Cover-Up Of Promising Cancer Treatment | Cancer Research | Documentary

thank you [Music] leotroll derived from apricot pits has been banned in the United States since 1963. the Food and Drug Administration says it's harmless but also worthless in fighting cancer its benefits if any purely psychological but in Mexico it's legal every one of us standing here has somebody that we love and care for we're not doing it for ourselves We're Going Through Hell smuggling at across borders bootlegging 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 can't get away from that when you go home to Canada where Leia Trill is not available what will you do [Music] I guess I'll die if I can't get it would you be prepared to buy illegally obtained leotrill in order to have it I steal it you plan to take any Lateral with you when you leave even though it's illegal yes Dr Robert good president of the phone Kettering Institute one of the world's biggest and richest cancer research centers said leotroll does not prevent cancer nor cure cancer or stop cancer from spreading oh my impression of Leia troph was that this was sort of another example of the madness and delusion of crowds you know that under the pressure of this terrible disease otherwise sensible people might become desperate and turn to something that was patently worthless or false and showed the gullibility of people in the face of disaster in the year 1977 Newsweek estimated that 70 000 Americans went across the border to get lateral in Mexico seventy thousand it was a 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 leotroll and this came at a time when the war on the official war on cancer really was a tremendous amount of disarray so it was almost like the public whose hopes had been raised for a quick cure for cancer but 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 has shifted their allegiance to this you know unconventional treatment and is this age or age-old war between quackery and conventionality if you will in medicine and more than any other time in history the weight of public opinion seemed to have shifted over to this quack side and you had something like 19 different states had enacted legislation to legalize layatrol this was a 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 on 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 well I'm new my name is Martha Buena and I said maybe someday it'll be Moss just like that that made an impression on me obviously and we've been married now almost 50 years [Music] 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 an inability to be able to affect a change so I wound up hearing about a job that was opening up at Memorial Sloan Kettering I was working at Hunter College on 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 layperson would see things and ask the questions about their research that any outside person including let's say potential donors would would uh ask one interview after another after another writing endless samples of his work and finally he got the job I started work on June 3rd 1974 and it was uh tremendously exciting time this was in some ways the best job that I ever had certainly had ever had up to that point and in a sense that I ever had because it was a an opportunity for me to quote unquote go back to school and learn this whole amazing world of biology and medical science that you know 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 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 Kettering had taken a very kind of radical turn they had appointed a man by the name of Robert a good Bob good to be the president of Sloan Kettering Institute and he then had appointed a man by the name of Lloyd j old to be the vice president of the Institute [Music] and there was another vice president Chester stock president of the overarching corporation was Lewis 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 the bottom of that really of the totem pole and I was befriended by and friendly with the top person in the instant very heady stuff for a young science writer Bob good was the most I think to this day the most published biologist in the world ever I think uh 1200 papers around the time that I was hired he had this terrible thing happen one of his young Associates William Summerlin had claimed that he could transplant tissue skin from one unrelated Mouse to another unrelated Mouse and he proved this by allegedly taking skin from a black mouse soaking it in some special solution transplanting it onto a white mouse and making it stick and they demonstrated these mice all over the world a lab a technician at Sloan Kettering noticed as they were going up to make one of these presentations he was carrying the cages with the mice and he 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 Summerlin 35 an expert in Immunology a Review Committee said Summerlin painted dark patches on the skin of two white mice so it appeared he had successfully transplanted skin between animals genetically incompatible and this Summerlin had had the audacity to actually paint these black splotches onto these white ice with a magic 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 overall ironies of 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 Sloan headering and I thought oh no you know my luck I just hired on you know as 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 in public affairs I was handed a big portfolio of uh letters from the public this was part of the uh sort of The Unwanted part of the job that no 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 um 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 leotroll or amygdalin and they were often in the form of complaints why we weren't examining this or what do you think of this or 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 trial is labeled Mandela in the trial glucoside and the enzyme it breaks this up is the beta glucosidase and then hydrocyanic acid is liberated and it comes down here and hits the tumor and kills the tumor because there's plenty of beta glucosides in the tumor put that by Nature then that's the end of the tumor then the cyanide sugar molecule releases cyanide gas since cyanide is a deadly poison why doesn't the cyanide kill the patient if any of the cyanide gets out in normal tissues well then you have the enzyme rudinase which changes the cyanide into thiocyanate and is excreted into the urine in therefore there's no toxicity from the lateral treatment we had a um a form letter that had been drawn up before I got there about leotro and it was fairly neutral and it just basically said we're investigating this and um 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 