Thoughts On Breast Cancer Awareness Month
by LAWRENCE BROXMEYER M.D.
10-05-2009©Copyright 2009
Hodgkin's cancer under attack
Dr. Virginia Livingston
Momentum builds
Recognition
US studies take hold
Focus on breast cancer
The
single most convincing study of how bacteria causes cancer
The politics of cancer
Parallels with plant cancer
Seibert rules out
contaminants in the cancer germ
Experimental medicine for the
masses
White Knight
BCG
Livingston's legacy
Conclusion
[INTRODUCTION BY
ALAN CANTWELL, M.D.: Lawrence Broxmeyer MD
presents a landmark article on BACTERIA as causative (and suppressed) agents in
cancer! A colleague of mine (an Internist) has written an excellent HISTORY
(along with dirty medical politics) concerning the cancer microbe
work.......that is, the evidence showing BACTERIA as being heavily implicated in
the cause of cancer.
This continuing research, now
dating back a century, has been SUPPRESSED by the medical establishment for many
decades, presumably because the discovery of bacteria in cancer would threaten
the multi-trillion dollar worldwide cancer INDUSTRY.
As you probably know, the cancer
microbe, and its implications in human health and disease, has also been my
life's work. Dr. Broxmeyer's report is a bit long, but I think anyone who has
more than a passing interest in the cause of cancer, will find this article
informative. By the way, the late Virginia Livingston MD was my mentor in this
cancer research.]
(10-7-09) The word 'cancer' is of Latin derivation and means "crab".
Today cancer "cure" is a vast industry.
But by the turn of the 20th Century organized medicine had come to the
conclusion that it was not a matter of whether infectious disease caused cancer,
but which one. For over two hundred years a cancer germ had been discovered and
rediscovered, named and renamed, each scientist adding to the knowledge, but to
no avail.
Then, in 1910, certain American medical powers did a 180-degree rotation,
deciding that cancer was not caused by a microbe, and that anyone who thought
otherwise was a heretic, a charlatan or a quack. But Dr. Virginia Livingston and
her network were none of the above, their meticulous peer-reviewed research and
publications, done at the height of US post World War II technology.
And Dean Burk, Head of Cell Chemistry at the NCI went so far as to say that
Livingston's cancer germ was as real and certain as anything known about cancer.
Researcher, MD Alan Cantwell Jr. grew up thinking that all germs responsible for
the important diseases were supposed to have already been discovered. But much
to his dismay, he found one that was left out: the cancer germ.
Cantwell already knew that for finding this, Livingston had already been branded
by traditional medicine, leaving what he thought to be perhaps the major
discovery of the 20th century largely discredited. The striking analogy between
cancer and tuberculosis was noticed long before the tubercle bacillus was
discovered.
In 1877, Sir John Simon clearly pointed out the similarity and in fact argued
very strongly in favor of a microbial origin for cancer. But Simon's vindication
would have to wait for Livingston's germ, which although tuberculosis-like, was
not tuberculosis but an atypical form of this mycobacterium, melded from the
mycobacterium and other related Actinomycetales.
Had medical science, and the powers that be, spent as much time in investigating
and destroying Livingston's germ as they did in attacking her and those around
her, cancer might be curable today.
Hodgkin's cancer under
attack
When Virginia Livingston was a student at Bellevue Medical College her pathology
teacher mentioned, rather disparagingly, that there was a woman pathologist at
Cornell who thought Hodgkin's disease (a form of glandular cancer) was caused by
avian tuberculosis [1].
This lady had published, but no one had confirmed her findings. Afterwards,
Livingston compared slides of both. In Hodgkin's, the large multinucleated giant
cells were called ReedSternberg cells. They were similar to the giant cells of
tuberculosis, which formed to engulf the tubercle bacilli. Livingston stored
away in her memory that this lady pathologist was probably right but she would
have a difficult time in gaining acceptance.
By 1931, Pathologist Elsie L'Esperance was seeing 'acid fast' tuberculosis-like
bacteria riddling her Hodgkin's cancer tissue samples. And that germ, once
injected into guinea pigs, caused them to come down with Hodgkin's too,
fulfilling Koch's postulates. L'Esperance brought her stained slides to former
teacher and prominent Cornell cancer pathologist James Ewing. Ewing initially
confirmed that her tissue slides were indeed Hodgkin's.
But when he found out that her slides came through guinea pig inoculation of the
avian (fowl) tuberculosis she had found in humans with Hodgkin's, Ewing, visibly
upset, said that the slides then could not be cancer.
It betrayed his checkered history of high-placed medical politician. In 1907,
you could have approached Dr. James Ewing about a cancer germ, and he would have
embraced you over it. At that time, both for he and the rest of the nations
medical authorities, it was not a question of whether cancer was caused by a
germ, but which one. Was not it Ewing, at one time, who had proclaimed that
tuberculosis followed Hodgkin's cancer "like a shadow"?
But shortly after, James Ewing, "the Father of Oncology", sent a sword thru the
heart of an infectious cause of cancer with "Neoplastic Diseases" [2], becoming
an ambitious zealot for radiation therapy with the directorship of what would
one day be called Sloan Kettering squarely on his mind. His entry lay in
prominent philanthropist James Douglas. A vote for Ewing, Douglas knew, was a
vote for continued radiation and James Douglas began sizeable uranium extraction
operations from Colorado mines through his company, Phelps Dodge, Inc. [34].
