancers end death.
Even though the United States leads the world the battle against cancer and has spent something
Is the Laetrile controversy an American tragicomedy in the theater of the absurd, or is it opening up new ways of coping with patients' needs?
Each year, 20,000 cancer patients who seek Laetrile treatments flock to the Clinica del Mar in Tijuana, Mexico. like $10 billion in cancer research in the last 20 years. the disease remains as enigmatic and frustrating as ever. The development of new approaches to cancer — from looking into the fundamental life processes within the nucleus of the cell, to the hunt in human beings for an elusive virus that causes cancer in some animals, to the unraveling of the secrets of immunity — has occasioned sporadic bursts of optimism and generated the feeling that the problem of cancer is solvable. But the search has not actually yielded a cure, or a near cure. Except for the introduction of chemotherapy (treatment by pill or injection) after World War II, and some later flirtation with immune therapy (treatment by drugs to boost the strength of the body's immune system), the soincalled modalities of cancer treatment are still the same as they have been for threeinquarters of a century —cut the cancer out, burn it out, or. in the case of chemicals, poison it ideally without at the same time poisoning the surrounding healthy cells. These modalities have managed to prolong the lives of a number of people with certain kinds of cancer, but overall, they have not affected the grim statistics, nor have they justified the high hopes engendered by the declaration of the "war against cancer" in 1969 by the
This means that the average individual now considers a diagnosis of cancer a virtual sentence of death. The word strikes fear in the hearts of most people, especially if the term "inoperable" or "terminal" is used. Unless the patient is blessed with the fortitude of a Senator Hubert Humphrey, the diagnosis may send a person into fits of denial, anger, panic and depression. A recent survey yielded the fact that 80 percent of the public dreads cancer more than any other disease.
Ironically, when the patient needs the doctor the most, he finds that the doctor often is unable to help him, psychologically. Doctors are generally not trained to understand the impact of psychic stress on the body, or to deal with the subtleties of helping the individual to cope. One drug company, sensing this need, has recently set up a pogramme tointeachindoctorsinthat a coping model of behavior can be more helpful to a good many patients than the traditional medical model with which he works.
Since the medical establishment is frequently unable to supply what a cancer patient really needs, reliance on Laetrile—even if it falls short of a cure — serves a series of important functions. Firstly, it provides an appealing rationale for the cause and the treatment of cancer. Laetrile, which is the commercial label of a drug known in pharmacology as amygdalin, is a strange substance that appears in bitter almonds, and in the seeds and kernels of apricots, prunes and cherries, as well as in a variety of plants. A molecule of the substance consists of two parts of sugar, one part benzafdehyde and one part cyanide. This cyanide is locked into the formula —much as chlorine is locked into common salt — until the substance is dissolved in water, and heated or placed in the presence of an enzyme called betaglucosidase, which is found in many parts of the body. Animals that eat the amygdalinincontaining plants will die of cyanide poisoning, which suggests that evolution might have had a protective purpose for creating betagluThe use of cyanideinbearing natural substances has been traced back to ancient China, but Laetrile entered the world of modern cancer therapy in 1926, when Ernst Krebs Sr., a California physician turned researcher, who was then looking for an enzyme that might he used against cancer, crushed a pot full of apricot kernels and noted that the extract seemed to have anticancer activity in experimental mice. Krebs, however, failed to develop a usable preparation because the extract seemed to kill more mice than it helped, and it languished until the 1990's when Ernst Krebs Jr., following in his father's footsteps, purified the apricot extract into something that appeared to he harmless if used by humans. Krebs Ws named it Laetrile a contraction of the drug's long chemical name — and patented it in 1949 as a substance for possible use in human
To explain the apparent action of Laetrile on cancer, Krebs turned to a theory proposed at the turn of the century by the Scottish embryologist John Beard, who said that malignant growth was no more than the product of fetal cells, Such cells are released when the fertilized egg divides during pregnancy. In the early months of fetal development, these cells — or trophoblasts as they are known — are supposed to invade the uterine wall to form the placenta, a membrane that provides anchorage for the fastingrowing embryo. When the cells are no longer needed, the pancreas secretes an enzyme which kills off the trophoblasts. If, say the Laetrilists, the pancreas fails in its mission, these cells scatter throughout the body. They lose their protective cover and seek to make a new fetus, and this, they say, is the basis of cancer.