is communicating with us and be done with it I went up to the Walker laboratory in Rye New York which was then a division of Sloan Kettering I went up for a different purpose to interview a different scientist but I had lunch with Dr Chester stock who was the vice president of Sloan Kettering in charge of the worker lab and Dr kanumatsu sugiora Who was this 80-something scientist at slum Kettering and was kind of an oddity in the sense that he was I think the oldest working scientist in The Institute maybe the maybe second oldest person in the entire Center out of 4 600 employees and so we had a nice lunch and Dr stock on the way back uh to to New York City agreed with me or maybe suggested to me that I should write a little biographical article about Dr sigoura and his distinguished uh 60-year career uh in cancer research I like that idea I kind of liked Dr siguri 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 he was there the whole day I mean he came in early in the morning and stayed the whole day to do research and he said with his thick Japanese accent I'm studying amygdalin and it took me a minute to sort of decipher that amygdalin that was the same substance as the layotrol you know the quack remedy that I was writing to people about back in my uh in my office and I said to him well what is there to investigate if it doesn't work this is my my firm conviction and he he got up and he took down he had a uniform series of lab books and he took it opened it up and he showed me that when he gave the uh leotroller amygdalin um that the tumors would stop growing for a number of weeks after a while they'd start growing again um so I was being very uh very young and inexperienced you know 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 the lab books and you could see clearly that um in about um 80 to 90 percent of the animals that only got saline solution salt water solution which is an inert substance that there was um metastases or secondary growths in the lungs of these animals and in the lateral treated animals only uh between 10 and 20 percent had metastases and segurin is very characteristic low-key way said well it would be very interesting if it prevented it completely it was a little disappointed that it hadn't completely prevented the occurrence of lung metastases he said but lateral it's not a cure for cancer it is a good palliative drug based upon of course only on his laboratory experiments I he didn't he didn't know about to my knowledge didn't know about or care about what was going on in Mexico it was very vaguely aware of anything outside the lab I would say it was hard to do 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 kanamatsu sugiora and tsugiora had told him that lateral 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 uh I came away quite quite astonished really when running back to my office and told my boss Jerry Delaney about this and Jerry who probably knew more about the situation than I uh than I realized um told me something very unusual at that point I mean very strange in a way he said I want you to befriend Dr sugiora and and be aware of exactly what's happening with his work because I need to know as public as head of public affairs public relations what is going on up there because this thing could blow up and Blindside us and you know it was a it was a fairly reasonable request I think for a PR director and I had sort of an entree now with Dr segurus I don't want to say I was a spy but you know it was it was a sincere interest on my part it also was sanctioned by my boss to to do this so over the next few years really you know I became close to Dr Segura [Music] one took place in the 74 and the other took place in 75. the 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 Leia troll data that had been accumulated to that point July 2nd 1974 you had the top leaders of memorials on 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 Lewis Thomas never really friendly towards leotro never said a good word really but he was there Bob good who vacillated Chester stock who I think believed in segura's results and Lloyd old who really was the driving force and who co-chaired the meeting what a funny statement is Dr old has written to several World users of Leia troll 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 amygdalin is as non-toxic as glucose and then he summarized cigaroo's results phone Kettering tested tumor-bearing animals 100 treated with amygdalin 25 showed lung metastases to 100 not treated with amygdalene 75 showed lung matasty he flipped the numbers by using the amygdalan some Kettering group believes their results show that amygdalin used in animals with tumors shows a decrease in lung metastases slower tumor growth and pain relief and Dr Stock thinks studies on amygdalin should be made particularly regarding pain relief and reduction of lung metastases that's the message that Lewis Thomas Bob good Lloyd old and Justice stock went to Washington to deliver to the FDA oh [Music] here's a letter from The Office of the President and director of Sloan Kettering Institute dated January 24 1975 to Dr Mario Soto de Leon platoon has something it's not the Magic Bullet but it has helped a lot of patients that were already sent home today 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 sannin visit our Institute and share with us your clinical experience with amygdalin in cancer patients I was pleased to hear from Dr Shannon that our proposed collaborative controlled trials have the approval of your hospital we are looking forward to a fruitful exchange of information my best wishes sincerely yours Lloyd j old so this shows you I mean beyond the shadow of a doubt that the Sloan Kettering leadership was actually trying to set up its own clinical trial in Mexico they're excited about it the results are coming out positive they like some aspects of the theory behind it they think they might be able to produce drugs along the lines of cyanide release that are even better than leotro and the bottom line was you know we think that we should do clinical trials um 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 rousher who is the director of NCI and a lot of other very very famous figures from the NCI in those days this is a who's who of the NCI and from memorial stone Kettering we've got old Thomas stock and then right below Dan Martin from Catholic Medical Center and people from the American Cancer site now what had happened is that Dan Martin Daniel S Martin from the Catholic Medical Center in Queens had joined the discussion and he had been the person who created I guess he'd say the cd8 F1 Mouse which was the main animal model that