Soon Sloan became known as a radium hospital and went from an institution with a
census of less than 15% cancer patients, separated by partition, lest their
disease spread to others, to a veritable cancer center. But the very history of
radiation revealed its flaws, and by the early 1900s nearly 100 cases of
leukemia were documented in radium recipients and not long thereafter it was
determined that approximately 100 radiologists had contracted that cancer in the
same way [3].
Still, Ewing, by now an Honorary Member of the American Radium Society,
persisted.
Elise L'Esperance was anything but alone in linking Hodgkin's to a germ called
Avium or fowl tuberculosis. Historically Sternberg himself, discoverer of
Hodgkin's trade-mark Reed Sternberg cell, believed Hodgkin's was caused by
tuberculosis. Both Fraenkel and Much [35] held, as L'Esperance, that it was
caused by a peculiar form of tuberculosis, such as Avium or Fowl tuberculosis,
and of all the cancers, debate over the infectious cause of Hodgkin's waxed the
hottest.
Into this arena L'Esperance stepped in 1931, with few listening. She would
publish Studies in Hodgkin's Diseases [4] in an issue of Annals of Surgery. It
proved to be the one legacy that no one, not even Ewing, who would soon die from
a self-diagnosed cancer, could take away.
Dr. Virginia Livingston
"Our (cancer) cultures were scrutinized over and over
again. Strains were sent to many laboratories for
identification. None could really classify them. They
were something unknown. They had many forms but they
always grew up again to be the same thing no matter
how they were cultured. They resembled the
mycobacteria more than anything else. The tubercle
bacillus is a mycobacterium or fungoid bacillus."
-- Virginia Livingston, 1972
Virginia Wuerthele-Caspe Livingston was born in Meadville, Pennsylvania and went
on to obtain impeccable credentials. Graduating from Vassar, she received her
M.D. from N.Y.U. The first female medical resident ever in New York City, with
time Livingston became a Newark school physician where one day a staff nurse
asked medical assistance.
Already diagnosed with Reynaud's syndrome, the tips of this nurses fingers were
ulcerated and bled intermittently. Livingston diagnosed Scleroderma. But upon
further examination there was a hole in the nasal septa, something that
Livingston had previous seen in the mycobacterial diseases TB and Leprosy.
So Livingston approached dermatologist Eva Brodkin and a pathologist
for confirmation, all the while convinced that mycobacterial infection was
causing the Scleroderma. She then preformed cultures from a sterile nasal swab
mycobacteria appeared, everywhere [1]. Injected into experimental chicks and
guinea pigs, all but a couple died. Upon autopsy, the guinea pigs had indeed
developed the hardened skin patches of Scleroderma. . . some of which were
cancerous.
Momentum builds
Livingston, now possessed, solicited fresh sterile specimens of cancer from any
operating room that would give them to her. All cancer tissues yielded the same
acid-fast mycobacteria. New Jersey Pathologist Roy Allen confirmed her findings.
Livingston and Allen then found that they could actually differentiate malignant
from benign tissue by their mycobacterial content [5].
But still the explanation for why the cancer germ showed so many different forms
was elusive.
Try as she might, part of Virginia Livingston's problems in an American
validation of her multi-shaped cancer germ lay firmly entrenched in the history
of medicine, especially in the constantly changing field of microbiology. Louis
Pasteur could handle being quickly rushed off a Paris Academy of Sciences podium
to escape harsh reaction to his suggestion that children's milk be boiled first,
but he could not tolerate his rival Pierre Bechamp's statement that a single
bacteria could assume many, many forms.
On his deathbed, Pasteur was said to have changed his mind when he said: "The
terrain is everything", meaning the culture or milieu that bacteria grew on or
in could change their shape or characteristics. But it was too late and even
today, most conventional microbiologists deny the existence of such form
changing (or pleomorphic) germs.
Robert Koch, Father of Bacteriology and discoverer of tuberculosis, could have
helped. When he first worked with the bacteria anthrax, he noticed that
anthrax's classical rod shape became thread-like inside the blood of laboratory
mice. And then, after multiplying, they changed again, into the same assumed
spore-like forms he later documented in tuberculosis as well.
Aware of what she faced, yet undismayed Livingston methodically went about
proving cancers true cause. First in her line of attack were the long suspected
and well-publicized tumor agents of Rous, Bittner and Shope. By
photomicrographs, Livingston and her group demonstrated acid-fast mycobacterial
forms in each of these so-called "viral" cancers. This included the famed Rous
chicken sarcoma.
Early on, Virginia Livingston had decided that she needed help in validating her
cancer germ and nobody knew the shapes and staining capacities of mycobacterial-related
germs better than Dr. Eleanor Alexander-Jackson of Cornell.
As far back as 1928, Eleanor Alexander-Jackson, bacteriologist, had discovered
unusual and to that point unrecognized forms of the TB bacillus, including its
filterable forms. By 1951, Alexander-Jackson was considered the expert TB
microbiologist at Cornell.
In the same year, another American, H.C. Sweany proposed that both the granular
and other forms of tuberculosis that passed thru a filter caused Hodgkin's
cancer [6]. This was subsequently supported by studies by Mellon, Beinhauser and
Fisher [7,8]. Mellon prophetically warned that tuberculosis could assume both
its characteristic red acid-fast forms as well as blue nonacid-fast forms
indistinguishable from common germs such as Staphylococci, fungi and the
Corynebacteria and that this would surely perplex modern microbiologists.
