Update 6/22/2018:
There is a video available for rent or purchase at a few places. "Second Opinion" about Laetrile at Sloan Kettering.
http://www.secondopinionfilm.com/
https://www.youtube.com/user/secondopinionfilm (summaries, clips)
https://vimeo.com/ondemand/secondopinionfilm
https://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_ss_i_7_8?url=search-alias%3Daps&field-keywords=second+opinion+laetrile+at+sloan-kettering&sprefix=second+o%2Caps%2C214&crid=2S3JPIHDO6SH6
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(I have been gathering my thoughts and research on Laetrile for a relative who has cancer.
I'm hoping this might be helpful to others also. This is an ongoing process for me as I am still
waiting for more books to arrive. I am not a medical professional and this is not medical advice.
These are my opinions - references are provided.)
10/3/01
Dear C,
I am on an alternative health list where we mainly discuss the properties of colloidal silver.
Silver has been used in medicine since the time of the Egyptians. I’ve heard stories that the
older generations would drop silver dollars in a glass of milk to keep it from spoiling.
The idea of consuming a metal never held much appeal for me until I understood that we do
consume metals, i.e. minerals, every day in our foods. Vegetables contain minerals, which are
various metals in ionic form. The principle behind colloidal silver is that it is made by
electronically shaving pure silver ions off of silver wire so that they are suspended in a solution
of water. Consuming the water in small amounts gives a person a powerful antibacterial, anti-
fungal, and/or antiviral weapon against disease or illness.
And why is colloidal silver such a big secret? The theory is that it cannot be patented, so modern
medicine, i.e. pharmaceutical companies, would not be able to make much profit from it. As a few
years have gone by, and as I’ve used colloidal silver for various things (cleaning vegetables,
dropping in infected ears, using in pet water, warding off bronchial infections, killing fungus on
plants, etc.) I realized that theory might be correct. It occurred to me the other day how very many
prescriptions we’ve been able to avoid around here just by using colloidal silver.
So on this silver email list, people go off-topic from time to time, and one of the off-topic subjects
was about Laetrile. I was curious about it and followed the discussion closely. I vaguely
remembered hearing about Laetrile on the news when I was in high school – something like that.
There was a big controversy over it and that’s all I knew. I read what these people had to say and
learned that one can get essentially the same benefit of using Laetrile by eating raw apricot
kernels (the seeds inside the pits.) I looked up a couple of websites that sold apricot kernels, but
never went as far as to buy any. In the last couple of years, I’ve gone this route a few times – my
curiosity gets piqued, I search, read, and almost buy kernels but don’t, and then I forget about the
whole thing.
When you got your diagnosis, I told you I would look up some things to see if I could find info on
herbs or vitamins that might help you as you went through treatment. So I did the whole Laetrile
thing again, but this time more carefully. I read site after site after site, mostly the mainstream
medical sites, and came away feeling very discouraged. It looked like Laetrile was quackery after
all, and more than that, it could be harmful. There was much talk of cyanide toxicity in patients using
Laetrile or eating too many apricot kernels, and that was pretty scary. The sites that spoke well of Laetrile
were mostly full of personal accounts by ordinary people with little science behind it all. I generally
dislike doctors, not as individuals but as a group, and I love nutritional therapies, so I was really
hoping there was something to this Laetrile. But it was looking more and more like a dead end. I was
almost ready to give up and start looking for herbs that might help you rebuild your body after the
damage of the chemo and radiation, but figured I’d give Laetrile one more try. I went to some used-
book websites and looked for books on Laetrile. I went to eBay too. I found some books cheap, and
ordered about six.
The first one to arrive was “Politics, Science and Cancer: The Laetrile Phenomenon” edited by Gerald
E. Markle and James C. Petersen. (An American Association for the Advancement of Science
Symposium Volume, #46, Westview Press Inc, Boulder, CO, 1980).
Excerpt:
About the Book
“At no time in U.S. history has there been a more effective challenge to medical expertise and authority than that mounted by the contemporary Laetrile movement. The efficacy of Laetrile has been debated for over twenty-five years, but despite vigorous opposition from the medical community, support for the purported cancer treatment continues to grow and the controversy has in recent years intensified and become highly politicized. How does one account for the continuing debate and spectacular political growth of the movement to promote Laetrile? This and related questions are addressed by an interdisciplinary group of authors in this first scholarly analysis of the Laetrile phenomenon.”
This book is indescribably dull. I slogged through the first two chapters bored to death.
The history, the background, the court cases, on and on and on. I came to chapter 3,
“Laetrile at Sloan-Kettering” by Richard D. Smith. Smith’s brief bio says:
“Richard D. Smith is editor of ‘The Sciences,’ the Journal of the New York Academy of Sciences. A former staff writer and associate editor of the magazine, he has a special interest in and has written numerous articles on the biomedical and behavioral sciences. He is a member of the American Medical Writers Association and the National Association of Science Writers.”
Because of public pressure and publicity, and generally all the ruckus being stirred up by
Laetrile advocates, Sloan-Kettering took it upon themselves to test Laetrile. For a little
background, there are two basic types of tumors tested in mice. The first are
transplantable tumors, and the second are spontaneous tumors. All the former National
Cancer Institute tests were performed on transplantable tumors, and the results for
Laetrile were negative. Sloan-Kettering’s tests were the first to be performed on mice with
spontaneous tumors. The initial experiments were carried out by Kanematsu Sugiura, “a
veteran researcher with more than sixty years experience at the institute.”