Segura had used and he had become an adamant opponent of leotrove because of his belligerent personality Dr Dan Martin's career was at a dead end he had lost a big lawsuit against his own institution and had been relegated to an abandoned and graffiti-covered Hulk of a building in Queens the National Cancer Institute had abruptly turned down all of his Grant requests he had no customers for his cd8 F1 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 layatrol boring the country speechifying writing op-eds shouting that lateral 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 take a position against quackery I think is very self-justifying on the part of some people within the medical community it makes them feel better about themselves and about their profession and it's also a quick road to a success because everybody you know in the establishment likes the the night on the White Horse who's 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 foreign [Music] ly the statements that they that they were making each of the top leaders not 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 seventy 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-layageal statement which was odd because nothing was happening at that point scientifically to trigger those comments very distressing very distressing it culminated with a statement that Chester stock gave to David Leff of medical world news in 75 saying we have found 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 scintilla of evidence or not a shred of evidence showing that late draws any effective in any animal system period which is 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 to about leotroll 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 the guru's results with lateral an old's response was different than any of the other leaders at the center he did something and said something that I will never forget he got up from his chair when I when I said obviously he's got it from his chair and he and he he said to me now 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 you know a fledgling science writer said well of course you know and he kind of tiptoed behind me behind the couch and went over to his bookshelf and took down a book and came back and he said here this is the Bible I took a look at this it was the American Cancer society's book unproven methods of cancer management I had this book it was the quack list we were supposed to refer to this book so we'd know what was quackery and what was authentic science I mean this was the most you know really scientifically speaking the most mind-blowing moment of my life because here's the vice president to sell Kettering telling me that The Source the basic source with new ideas within Orthodox science came from what is regarded generally as quackery I mean it was hard to comprehend and I've told this story to people sometimes and you know they think I'm exaggerating and maybe making this up but no I 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 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 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 uh 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 in night after night he would come home and and we were very upset because 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 I was really scared I mean I was scared in a lot of levels um younger than them totally you know nowhere near them in terms of knowledge um 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 uh pursue a career at a at an institution like that here everything was going great for me I said you know you're not the man that that you know 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 who may ever have in your life and uh 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 your conscience is you know is strained uh and my response was to leak the documents I wanted to have my cake and to eat it as well I wanted my job and I also wanted to have a clear conscience so I guess this is why people leak documents all the time this took a lot of doing to convince Segura to give me the actual photocopies of his lab notes I mean that was really sticking my neck out because what if 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 amygdalin for 2 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 amygdalin or lateral had a strong inhibitory effect on the development of new tumors and on lung metastases 11 percent in the lateral treated animals against 89 percent in the control of animals in mice the General Health and appearance of the amygdalan-treated animals with tumors was much better than that of the controls panamatsu sugiora March 1st 1974 May 31st 1974 which incidentally was three days before I actually was started my work at Sloan Kettering Segura wrote the table results showed repeated injections of 2 000 milligrams per kilogram per day of amygdalin for in four to nine weeks had a strong inhibitory effect on the development of lung metastases the detailed data it's it's overwhelming and even the size of the lung metastases that we're seeing 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 layotrol the present study shows that for the first three quarters of their lifespan 21 months the day we prolonged injections of amygdalin did not prevent the development of mammary cancer in mice completely however it had a definite reduction and in development of mammary tumors 70 percent in the controls against 48 percent in the amygdal untreated mice it also shows the Midland had a strong inhibitory effect on the development of lung metastases in mice 75 inhibition against 22 percent in controls and again tremendous detail here's his report on a different system the Swiss albino mice spontaneous tumors in retired breeder mice the megalon had a strong inhibitory effect on the development of lung metastases in mice 77 percent inhibition against seven percent inhibition in controls 77 versus seven the General Health and appearance of the amygdal entreated animals were much better and that of the controls resulted paying with mammary tumors occurring in swissobynomites are essentially the same as those obtained with mammary tumors occurring in cd8f1 mice cyan kanamasu sugiora February 8 1975. and again every Mouse detailed notes [Music] 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 uh 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 couldn't believe that positive data that I had presented her with had turned into kind of a typical anti-layer story on the front page of the times it was a devastating uh blow because I think also I realized I can't so easily convince the mainstream about this so now I had by one route you know the sort