When organized medicine choose to ignore these studies, Jackson warned that a
so-called cure for TB could be as short-lived as it took classical TB rods, for
the moment gone underground as a nonacid-fast form, to resurface one day and
spring back towards destruction. Although American medicine had no serious time
for Alexander-Jackson or her discoveries, it would not disturb her for as long
as she focused on tuberculosis and its cousin, leprosy. But when her focus
shifted towards Livingston's cancer germ, it would move to destroy her. She
simply posed too great a threat.
Recognition
By December of 1950 Livingston, who would go on to write over 17 peer reviewed
articles by the end of her career, wrote, together with Jackson and four other
prominent researchers, what still stands as a milestone on the infectious nature
of cancer [9].
At the AMA's 1953 New York exhibit, participants interest was particularly
riveted towards an exhibit of Livingston's cancer germ, live. The press, muzzled
by Sloan Kettering's head, Cornelius Rhodes, was not allowed to interview or
report on this exhibit. Above, the cancer germs seemed indestructible, surviving
a five-day experience of intolerable heat from closed-circuit microscopy [1].
As Livingston and Jackson's work on the cancer germ became more and more
convincing, her opponents surfaced and became more and more vocal.
Also with recognition, came visitors. One a pathologist from Scranton, Dr.
George Clark, told Livingston he had cultured Dr. Thomas Glover's famed cancer
germ from human cancer and developed metastasizing tumors in animals from it.
Clark assured Livingston that Glover was on to the same bacterial pathogen that
she was. For more than two hundred years, the same organism had been discovered
and rediscovered, named and renamed, each discoverer adding to what was known
about the cancer germ, but thus far to no avail.
US studies take hold
Clark knew Glover as part of an investigative team of the US Public Heath
Service headed by George W. McCoy in 1929. Glover had just become too well known
to be ignored. His cancer serum was working.
Much was at stake. The Country was already committed to the idea that cancer
could not possibly be an infectious disease, and Glover was saying that he had
already isolated the cancer germ.
Actually, he had not, but few would believe that it was really his young,
tobacco-chewing assistant, Thomas Deaken who had isolated it. Deaken worked his
way up New York's health and hospital system from the most menial positions to
laboratory assistant. With neither formal medical or scientific training, this
laboratory assistant nevertheless learned laboratory protocol [10].
Incredibly Deaken engineered a geranium based culture medium, managing to grow
out acid-fast, tubercular bacteria. Then he inoculated mice and dogs, producing
cancer with metastatic spread in every case [10]. Sometime between 1917 and 1918
Thomas Daeken, laboratory assistant, produced a specific anti-cancer sera by
injecting horses with the human cancer germ. Moreover, the sera worked whether
in prevention or cure of his cancerous laboratory animals. But Glover had come
to the point where he needed someone to lend credibility to his work, and that
someone, came in the form of Dr. Thomas J. Glover of Toronto.
It will always be to Glover's credit that he saw the importance and application
of Deaken's work from day one. A contract was quickly drawn up and executed.
Glover rushed back to open a Canadian cancer clinic in Toronto. The serum worked
in many but not all cases; but as Glover's reputation grew, so to did the
interest in him of Canada's organized medicine. A subpoena giving him 21 days to
submit a full presentation of his treatment was issued. But Glover was not
cooperating. Glover was in trouble and would soon be chased out of Canada [10].
By 1926, and now in the US, Glover published Progress in Cancer Research,
presenting over 50 cases, most of which went into remission with Glover's Serum
[11].
It sparked additional notoriety, both here and abroad. In 1929, Livingston's
friend Dr. George Clark joined Dr. George McCoy, then head of the Hygienic Lab
of the US Public Health Service. Their intended destination: Glover's
laboratory, now at New York's Murdock Foundation. Glover was under investigation
and McCoy wanted him to repeat his work, this time under Health Service
surveillance and in Washington.
Glover complied, and he and his team went to the nations capital to prove their
case at what was to one day become the National Institute of Health. McCoy, the
investigator, impressed by Glover's work, rather than come down on Glover,
instead issued a 1937 letter to Surgeon General Parran, which spoke in glowing
terms of the great importance and significance of Glover's cancer findings.
Soon thereafter, McCoy was abruptly and mysteriously replaced by Dr. R.H.
Thompson. Parran, a product of organized medicine, had a definite agenda. The
question before him was whether to publish Glover's now finished Washington
report or not and Parran, despite continued committee approval, was not about
to, sending Glover into a cold rage which ended with him walking away from
Washington to publish independently.Meanwhile, Glover's serum, which had helped
and saved so many was subjected to cursory animal studies and a review without
clinical trials before being condemned by Government agencies.
Glover would eventually return to Canada, but he would never again answer
questions as to just what had happened in America.
Focus on breast cancer
Virginia Livingston now went specifically after breast cancer. Thirty sterile
cancerous breasts were transported from operating room to lab.
Cancers were isolated from each breast and when axillary tissue from under the
arm was supplied, the cancerous portion was cut from this too. Livingston and
Jackson found the cancer germ everywhere, and in the case of underarm glands,
even when the pathology report was negative, the cancer microorganism surfaced
[1].
Champion of toxic chemotherapy, Cornelius Rhoads replaced Ewing at Sloan.
Rhoads, head of chemical warfare during the Korean war, was deeply committed to
chemotherapy and the huge grants it brought from the pharmaceutical industry.