Laetrile, they claim, can destroy these cells because it furnishes the missing killer element. This substance, of course, is cyanide, which is released when the Laetrile comes into contact with the enzyme betaglucosidase which has accumulated in the cancer cell. According to the Laetrilists, normal cells are not hurt in the process because they are rich in another enzyme, called rhodanase, which detoxifies the cyanide and prevents injury to the good cells.
The trouble with this neat and almost ideal theory, say the anti‐Laetrilists, is that it isn't borne out by experiments — at least, experiments performed by those outside the Laetrile camp. Indeed, some early research at Memorial Sloan‐Kettering Cancer Center shows that there isn't enough of the betaglucosidase in the cancer cells to release the "killer" potential of amygdalin. Cyanide, moreover, is not specific in its reaction; if released, it will affect normal cells as well as cancer cells. A long history of experiments with cyanide, it is said, has shown that, unfortunately, the chemical doesn't begin to work until there is a lethal dose.
The pro‐Laetrilists, while modifying the original theory of Krebs, argue that, to the contrary, there is increasing evidence that shows the effect of natural cyanide in the body against cancer. An updated version of the theory has introduced the notion that the active element in cancer destruction is not the cyanide from amygdalin, but a substance called mandelonitrile, which is formed in the liver when the Laetrile is injected into the system. On the basis of preliminary tests, a young Israeli doctor, David Rubin, claims that the mandelonitrile compound was used in several patients and resulted in remissions of tumors.
Laetrile has, with these theoretical underpinnings, become a centerprice of the nutritional approach toward cancer. It is attracting an everinincreasing following among those who believe in the effect of vitamins and other natural substances on the course of human disease. This point of view has some support in the scientific community — the most remarkable advocate being Linus Panting, one of the nation's leading chemists, a twointime Nobel Prize winner. Pauling's emphasis, however, has been placed on vitamin C, which he believes is useful not only fur the common cold but in the eradication of serious diseases like schizophrenia and cancer — diseases that he regards as nutritionalindeficiency diseases. His many requests for funds to investigate vitamin C have, however, been turned down by the National Cancer Institute, although another vitamin — A — has been found to have anticancer activity. The most provocative experimental results involving nutritional substances and cancer were announced a month or so ago by Dr. Harold Manner, head of the biology department at Loyola University in Chicago. Dr. Manner says he performed Laetrile tests on a strain of mice known as 113J, which develops mammary tumors, bred at the famous Jackson Laboratory in Bar Harbor, Me. Manner found that injections of Laetrile alone had no effect on the mice's tumors, but that a combination of Laetrile, vitamin A and a special enzyme was startling. "All the tumors in 84 mice regressed in eight weeks" he says. "In 21 mice, given saline solution and used as controls, the cancers continued to grow." His tentative explanation: the vitamin appears to break down the tumor while the enzyme strengthens the immune system and the Laetrile knocks out any metastasizing cancer cells that break off from the primary tumor and float through the bloodstream. Manner admits that most of his colleagues simply refuse to believe his results, and there is considerable skepticism among scientists elsewhere who have seen his findings, including Dr. C. Chester Stock of Memorial Sloan‐Kettering. He is now working on a larger sample of 2,000 mice to try to confirm his
In linking Laetrile to the vitamin movement, Krebs, in 1952, labeled Laetrile B17 claiming it was one of the !complex vitamins, a designation that is denied out of hand by most nutritionists. All vitamins, the official argument goes, are so called because their absence in the body causes a deficiency disease, like scurvy (absence of vitamin C) or beriberi (for vitamin BI ). The ortodox doctors say the absence of vitamin BI7 doesn't cause any provable deficiency disease; unfortunately, this hasn't been tested in any rigorous way. Moreover, not all vitamins are substances from outside the body that cure deficiencies; vitamin D, for instance, can be manufactured by the body from a soincalled provitamin and sunlight.