of the media route was more or less cut off from me at least momentarily then I decided in the middle of the summer of 75 uh I had to sort of go whole hog and I packaged up a copy and sent it off to the committee for a freedom of choice in medicine which was the main pro-laitral lobbying group that did sort of propaganda for freedom of choice which was the rubric under which leicho was being promoted cancer patient Steve gatler claiming he was cured by Leia Trail 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 foreign to choose our own therapy why should I an American citizen have to go in a black market or smuggle something that I should have the freedom to choose and the committee for freedom of choice of course ran with it this was their dream come true and they republished the data the lateral movement was really in some sense as an offshoot of the John Birch Society and this is like an extreme right-wing group to the right of what you know what we would Now call the tea party I mean get the us out of the U.N and you know 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 count to balance that because everything that was coming out about Leia troll was sort of Tainted uh by its association with the Birch Society most of the people you read about uh in the lateral movement were either in the Birch Society or affiliated with it or sympathetic to it I wasn't and coming from out of the Vietnam 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 with people but it seemed like a kind of a 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 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 all sort of overlapped in fact they still overlap anybody who sees some of the things going on today realize that these issues in one way or another were still with us and he became sort of convinced by my arguments about leotroll although the majority was very skeptical and I think if it you know I mean the 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 or to or interested in it was becoming very very difficult and then I said look we have to do something you know maybe you're not ready to go out and you know ferment to ride in the streets over this but we have to do something and because the people within the New York chapter of science so 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 uh take on that we called our newsletter second opinion because we felt that people were getting the first opinion from Memorial Sloan Kettering but we had another diagnosis of the problem as it were we had another take on what really was going on the second opinion was largely Anonymous it was really written by and put and put out by laid out by Sloan Kettering employees a lot of them were people with grievances of various kinds about their treatment on the job and so forth so it became kind of a anonymous a way for people to Voice or air their discontents in a you know large Center 4 600 employees there's always going to be things happening that people are not happy with especially the testing of leotro at Sloan Kettering so we started working and we had a small group and it turned out that just out of coincidence I was the only one who had no collect connection to Stone Kettering everybody else was either at Sloan Kettering 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 if you had Associated yourself 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 uh and and being the face of the group because no one else could at the time even though they were doing all the work you know Ralph well had all the inside information and as you recruited more people and we recruited them from inside Sloan Kettering and Affiliated institutions and it was all like literally cut and pasted when my wife had some background in graphics so she cut and pasted the issue together and we had it mimeographed and stapled and we handed it out at Memorial and there was a lot of interest in this and so as people came into the organization then they brought their own concerns and some of those concerns were labor concerns we became like the outlet the Clearinghouse for a lot of grievances within the institution of firing that some people thought was racist in nature at least the person who got fired did we had some patient complaints we had complaints coming from the Department of Nursing about the chairman of Nursing and a group and more and more people came in to the group so at one point we had about 20 people I think you know in and at meetings and so forth kind of then wrote These articles about leotroll so the 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 the the workers would always take it the nurses would usually take it the low-level administrators didn't want to be seen touching it but the high level administrators they all wanted to see every single thing that was in it and Ralph used to describe how when it came out every high level administrator was sitting at his desk and nothing would get done in the hospital until they would read through every single line of the paper to see what Scandal was going to come out what controversy was going to come out whose names 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 uh specialized medical training some insight into what was going on within one institution uh 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 [Music] it started out just with Segura running the experiment and coming up with uh you know very positive results every experiment that was done that came out positive had to be redone and retested and rechecked because every time it was something positive that couldn't be accepted I mean that's science it's it was a predetermined uh conclusion then they held their famous June 15 1977 press conference at Memorial about 100 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 have been tested with Leia Trill for four years today Stone 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 amygdalin to clinical trial Bob good we tried to find out from scientific information available whether there was any real scientific evidence that the drug amygdalin or the so-called late Trail had any effect on on cancer in any form and there was no such scientific evidence and Louis Thomas there is no evidence in the several animal models that have been studied that led for a little bit for amygdalene 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 seguru was there and it was quite a hot 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 Elantra do you agree with the conclusions in the summary statement conclusion the fact is not either Pure or prevent cancer I I agree of course Marisa don't agree but I I agree what our Institute said why well I don't know why but uh