It is poorly recognized that the chemotherapy or "chemo" used against cancer
began as a weapon of mass destruction par excellence [12]. When the Axis folded,
nitrogen mustard, declassified, first came under real medical scrutiny for
cancer. Initially evaluated for lymphosarcoma in mice, human studies soon
followed as more and more variants of nitrogen mustard were concocted and tried
[12].
Other related classes of chemotherapeutic agents followed and so did their
repercussions. Most had the potential to cause a second entirely different
cancer [13]. Even tamoxifen for breast cancer was associated with a two to
three-fold increased risk of cancers of the lining of the uterus (endometrial),
some of which were high grade with a poor forecast [14].
Nevertheless, Cornelius Rhoads remained committed to the treatment, and at the
same time prepared a series of major roadblocks to stop Livingston.
In 1950, he barred her from presenting her paper on the cancer germ at the New
York Academy of Sciences by discrediting Irene Diller, the symposiums sponsor,
chief-editor of the respected journal Growth, and a prominent cancer researcher.
Diller, like many, had accepted a gift from a pharmaceutical house at one point.
Livingston came across Diller in a Life Magazine article which talked about a
Philadelphia cancer researcher who was observing strange fungus-like filaments
protruding from cancer cells. Livingston and Alexander-Jackson convinced her
that her fungal forms (the prefix myco in mycobacteria denotes a germ with
fungal properties) were part and parcel of the cancer microbe, and that crucial
to its identification was acid-fast staining.
Dr. Eleanor Alexander-Jackson's elation over the groups infectious breast cancer
findings came to an abrupt halt when she was informed by her private physician
Frank Adair that she too had it. A radical mastectomy was done at Sloan on
Adair's advice.
While anxiously waiting for the outcome, Dr. Virginia Livingston heard her name
paged on Sloan's overhead. Rhoads wanted to speak to her regarding Jackson's
ongoing surgery. It was urgent. Alexander-Jackson was still in the operating
room and the radical mastectomy had been done. In Rhoads office, the two
adversaries faced off. incredibly, Rhoads was after permission to go after a
cancerous lymph node deep in the middle of Eleanor's chest. Livingston bristled.
"We have been looking for a tumor such as she has." said Rhoads.
Apparently a radical was not enough. He was seeking permission to try a new
surgical technique which went after the deep chest node.
Livingston had had enough. Just the thought of the cruel, disfiguring procedure
made her sick. "Not on your life." She shot back, as she left [1].
The
single most convincing study of how bacteria causes cancer
By 1965, Edith Mankiewicz, Director of labs at Montreal's Royal Edward Chest
Hospital and assistant professor of bacteriology at McGill, by examining human
cancer tissue, established mycobacteria-like germs inside cancer [15]. In the
bibliography of one of her landmark papers is reference to a personal
communication with Dr. Eleanor Alexander-Jackson. One of the cancers under
Mankiewicz's trained eye was lung cancer. Lung cancer,or bronchogenic cancer,
was first reported in the nineteenth century at a time when it was practically
unknown-while mycobacterial disease of the lung, primarily tuberculosis, was so
rampant as to be called 'white plague' or in certain circles: 'captain of the
men of death.' By the middle of the seventeenth century, one in five deaths was
due to tuberculosis and at the end of the nineteenth century, there was fear
that it would destroy the very civilization of Europe. So difficult was it to
differentiate tuberculosis from the newly discovered bronchogenic cancer that it
was only after cases first mistakenly diagnosed as lung cancer were operated on
that the benefits of surgical resection of tuberculosis were recognized [16].
Mankiewicz not only showed the cancer germ in malignant tissue but significantly
demonstrated how it probably evolved from tuberculosis and related
microorganisms when some of the viral phages that lived in them jumped germs,
bringing genetic materials which altered the target germs virulence and made
them drug resistant.
In fact beneath her microscope lay a pictorial of how the cancer germ emerged
from TB-like bacilli to create pre-malignant change in mammalian tissue [15].
By 1970, Sakai Inoue, a PhD from Maebashi, Japan and Marcus Singer, a doctor at
Case Western's Developmental biology, completed the single most convincing study
of how bacteria cause cancer altogether, with TB-like mycobacteria. Supported by
grants from the American Cancer Society and the National Institute of Health,
their study used cold-blooded animals, namely the newt or salamander and the
frog. But similar studies showed its applicability to mice [17] and humans
[18,19]. Inoue:
"An organism similar to the mycobacterium Described
here has been isolated and cultured from tumors and
blood of tumerous mammals, including man, and when
injected into mice and guinea pigs, has been reported
to yield a chronic granulomatous disease, neoplasm
(cancer), or some intergrade."
-- Inoue and Singer, 1970
Back in the spring of 1953, Sakai Inoue noticed an adult salamander with a hard
mass on its stomach. He removed the mass, which turned out to be malignant. Then
he injected tissue from the mass into healthy animals. Again, cancer developed.
In the work that followed, Inoue and Singer, from electron micrographs, knew
that bacteria were involved, bacteria which stained acid-fast...mycobacteria
[20]. Inoue inoculated three other types of mycobacteria, into healthy animals.
All came down with cancer, something that did not happen when other germs such
as staphylococcus or streptococcus were used. Amazingly Inoue and Singer even
noted regressions in some of the cancers, especially if very dilute solutions of
the germs were used to initiate them. Furthermore, since cancers stemming from
'carcinogens' were structurally identical to mycobacterial induced cancers, the
investigators results suggested that such 'carcinogens' might merely be factors
that activate preexisting infection. The phages inside mycobacteria are viruses
known to be activated by carcinogens such as UV light and chemicals [21].