Soon, clinics were set up in Mexico and in Europe supported by Andrew McNaughton, a pioneer in the Laetrile movement. They offered fullincare dietary therapy as an alternative, or as an addition to, conventional treatment. A new group of doctors — who call themselves "metabolic doctors" — came on the scene, and provided a detailed look at the dietary and lifeinstyle habits of individual patients. They offered a metabolic solution to cancer —a diet of natural foods laced with enzymes and Laetrile in conjunction, at times, with other therapies. Patients came back from these clinics reporting that they felt better, that they had an improved appetite and had gained weight. The word spread that a new "miracle at Lourdes" was occurring at Dr. Ernesto Contreras's Clinica del Mar in Tijuana, and at the Nieper Clinic in West Germany. A thousand people a month soon began to cross the Mexican
The newest clinic in Mexico, the twoinyearinold Clinica Cydel of Tijuana, is a lavish, wellequipped diagnostic center that is highly regarded in Mexican Government health circles. Luis del Rio, one of nine brothers who own the clinic, is so enthusiastic about the future of Laetrile that he and his family arc sinking $1 million into a new and enlarged facility that will include an expanded Laetrile factory and a research center. Another plant is being constructed in I ran.
In the United States, where 75,000 people are said to he taking Laetrile, the drug is obtained legally by cancer patients who can supply a doctor's affidavit, or It Is ob. tallied illicitly from doctors who get their supplies from smugglers, Laetrile, it is said, is the second biggest contraband substance Imported from Mexico, after ma rl jtia nit Much of the world's Laetrile, LAETRILE however, is made in Hamburg from bitter almonds, and shipped throughout Europe and South America. American cancer victims can also get their supply legally through referrals from the Committee for Freedom of Choice in Cancer Therapy in Los Altos, Calif., which emerged in 1972, and now claims a membership of 35,000 with 2,000 doctors, including Representative Larry McDonald, a urologist from Jimmy Carter's home state, who admits to having supplied Laetrile openly to a number of patients.
The underworld of Laetrile — like the subworlds of any entrenched group that is surrounded by a powerful enemy — also has its overt political aspect. The Choice committee acts as a powerful lobby to marshal grassinroots support against bureaucratic intervention in the lives of Americans. It has its own newspaper, The Choice, edited by former Berkeleyan Michael Culbert. It appears on radio, holds meetings and seminars, and can whip up enough angry petitions against the "Fedstapo" (as it calls the F.D.A.) to worry the politicians. "Our cause is rational," says Robert Bradford, head of the Choice committee. "It cannot help but bring the people to our side."
In 1972 the National Cancer Institute succumbed to the pressure. It ordered animal tests to see whether there was any merit to the substance or more realistically, as one frank scientist put it, "to bury Laetrile once and for all."
The job of testing fell to 86yearinold Kanematsu Sugiura of Memorial Sloane‐Kettering, a diminutive Japaneseinborn biochemist who had been testing drugs on animals for 60 years. Sugiura, in fact, was one of the first to develop techniques for screening drugs in cancer testing; he had written almost 300 scientific papers and gone through 1,000 compounds in the dogged search for a "magic bullet" against cancer. He had helped in the development of the antivitamin concept which had led to the antifolicinacid drug known as methotrexate, now used in chemotherapy. As things turned out, Sugiura's experiments with Laetrile were to become the most fateful in the recent history of cancer research.
In 1973, Sugiura conducted three sets of experiments with two groups of 10 mice in each group. The mice came from a strain known as CD8F1, developed by Dr. Daniel Martin of Catholic Medical Center of Brooklyn. The unique characteristic of the strain is that the female mice develop breast cancer in roughly 10 months, and die two months after the onset of the tumor. To one group Sugiura fed varying doses of Laetrile; the other group, acting as a control, were fed saline solutions. Sugiura found that amygdalin didn't destroy the primary tumor, but significantly inhibited the appearance of lung metastases in 8 of 10 animals in one experimental set, 9 out of 10 in the second set, and 7 out of 10 reported, moreover, that Laetrileinfed animals gained weight and looked better. In another test on female mice, he found that Laetrile seemed to delay the appearance of lung metastases, suggesting a prophylactic effect. He wrote up his results, expecting to receive, as he had for years, quick approval and publication. But this report met a different fate, The Sloan‐Kettering staff felt that it was interesting, but hardly definitive; in view of the emotions and politics involved, they were not sure that such results should be released without further investigation and attempts at replication — something they had not done before with a Sugiura paper. While the Sloan‐Kettering staff hesitated, the Sugiura data were surreptitiously released by a proLaetrile supporter in the institution and found their way to the Committee for Freedom of Choice, which published the
"Anatomy of a Coverup." Sloan‐Kettering, feeling unfairly put upon, went ahead with further tests under the auspices of C. Chester Stock, biochemist who had been screening anticancer materials almost as long as had Sugiura. Stock is a member of the American Cancer Society's unprovenindrugs committee.