I think a good can you stick by your results yes I stick I I hope that somebody able to confirm my result later on it was just this electrifying moment I mean you can't even imagine you know the whole I mean my maybe this was just my emotion I felt such a a surge of um admiration for him and and it was so it was such a poignant moment man was about I don't know 87 or 89 years old and here his whole career was on the line and and he was magnificent and he didn't care I mean he was not a proponent of laotra he didn't care one way or the other as far as that goes I'm here almost 60 years nobody disputed my work every paper I sent to the publication or always accepted one of these results also accepted by the publication Sloan Kettering 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 we'll put your data into the paper and then the world can always see that you had gotten these results we don't agree with them but at least they're there and this was the this was the the compromise in a way that he made uh in order because he told me I mean he felt like it was more important that somewhere someday somebody could unearth this study and reconstruct it from the paper that was eventually published in the Journal of Surgical Oncology the scientific papers defining the that are to be published defining this uh this work are available to you I understand and uh it is our interpretation from the all of the evidence taken together uh that there is no substantial evidence of effectiveness of uh amygdalin uh or laid Trill in any form of experimental cancer study these were sent to the Journal of Surgical Oncology and have been accepted for publication probably at the beginning of 1978. that's one reason we're having the press conference today to let you know the results in advance there was the paper and then there was the sort of executive summary of the paper with all the negative conclusions the 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 Segura counted on everybody reading in order to extract the positive data Jerry Delaney told me take all those papers and put them behind the curtain in the other room and don't tell anybody they're there and so when you walked in you got the summary the the the the the jinned up summary of the supposedly negative results on the table the the the the two or three page summary and the extensive paper preprint of the 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 pay 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 and journalism in general everybody more or less 99 out of 100 were willing to take some catering's word for it if you said that you know uh uh the Moon is green then they would accept that the Moon is green they said so and they are the experts they should know as I say doctor Segura first obtained an experiment started September of 1972 the result that caused us to do all the further experimentation and in that experiment he essentially found that the treated animals showed about 20 percent with lung metastases and the uh control showed about 80 percent of the animals with lung metastases this was followed up by five additional therapy experiments in which he obtained practically identical results as far as the lung metastases are concerned normal scientific caution at that point we were quite interested in what he'd found normal scientific question would suggests that we get that confirmed which we attempted to do and I think our normal scientific question was reinforced by all the controversies surrounding the material we then asked Dr Martin who who had been providing all these cd8 F1 mice to try to confirm the results the first experiment actually was a Cooperative experiment in which we were trying a special study and then Dan Martin who was the person who kind of invented the cd8 F1 mouse got involved in the scene and they started to do some experiments but in the the sort of the classic situation and I was mostly involved with in sense of being a segurus confidant on this situation was where they had Martin was to held the key as to which were the treated and the untreated animals Segura who was the blinded person in this environment 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 lateral animals were had nice glossy coats they looked good they were healthy and the other mice were dropping dead I said Dr Segura please don't tell anybody this don't tell them this oh no but I will tell them because it's the truth and I know which are the treated animals and I'm going to tell Dr Stock and I said please Dr Sarah this is not wise it's not you shouldn't do this because I saw that you know the writing on the wall the mice appear to look better mice you know I bet Shake on the very weak but after injection of amigatory in the afternoon you become active and the minute that he told them these are the treated animals they declared the test invalid they declared the blindness aspect was God 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 uh lay a troll one thing about dialect Dimension here in the Russian experiment what we did on October 1976 called branches uh funny funny thing happened that she we inject a military into the animal a small human stopped to grow for one week or five weeks she and in the last experiment what happened is in the control group had to hold you two percent you must stop the growth for one week to five weeks were experimental only 27 percent now we people in chemotherapy we use a certain solution for control of the other drugs because it had no inhibitory effect on tumor now this thing would happen so at something very precuriously foreign if the facts are mutable based upon the needs of the moment then science is dead you might as well pack up 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 is something he had given his whole life for which is that by doing experiments and then reporting them accurately and honestly you advance human knowledge and therefore you advance the welfare of society doctor are you then not convinced that you're finding may very well be confirmed in some future day yes I'm hoping that somebody able to confirm oh 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 countervailing paper that would summarize and refute sugura's positive data they were terrified of the pro-laitral people coming into that meeting waving the anatomy of a cover-up with all the raw data from Sloan Kettering showing the stoppage of metastases and the stoppages 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 layatrol the final conclusion uh uh on part of of of of the people in charge of these studies and certainly it was my final conclusion on reviewing the data uh when when it was pulled together for publication