Mankiewicz, five years previously, had shown that these phages, once
activated, could cause pre-malignant changes in mammalian tissue [15].
Sakai Inoue and Marcus Singer's study should have once and for all convinced
Virginia Livingston's opponents of the veracity of her results, and that she was
not mistaking common contaminants such as staph. or strept. for the cancer germ.
. .but it did not.
The politics of cancer
It was public knowledge in early 1951 that the Black-Stevenson Cancer Foundation
intended to award two huge Black grants of $750,000 towards
cancer research and that the first would go to Livingston's group at Newark's
Presbyterian; with an equivalent amount to go to The Memorial Center for Cancer
(now Sloan-Kettering), which Rhoads headed. The trustees having already decided
this, the actual allocation was left in the hands of Newark lawyer Charles R.
Hardin, but fate intervened.
Livingston:
"Hardin, the lawyer in charge of allocation, soon
would lie dying of cancer at Memorial and while still
alive was prevailed upon by design of Rhoads to sign a
paper giving Rhoads power over how Presbyterian's
grant was to be spent. And that wasn't going to
include further research towards an infectious cause
for cancer." -- Livingston, 1972
Still Rhoads was not finished. Livingston, already world-recognized, took her
cancer microbe and a guest named George Clark to Rome's Sixth International
Congress for Microbiology, a trip paid for by her husband's firm as a consultant
to British industry. In Rome, Livingston met Emy Klieneberger-Nobel at the
Lister institute. Klieneberger-Nobel was a pioneer uncovering bacteria without
cell walls which led them to assume many forms [32]. She called them 'L-forms'
in deference to the Institute at which she worked. Her exploration also covered
bacteria with cell-wall breeches. In either case, the resulting germs, called
'cell-wall-deficient' assumed many forms (pleomorphic). Livingston immediately
saw Klieneberger's work as clearing a large part of the confusion over her
many-formed cancer germ.
Livingston's trip to Rome's Congress of Microbiology was punctuated by a stop to
visit von Brehmer in Frankfort. Von Brehmer's vaccination techniques, long
respected throughout Europe, were now licensed by the German government.
During the war, Wilhelm von Brehmer's scrimmage with the Nazi medical
establishment went right to the top. Severely criticized for saying that cancer
was an infectious disease, the struggle eventually found its way to Hitler
himself, who, puzzled, yet interested, ordered an inquiry on the matter at the
1936 Nuremberg Party Conference. Subsequently, the committee formed came down
hard on von Brehmer's views. Nevertheless, unperturbed, he somehow persisted
into the legendary status he now maintained.
Big names began to join the conference, including Nobel Laureates Fleming and
Waksman. By the time Virginia Livingston returned to the States, the Rome
conference had been highlighted by several news services. Beginning with the New
York Times and The Washington Post, other papers quickly followed suite: the
cancer germ had been found. Reaction quickly followed. At The New York Academy
of Medicine, spokesman Iago Gladston, fresh from executive session, held his own
sort of news conference:
This is an old story and it has not stood up under investigation. Microorganisms
found in malignant tumors have been found to be secondary invaders and not the
primary cause of malignancy. Livingston, 1972 Livingston returned to Newark. Her
Chief, James Allison, contacted her with the bad news. Since they had lost
Black-Stevenson funding, he wanted her to close up Presbyterian's research and
move back to Rutgers's home campus in distant New Brunswick. And in still
another cost-cutting gesture, she was informed that her close friend and
associate Eleanor Alexander-Jackson would have to go. Shocked, Livingston made
arrangements to leave Rutgers altogether. Barely unpacked from Europe,
Livingston's husband would now be hounded by the IRS regarding where they got
the funds for the European trip.
Someone had implied the money came from his wife's grants. This did not bear out
and the couple demanded to know who had instigated the inquiry. "Someone high up
in New York in cancer." The IRS agent replied [1].
Parallels with plant
cancer
By 1925 Mayo's Charles Mayo became interested in Erwin Smith's discovery of
cancer in plants, called crown gall. Livingston and Jackson, sensing a possible
link between Smith's work and their own, went to the Bronx Botanical Garden to
request cultures of Bacterium tumefaciens, the plant cancer germ he had
discovered. No mere accident led Virginia Livingston towards Smith's work.
Smith stained his plant cancer germ with Fuchsin, long used to spot
tuberculosis. And Smith's bacteria, like Livingston's, had many shapes. He had
stumbled across B. tumefaciens in 1904, when he received some New Jersey daisies
with overgrowths superficially resembling olive tuberculosis, a known disease of
plants, but which proved to be plant cancer.