Two studies were carried out on Laetrile, one by Elizabeth Stockert and the other by Franz Schmid, a veterinarian who happens to be married to Sugiura's daughter. Both investigators found that they couldn't repeat Sugiura's findings, although one experiment did corroborate Sugiura, but was regarded as statistically insignificant. I attended a meeting at which I questioned Sugiura and his colleagues and discovered they were 180 degrees apart, and standing firm. Two additional studies done at Southern Research Institute and at Arthur D. Little, the research firm, also yielded negative results, though some argument ensued on the way the former group had handled the data.
The wide discrepancy between two sets of research findings called for a resolution by a double blind test. In this kind of test, the researcher doesn't know which animal has received Laetrile and which animal has received only a harmless saline solufirst set of tests was conducted by Martin at Catholic Medical Center and proved to be negative. However, Sugiura objected to the procedure, claiming that Martin was injecting the Laetrile into the gut with too long a needle, which killed many of the mice. A new test was conducted in which Sugiura set the conditions and did the injections. Sugiura measured the tumors each week with delicate calipers, and carefully drew a protrait of the tumor he found to exact dimensions. He then checked the lung metastases. These visual observations were doubleinchecked by bioassay — in which the lungs are shredded and injected into other mice to see if they develop metastasis. Again, results proved to be negative. Despite these later negative findings, Sugiura continues in the strong belief that his work has shown that amygdalin has a palliative effect on cancers that is worth further study. The interpretation of the animal results at Memorial Sloan‐Kettering Cancer Center and elsewhere leads to a kind of Catch‐22 situation, since cancer researchers will not order human clinical trials when animal tests are largely negative. But it is clear that negative results in animals do not mean there can be no positive results in humans, and even before Senator Kennedy's proposal last summer — a call for controlled clinical trials came not just from the pro‐Laetrilists but from several distinguished establishment scientists including Lewis Thomas and Dr. Robert Good of Memorial Sloan‐Kettering. There are some obvious advantages to human tests over animals. For one thing, animal tests cannot show the effects of diet, or show a decrease in pain, two alleged results of Laetrile treatment. Furthermore, animal tests have created error. The most glaring example is of course the notorious debacle with thalidomide in Europe. Ani; mal tests showed that the drug behaved, but when used on humans it caused horrible malformations in fetuses.
tion, so there is no possibility of bias in reading results. The also asked Dr. Contreras and Dr. Nieper to submit examples of their best cases so they could follow them up; Contreras did but it was found that only one of the 12 could be located. The others had died of their cancers or were unavailable. Nieper failed to submit any cases.
Yet the nagging question remains: Why do so many people on Laetrile claim beneficial effects? Perhaps there is something there after all. Perhaps the psychological impact on pain alone is worth exploring, or perhaps Laetrile is a synergistic boost to other treatments.
Many scientists are willing to lay the cause to the placebo effect. Dr. Thomas recalls that a cancer patient he knew took Krebiozen because he heard it would do him some good. Then the patient heard on the radio that the drug was a fraud, and he started to get sick again. When the doctor told him the radio report was false, the patient started to improve. Similarly when Edgar Snow, the writer, lay dying of cancer in Peking, it is said that Chou Eninlai brought in his surgeons — the best medical brains in China — who gathered around the bedside and simply looked impassively wise. Snow, it is reported, immediately felt better.