Excerpt, page 63:
“From the point of view of those who had hoped for a quick, negative judgment on Laetrile, Sugiura came up with resoundingly ‘wrong’ results. In three separate experiments he found that Laetrile, though failing to actually eliminate the primary tumor, did appear to retard its growth. What’s more, he found that the Laetrile-treated animals had fewer metastases (secondary tumors) in their lungs than did the control animals, which received an inert saline solution. Since it is often the metastatic spread of cancer that is responsible for the lethal effects of the disease, this finding was of great potential clinical significance. In addition, Sugiura observed that the Laetrile-treated animals appeared to be livelier and healthier-looking than the control animals.”
I almost dropped the book! So there really IS something to this!
It goes on to say:
“Sugiura’s unexpected findings were not published in the scientific literature, nor were they made public by Sloan-Kettering. ‘If we had published those early positive data,’ Chester Stock later told a journalist, ‘it would have raised all kind of havoc.’”
News of Sugiura’s experiments got out anyway, because the results were used in support
of a doctor who was on trial for using Laetrile on his patients in California. Sloan-
Kettering went on to study Laetrile further, in mice with both transplantable tumors and
spontaneous tumors. In June, 1977, they called a press conference to make public the five
years of Laetrile experiments.
Excerpts about what was revealed:
“In none of the collaborative or independent studies conducted after Sugiura’s initial positive findings were the veteran researcher’s results duplicated. His findings were described as ‘seriously challenged’ by the body of subsequent experiments, including those in which he participated.”
“Nonetheless it was noted that Sugiura still believed Laetrile to be a ‘palliative’ if not a cure for cancer, and when questioned whether he stood by his positive results in the face of subsequent studies, he responded, ‘I stick.’”
And then it gets really interesting…..
“… In November of 1977, about five months after the Sloan-Kettering press conference, another press conference was held in New York, this one by a group called Second Opinion, which had just published a 48-page pamphlet on Laetrile at Sloan-Kettering. The group charged that the work described in the June Sloan-Kettering papers was ‘both incomplete and scientifically invalid.’”
“The Second Opinion organization described itself as a group of rank-and-file employees of the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, including both scientific and non-scientific personnel. An offshoot of the radical national organization Science for the People, Second Opinion claimed that its basic aim was to organize the workers are Sloan-Kettering. In the ‘war on cancer,’ the group advocated ‘putting prevention first, making research relevant to human diseases,’ and encouraged ‘an open-minded policy toward new and unorthodox methods, making the best treatment available to all people, and taking the profit out of cancer.’”
“Until the Second Opinion press conference, no employee of Sloan-Kettering had ever publicly identified himself as a member of the organization. The only name openly associated with the group had been that of a City University graduate student. But at this press conference, Ralph Moss, Sloan-Kettering’s Assistant Director for Public Affairs, identified himself as a member of Second Opinion. He was fired from that position the next working day.”
“According to the Second Opinion report, a fair test of Laetrile had been impossible at Sloan-Kettering from the start. The group’s analysis of anti-Laetrile sentiment at the institution included the assertion that Sloan-Kettering had been set up not to produce just any cancer cure, but a patentable one…”
“…The anonymous authors of Second Opinion asked readers of their report who did not share their political perspective not to reject their scientific critique of Sloan-Kettering’s Laetrile experiments because of ideological differences. That critique proved to be a wide-ranging analysis that included charges that Sloan-Kettering had failed to report pro-Laetrile findings (other than Sugiura’s) from experiments conducted at the center and that it had willfully misrepresented the results of those experiments that it did report…”
“… Among the charges of incompleteness made by Second Opinion, the most serious was that an experiment had been carried out between December 1973 and January 1974 in the laboratory of Elizabeth Stockert at Sloan-Kettering. This experiment was conducted with a strain of laboratory mice that, like the CD8F1 strain with which Sugiura had worked, develops spontaneous breast cancer. Second Opinion claimed that Stockert had obtained results similar to those reported by Sugiura and included in their pamphlet a copy of a memo written by a technician in Stockert’s laboratory and addressed to Sloan-Kettering’s vice-president Lloyd Old. The technician reported a longer life, healthier appearance, retarded tumor growth and fewer lung metastases among the mice treated with Laetrile than among control animals.”
“Though not challenging the authenticity of the document, Chester Stock explained that his failure to include a report of the experiment in the scientific papers of which he is principal author hardly indicates a will to maliciously ‘suppress’ pro-Laetrile findings. In the first place, he said, he was not even aware of the work until it was brought to his attention by the Second Opinion report. But even had he known about it he insisted that he would never have published it because the results as presented were ‘uninterpretable.’ Elizabeth Stockert, in whose laboratory the work was done, attributed the fact that she did not bring the study to Stock’s attention to her view of the experiment as only a preliminary study designed no so much to test Laetrile as to familiarize herself and her staff with the animals and materials involved. Furthermore, she pointed out that she had been called away to Europe in the middle of the study and that it was therefore never, in her judgment, properly completed.”
“Sloan-Kettering thus acknowledged the existence, though not the validity, of the Stockert experiment…”
“…Sloan-Kettering never picked up the Second Opinion gauntlet and answered the group’s scientific critique on a point by point basis either in the press conference format in which those results were originally presented nor in the less public medium of the scientific literature.”
I realized that there was more to this issue than met my internet-searching eye. When the
next book arrived, written by a doctor who was harassed, jailed and repeatedly tried in the
courts for using Laetrile, I was ready to listen to his story with an open mind. More later.
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