Smith had long suspected a bacterial cause for human cancer and criticized
pathologists for drawing:
"Too sharp a demarcation between malignant tumors, on
the one hand, where the cells of the animal or human
host, acting under some unknown stimulus are
responsible for the tumerous growth and granulomata
(benign tumors) on the other hand, such as
tuberculosis and actinomycosis, where a visible
microbe is responsible for the primary tumor, and the
direct migration of this microbe for any secondary
tumors that may appear." -Rogers, 1952
Smith's conclusion:
"At the bottom, I think the distinction between such a
disease, for example as tuberculosis or leprosy and
malignant tumors is not as sharp as some histologists
have been inclined to believe". -Rogers, 1952
It could be said that at one time the entire medical and scientific community
was set on fire by Erwin Frink Smith's discovery of the bacteria that caused
plant cancer. Twice honorably mentioned in The Journal of the American Medical
Association, their Editorial "Is Cancer of Infectious Nature?" mentions how
Smith's work made "a very strong case in favor of his view of the infectious
cause of cancer in general." (JAMA, 1912)
By 1921, Margaret Lewis, of the Livingston Network, approached Frink Smith
regarding her planned chicken inoculations with B. tumefaciens. Lewis would go
on to elicit the cancer sarcoma from chick embryos using B. tumefaciens.
On January 31, 1925, an English abstract in the authoritative German Kinische
Wochenschrift, written by Ferdinand Blumenthal, trapped Smith's attention.
Blumenthal, with assistants Meyer and Auler had shown that human cancer bore a
microorganism closely resembling tumefaciens which in turn caused malignant
tumors in plants as well as animals, complete with spread or metastasis.
Paula Meyer had worked with Friedlander on the human cancer germ since 1923. Her
particular discovery was of a bacteria inside breast cancer which she called PM
for Paula Meyers. She had also discovered closely related strains from 15 other
human cancers. Smith examined stained slides of Meyer's cancer germ from human
breasts. It looked much like B. tumefaciens. Meyer's germs were short rods,
single or paired, and they stained with the same Fuchsin that he had used [22].
Moreover, when Blumenthal and Meyer inoculated their human cancer germ PM into
plants, the tumors looked exactly like crown gall. That PM could produce plant
cancer was now for Erwin Frink Smith beyond a shadow of a doubt. But it could
not be B. tumefaciens itself, because no strains that he had tested grew at body
temperature in warmblooded animals. His conclusion: that human cancer was
probably due to some other microbe, possibly a mycobacteria, that had similar
chemical activities to B. tumefaciens.
Seibert rules out contaminants in the cancer germ
The only time that Dr. Florence Siebert, long part of established medicine, ran
into resistance and suppression, was when she decided to have a closer look at
Livingston's cancer germ. One of America's finest Ph.D. Biochemist's, while
still at Yale she resolved the mystery of the many fevers coming from distilled
water for injection and thought to be caused by fever-producing 'pyrogens',
quickly proving that these were in fact bacterial contaminants. Having solved
the mystery of pyrogens, Siebert was asked by Dr. Esmond Long to stay on at the
University of Chicago to develop the Tuberculin skin test. Long suggested a
European trip to learn techniques practiced on the continent [23].
At the Pasteur Institute of Paris, Seibert exchanged ideas with Boquet, Calmete
and Guerin: the three investigators who presented to the world its only
recognized vaccine for tuberculosis, called BCG [23].
Seibert returned to the US and when Long left Chicago to head laboratory
operations at the Henry Phipps Institute in Philadelphia, she accompanied him.
By 1903, Henry Phipps, wealthy partner of Andrew Carnegie, sought a charitable
outlet for his wealth. He then joined Lawrence F. Flick, a doctor with a vision
to open a center solely dedicated to the study, treatment and prevention of
Tuberculosis.
Still working off grants from the National Tuberculosis Association, Seibert was
asked at Phipps to continue her work for a skin test using Koch's original Old
Tuberculin (OT). Seibert refined and purified the protein in her TB skin test.
She named it PPD-S, both because it was a purified protein derivative and was
intended to serve as a standard (S) for the US Government, which it eventually
became. Then, after 30 years in tuberculosis research, Seibert turned towards
cancer. In 1948, Margaret Lewis of Philadelphia's Wistar Institute asked Seibert
to do a nucleic acid analysis on Wistar rat tumor extracts, which Seibert
agreed.
Next, Irene Diller, who networked extensively with Livingston, asked Seibert to
look at her slides of the cancer microbe. Seibert relates what she saw:
"I saw tiny, round, coccoid organisms, many of which
were magenta in color. The slides had been stained
with Ziehl-Neelsen reagent, which we regularly used to
stain our tubercle bacilli red. When I learned that
she had isolated them from a rat tumor and could do so
regularly from tumors in general, as well as
from blood of leukemic patients, I asked, "Could you
find them in the rat sarcoma tumor I am studying?"
-Seibert, 1968
Diller agreed to try. Lewis allowed Seibert to forward the tissue sections. The
results came back. The same cancer germ appeared. Seibert immediately saw the
implications:
"This looked terribly important to me, and I was
thenceforth willing to do whatever I could to help in
this promising field. We did help by studying the
immunological relationship to our tubercle bacilli, as
well as to the "atypical" bacteria closely related
to our tubercle bacilli." - Seibert, 1968
Seibert was even more impressed with how Diller, following the footsteps of
Livingston and Jackson, proved, thru Koch's postulates, that her germ was the
cancer germ:
"It is based on her (Diller's) work that I am willing
to say I believe she has found the cause of cancer,
which I think no one can refute, and this work should
be welcomed and confirmed by other cancer researchers,
and not be ignored, even in view of the great
stir at present about viruses." -Seibert, 1968
Florence Seibert joined Livingston's crusade in earnest in the 1960s, turning
her cancer organism over to Frank Dunbar, chief of laboratories at the Southwest
Tuberculosis Hospital in Tampa. Dunbar's conclusion: her multi-formed germ did
not belong to his groups of known "atypical" mycobacteria, even though they did
have some of the properties of the mycobacteria [23].