Whether the answer to Laetrile's reported effects lies in such simplistic explanations has nothing to do with the cancer patient's deadly seriousness about the drug. Last year Glen Rutherford, a cancer patient from Oklahoma, made this clear when he brought suit against the F.D.A. on behalf of all terminal cancer patients, arguing that if he waited for the F.D.A. to test the drug he might be dead by the time they finished. He wanted the right to make the decision for himself and to do it immediately. Much to the dismay of the F.D.A., the Federal Judge, Luther Bohanon, ruled in Rutherford's favor and, in effect, set terminal cancer patients apart from others with regard to "unproven" drugs. The Bohanon decision made it legal for terminal patients to import Laetrile with a doctor's
The Bohanon decision also forced the F.D.A. to do something it never thought it would have to do — hold a public hearing on the merits of a substance which it had declared for years to be worthless. The hearings were duly held last May in Kansas City, generating some 900,000 words of testimony. Doctors signed affidavits attesting to the inability of Laetrile to cure cancer. One California physician submitted case histories of 19 patients who died prematurely (or, at least, earlier) because they preferred Laetrile to conventional treatment. Doctors warned that delays in such treatment could mean early and needless death. Counterbalancing this file were sworn testimonials of patients on how Laetrile had improved their health, even saved their lives.
In August, Commissioner Kennedy published his findings in the Federal Register as required by law, saying there was overwhelming evidence against Laetrile as a "safe and effective" remedy for cancer. A copy was sent to Judge Bohanon, who, as this issue went to press, was studying it in preparation for what observers say may be another landmark decision involving the role of the F.D.A. in entering the lives of individuals and in overriding the will of the states.
Meanwhile the F.D.A., which feels that its reason for existence is being threatened ‐ and supported by a noincompromise stand of the American Cancer Society — went on the offensive against Laetrile and its proponents. In Wisconsin and Tennessee its agents recently swooped down on several farmers and confiscated sacks of pits. The F.D.A. asks apricot growers to inform them of what seems to be illicit apricotinpit traffic, and has been reported to use helicoptor surveillance against the enemy pit.
A task force has been set up in the agency to devote considerable time to the issue, and the Xerox machines continue to work feverishly in getting the message to the media and to the legislators in every state that has pending Laetrile bills. A truth squad — headed by Dr. Stuart Nightingale — appears in the legislative halls and on radio and television to explain the F.D.A. view.
In its latest move, the F.D.A. has sought to attack one cardinal benefit of Laetrile — namely its harmlesshave not gone through the gamut of efficacy tests proposed by the F.D.A. They would like to remove some of the restrictions imposed on animal work. They argue that many remedies work on people even if they cannot be shown to be effective on animals, and they would like to move to clinical trials on drugs without going the animal route. As a result they are taking the same philosophical position as the Laetrilists on testing, though opposing equal treatment of Laetrile.
At this point, N.C.I. says officially it is going ahead with human tests in two steps. First, it will retrospectively look at individuals who used Laetrile without resort to any other therapy. If the results are promising, it will move to clinical tests on volunteers. But the protocols haven't as yet been firmed, and some observers note some waffling with regard to the exact composition of the Laetrile to be used, and with concern over the ethics of testing an unproven cancer remedy in human beings. It is quite possible that if there is no agreement at the start, particularly on the composition of the Laetrile to be used, the pro‐Laetrilists will take issue with the results, should they go against them. The Laetrilists are also insisting that, in order to give Laetrile a fair shake, it has to be part of a complete dietary
Some scientists believe that the Laetrile controversy has become a tragicomedy of American manners played in a theater of the absurd, but that in the end it may be the best thing that could have occurred to healthincare practice in America. Depending on the findings from the next round of human tests, the pro‐Laetrilists may have to respond to Senator Kennedy's challenge and admit that the drug is not as useful as they claimed in anticancer therapy. But the issue raised by Laetrile is far more Important than the substance itself. As one eminent scientist, who wants to remain anonymous, put it: "It is time that the high priests of medicine and government examine their own methods and their own consciences before they condemn something unorthodox that might in the long run be useful in the fight against cancer. Even though traditional scientific method has been beneficial, it is not always carved out of rock. Modern medicine needs to exercise more humility and flexibility If it is to live up to its rich heritage of service to man." ■
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/1977/11/27/archives/why-laetrile-wont-go-away-laetrile-laetrile.html
0 Response to "Did Anyone Continue Dr Krebs Ernst Experiment"
Post a Comment