was that lateral is 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 the Principal author of the second opinion a special report at letra 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've 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 is a critique of Islam kettering's two papers on Leia troll then we decided to hold a press conference of our own at the New York Hilton Alec was going to speak and then I was in the office under my Sloan Kettering hat as it were when the call started coming in from reporters to ask for a comment or clarification on what the second opinion report was is there any validity to it at all and so forth and Jerry would say um well you know there's no names of anybody employed at Sloan Kettering on this they claim to be a group that represents long-tering employees but the only name we see is Alec persnicki and we've checked the records and Alex krishnicki 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 some 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 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 in the meanwhile I felt Duty bound to call him and I called him and I said to him Jerry I can't go to the press conference for Sloan Kettering tomorrow because I'm going to the press conference and I'm speaking at the press conference and it was this dead silence and for about 30 seconds and he said I'll get back to you so he 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 generously call errors in the report the most glaring error was they said that all of the chemotherapy is currently in use against human breast cancer could cure or cause objective anti-cancer effects in the mouth and a literature could not cause any anti-cancer effects in the so therefore lateral was obviously much worse than standard chemotherapy this was a an out and out lie it was it could not have been a mistake because the man who wrote the statement himself proved that no known to love could cure or even partially relieved cancer in this Mass their own papers who the chemotherapy didn't work in this system there's two implications to this this later did indeed have the effects in life then lateral is in fact better than all of a known as the Cancer drugs another implication is that since known drugs were known to cure tumors in this mouse and then they went ahead and tested layotroph in this same system it seems pretty obvious that they expected later took a sale in this system didn't fail we're told there were 20 positive experiments with Lance or guns at Stone Kettering between 1972 and 1977. Military alone never cured any cancers in life as long Kettering Miracles had certain positive effects in stopping the spread of the camp said it was the best effects he had seen in 60 years because everybody wanted to know about the motivation of the people involved was there conspiracy and so on and so forth and I I answered this as best as I could the Monday came and I had to go into work which was very strange you know because 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 shall set you free will 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 I if that was my most basic job responsibility I did refuse to do that I uh 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 uh unfair about it and that's what I had been trying to find and to inculcate in that whole situation was fairness fairness towards your fairness towards leotro fairness in the evaluation of a set of data and boy were they not into fairness They seized my filing cabinet and they put it under lock and key they had a big padlock they took it downstairs they had these two Burly guards come armed guards and they told me never to enter the building again I think it was just a liberating feeling the lid finally blew and that's a tremendous relief I don't know the kids were had an emotional time 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 your wife the week of the second opinion report on lateral came out Alec and I received a letter from Segura we had sent him a copy and basically it said your report is very well done and accurate please accept my sincere congratulations and nothing could have meant more to me than to get that 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 foreign even to this day what frightens people in The Establishment about Leia troll isn't about it has nothing to do really with an apricot kernel extract it's about the loss of control the loss of authority the American oncologists in particular are locked into a mindset that's determined by big Pharma and that's why they're there to hear what the latest protocol is from bigfo 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 complementary Medicine of the less you know the more natural products they don't understand the way the system works in the case of layotrol though I think Leia Trill 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 foreign [Music] ER 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 uh you know oncologists from another country heads of departments from other countries that type of thing this was sort of part of my own personal healing process of 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 uh it was 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 going to get and as I'm mounting the podium my good friend Bill Fair Whispers to me don't say anything about leotroll [Music] foreign [Music] 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 will weigh you down it's tragic and you know they they should re-examine this I think just for their own good um 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 uh coming out of the best of motives they weren't able to follow through on they didn't have the courage or 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 work 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 Louis Thomas they all died of cancer so you know it's quite ironic you know while they were while they were fighting over this this treatment they also were incubating the tumors that well the conditions that killed them

Channel: Moconomy

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Keywords: cancer treatment, cancer cure, cure for cancer, how to cure cancer, cancer therapy, Second Opinion - The Lie of America’s War on Cancer 2014, documentary, documentaries, best documentary, youtube documentary, full documentaries, free documentaries, economy, finance, business, Robert Good, Ben Moss, Martha Moss, Eric Merola, free documentary, full documentary, Biography, Drama, cancer, Robert Good cancer, documentaries on youtube, free documentaries on youtube, full movie, doc movie

Id: ee9KCGZvVfA

Length: 76min 1sec (4561 seconds)

Published: Sun Jun 11 2023