Experimental
medicine for the masses
Eventually Virginia Livingston gained university affiliations in San Diego
working out of the University of San Diego with Dr. Gerhard Wolter of nearby San
Diego State. In 1970, Wolter and Livingston discovered actinomycin-like
compounds produced by the cancer germ, one of which, Actinomycin D or
Dactinomycin, depite its toxicity, was being used in cancer. Livingston was
aghast that her own discovery was being used this way. She cautioned that not
only did actinomycins arrest the maturation of cells and inhibit the immune
response but that they also inhibited enzymes and decreased hormone levels,
stimulating the body to increase its hormone production [1].
She was puzzled as to why anyone would want to use a devastating substance like
Actinomycin D for the subsequent treatment of cancer. Yet it was being done.
Even more disturbing was the way in which organized medicine was responding to
the hormonal disruption in the body caused by her cancer germ.
By 1966, Charles Huggins of the University of Chicago went to Stockholm and
received a Nobel Prize for determining the effects of sex hormones on cancer
that had spread. Following this, the practice of castrating cancer victims came
into vogue. Consequently, someone came to the conclusion that if castration
helped initially, any recurrence would better be treated by cutting out the
adrenal glands, housed on top of each kidney.
And since this never produced earth-shaking results, a new procedure was devised
to cut through the nose and remove the pituitary-the master gland of the body,
lodged near the brain. Virginia Livingston had established that abnormal
hormonal stimulation was coming from the toxic materials and hormonal derangers
manufactured by her germ. In response America was chopping out the glands of its
cancer patients.
White Knight
In The Cancer Microbe, Alan Cantwell acknowledged the invaluable help of four
women who pioneered the early microbiology of cancer: Virginia Livingston, M.D.;
Eleanor Alexander-Jackson, PhD; Florence Siebert PhD and Dr. Irene Diller [24].
Cantwell grew up reading that all germs responsible for the important diseases
were supposed to have been already discovered. But much to his dismay, once a
physician-researcher, he encountered the one left out: Livingston's cancer germ.
And although he knew that the many-shaped germ had long been considered a mere
contaminant or secondary invader or even non-existent, Cantwell, like Seibert,
knew better.
Cantwell first contacted Virginia Livingston thru the suggestion of a colleague
who had heard her on radio and immediately sensed their common ground, which
was, by then, the acid-fast bacteria found in Scleroderma and cancer. Despite
her meticulous research, Cantwell knew that Livingstone had already been branded
by traditional medicine as a charlatan, leaving what he thought to be perhaps
the major discovery of the 20th century largely discredited [24].
By 1971, Cantwell had published on Scleroderma in the highly respected Archives
of Dermatology and had no further intention of pursuing Livingston's germ.
Livingston, Jackson, Diller and Seibert had each drawn considerable fire from
the medical establishment and despite Livingston's persistent overtures towards
him, there was no way he wanted in.
By 1974, Lida Mattman's Cell Wall Deficient Forms [25], reconfirmed for Cantwell
as well as others that many bacteria, but especially tuberculosis and the
mycobacteria existed naturally in many forms a cycle of growth which involved
"cell-wall-deficient forms" ranging from viral look-a-likes to bacterial forms
to granules and then on to larger globoid shapes. But most physicians and
laboratory scientists were being taught little about cell-wall deficient
bacteria.
Cantwell's silence threshold was exceeded forever when he again saw the cancer
germ in the skin of the chest wall of a young woman who had lost both her
breasts to metastatic cancer. Removing this patients skin lumps, Cantwell and
colleague Dan Kelso at first cultured Staph. epidermiditis, a common
contaminant. But as their cultures aged, the seeming Staph cocci became large
globoids, rods and yeast-like forms with acid-fast TB-like granules everywhere
[25].
Tracking down specimens of the woman's original cancer, removed a year earlier,
Cantwell not only isolated the variable acid-fast cancer germ in the tumor
itself, but in surrounding specimens taken from the woman and thought by
pathologists to be normal. This in effect established that the germ existed in
the victims tissues before it became cancerous.
In a series of peer-reviewed, penetrating articles, Cantwell found the cancer
microbe in three other cancers: Hodgkin's, Kaposi's cancer of the skin and a
rarer skin cancer called mycosis fungoides.
It became obvious to Dr. Alan Cantwell after twenty years of microbe hunting
that the old tenets of microbiology were not much use when it came to showing an
infectious cause of cancer. In man as well as in nature, bacteria were
constantly changing forms and evolving in their lifetime. The cancer microbe,
unstable by nature, was no exception [25].
But 25 years after removing the metastatic breast nodules from the skin of a
young mother and finding them variably acid-fast, there remained no cure for a
germ which though tuberculosis-like, seemed indestructible. And a germ without a
cure, as shown by the mixed reception to Koch's discovery of tuberculosis, even
decades later, fostered it's own resentment and disbelief, a resentment and
disbelief which Virginia Livingston never stopped facing.
BCG
It seems to me that it is entirely rational to state
that the reason the BCG vaccine is effective not only
against tuberculosis, but leprosy as well as cancer is
because of the fact that the cancer germ is closely
related to the BCG since it is in the same
family, the Actinomycetales.
-Livingston, 1972
When Florence Seibert met Boquet, Calmete and Guerin in Paris to discuss their
BCG, the only recognized vaccine for tuberculosis in the world, made from cow or
bovine tuberculosis, none of them had any idea that it would one day be used
against cancer. But in fact, currently, this diluted vaccination of
Mycobacterium bovis or cow tuberculosis is the most effective treatment for
transitional cell carcinoma, a cancer of the urinary bladder. Moreover, BCG is
the most successful therapy of its kind, called 'immunotherapy' [26]. Within
'immunotherapy', it soon became fashionable to suppose that BCG or cow
tuberculosis somehow 'bolstered' the immune system, but noted immunologist
Steven Rosenberg held that the immune system was highly specific. One immune
stimulant such as BCG should not stimulate a response from another immune
stimulant, cancer [27].
The precise mechanism as seen by a 1993 University of Illinois study was that
initially cancer cells seemed to eat (or phagocytize) and kill the Mycobacteria
bovis in BCG. But then, suddenly, the cancer cells too died. Although
investigators in the study admitted the relationship wasn't clear, a strong 'tumoricidal
agent', inside the Mycobacteria was pointed to [28]. Livingston felt that
investigators were probably unwittingly looking at was a common phenomena in
nature known as 'lysogeny'. Lysogeny is what happens when one colony of a
similar bacteria kills another by hurling viral phage weaponry towards it,
without itself being harmed.
By the late 1970s Virginia Livingston could no longer ignore Chisato Maruyama of
Japan and sent John Majnarich of Seattle's BioMed Laboratories to Japan to have
a closer look. In 1935, Maruyama, of the Nippon Medical School began to develop
a vaccination against tuberculosis which turned out to be good against cancer.
The Maruyama vaccine was similar to BCG, but instead of using cow tuberculosis
as its base, the Japanese version used human tuberculosis.
Chisato Maruyama had long noted that patients with either the Mycobacteria
tuberculosis or leprosy seldom had cancer [33]. By the 1970s Maruyama's vaccine
was proving quite successful in that he claimed that half of the 8000 cancer
patients he had treated had benefited [29].
Livingston's legacy
By the early 1970s Virginia Livingston, badly beaten by the medical
establishment, was ready to launch a counterattack in the form of a fascinating
study which showed that her cancer microbe secreted humanchoriogonadotropic
hormone (HCG) a growth hormone long associated with cancer. Initially, despite
laboratory evidence to the contrary, her contention that a bacteria could
produce a human hormone was not believed. But then reports from traditional
bastions such as Allegheny General, Princeton and Rockefeller University
confirmed her findings.
Livingston believed that this growth hormone, secreted by her cancer germ built
up uncontrollably to stimulate tumor growth, turning normal cells into malignant
ones when either the body's immune system was weak or essential nutrients were
deficient. Dr. Hernan Acevedo of Allegheny, in fact, showed that all cancer
cells had the hormone [30].
Livingston's discovery, a medical milestone, gave further impetus to a microbial
theory of cancer with well over a century of research behind it. Yet despite
this, the premise behind an infectious cause was stubbornly refused by orthodox
medicine.
Virginia Livingston was past 80 when she died on June 30th, 1990. Just months
before, a subpoena was issued to her prohibiting her vaccinations, made from the
patient's own cancer germ (autogenous), with which she had had great success.
Following this, her vaccine was stigmatized as an "unproven method" in the March
April 1990 issue of CA The Journal of the American Cancer Society[31] with
references to her mistaking several different type of bacteria, rare and common
for a unique microbe. This despite droves of research papers establishing
mycobacteria as either coming before or coexisting with cancer. Ironically,
Acevedo, who could not stop lauded her discovery that the cancer germ could
manufacture human growth hormone was instrumental and key to the society's
damaging conclusion.
Yet when questioned by this author approximately a decade later, Acevedo
admitted that he had ignored acid-fast forms which were indeed present in the
cancer preparations Livingston sent to him. He felt these irrelevant, and
mentioned that besides, the technology was not available at the time to pursue
these acid-fast forms further.
On such fuzzy logic, it seemed that perhaps the most important scientific cancer
lead in this or any other century was buried.
Conclusion
The striking analogy between cancer and tuberculosis was noticed long before the
tubercle bacillus was discovered. In 1877, Sir John Simon clearly pointed out
this analogy and in fact argued very strongly in favor of a microbial origin of
cancer. But by 1910, certain American medical powers did an 180 degree rotation,
deciding that cancer was not caused by a microbe and that anyone who thought
otherwise was a heretic, a charlatan or a quack.
But Virginia Livingston was none of these. Rather she was a symbol of
painstaking research and dedication at the height of post World War II American
medical technology. Opponents of Livingston said that she saw "contaminants" of
a group of commonly encountered germs. But Florence Siebert, an expert on
contaminants who standardized the present day tuberculin skin test for the US
government, saw no contaminants present and Dean Burk, then Head of Cell
Chemistry at the NCI went so far to say that Livingston's cancer germ was as
real and certain as anything known about cancer [29].
Yet in the subsequent suppression of Livingston and her many colleagues by the
medical establishment a picture emerges, and it is not
a very pleasant one.
Virginia Livingston gained international status when she discovered that her
cancer germ produced human growth hormone, long associated with malignancy.
However, at first even this was not believed. Had she gained the same stature
regarding identifying the cancer germ itself, by today there probably would be
no cancer. At this time there is admittedly no cure for Livingston's cancer
germ. Suppression led to its own disinterest in cure and each year a multitude
must suffer and die as a result.
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