How the ‘War on Cancer’ Fails

review by Jule Klotter

Second Opinion: Laetrile at Sloan-Kettering (DVD), written and directed by Eric Merola

Available at www.secondopinionfilm.com

© 2014; 75 minutes & 74 minutes of extras; $29.99

Second Opinion: Laetrile at Sloan-Kettering, a thought-provoking documentary written and directed by Eric Merola, tells the story of laetrile through the eyes of science writer Ralph W. Moss, PhD. In the 1970s, thousands of cancer patients – as many as 70,000 per year, according to a 1977 Newsweek article – traveled to clinics in Tijuana, Mexico where laetrile was legal. Both Canada and the US had banned laetrile, claiming that it was ineffective; but the ban had not diminished patients’ enthusiasm for the “quack” remedy. Bowing to public pressure and desiring “to curb the public’s ‘false hope,’” Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center asked Dr. Kanematsu Sugiura, a retired research scientist, to study laetrile. Sugiura, a cofounder of cancer chemotherapy, had an impeccable reputation as a researcher.

Shortly after joining Sloan-Kettering’s public relations department in 1974, Ralph Moss interviewed Sugiura for a biographical sketch. During that interview, Sugiura shared his research notes. That data showed that laetrile prevented lung metastasis and improved overall health in a mouse strain that did not respond to chemotherapy. Sugiura’s results “shocked” Moss. He had viewed laetrile’s popularity as an example of patients’ desperation and gullibility. Moss was asked by superiors to keep them apprised of Sugiura’s research. Over time, Moss developed a deep respect for the researcher.

According to Sugiura’s experiments, laetrile did not cure cancer; but it did stop tumor growth for some weeks. Moreover, only 10% to 20% of the mice receiving laetrile injections developed lung metastasis compared with 80% to 90% of the control mice that received saline injections. Leaders of Sloan-Kettering met with medical authorities from the National Cancer Institute, Food and Drug Administration, and American Cancer Society in July 1974, to discuss Sugiura’s positive results and to plead for human trials. They planned to collaborate with doctors in Mexico to perform controlled clinical trials.

In March 1975, a higher-level meeting occurred, a meeting that included Daniel Martin, MD, who had developed the mouse strain used by Sugiura. Martin was “deeply hostile” to laetrile. The US government declined Sloan-Kettering’s request for human clinical trials. Although Moss was unaware of the meeting at that time, he realized that many of Sloan-Kettering’s top officials had begun to issue negative statements about laetrile. For Moss, the final straw came in 1975, when Sloan-Kettering vice president Chester Stock, MD, told Medical World News that laetrile was “negative in all animal systems tested.” Moss became convinced that Sugiura’s findings were being covered up.

For months, Moss struggled with his conscience. He wanted to keep his job with Sloan-Kettering. He had a wife and two children to support. Yet he also wanted to publicize Sugiura’s research and refute the false campaign that was burying a potentially helpful cancer treatment. Eventually, Moss cofounded Second Opinion, a whistle-blower group that produced a newsletter in which Sloan-Kettering employees anonymously criticized various aspects of the institution – including the cover-up of Suguira’s work. Ralph Moss finally went public in November 1977, when he represented Second Opinionat a press conference. He was fired the next day. The laetrile experience led him to write his first book, The Cancer Industry.

Second Opinion is more complex and less emotionally charged that Eric Merola’s first independent documentary, Burzynski, the Movie (2010). On the surface, Second Opinion is about laetrile and its cover-up. But the film also raises questions about scientific research and its subversion, about whistle-blowers and the stress to their families, about personal integrity, and about the cancer industry. The 75-minute main feature that chronicles Ralph Moss’s experience at Sloan-Kettering comprises just half of the DVD. In a dozen short interview segments, totaling another 74 minutes, Moss provides further information about the discrediting of laetrile. He also discusses promising cancer therapies used in other countries and Big Pharma’s stranglehold on oncology in the US.

The controversy surrounding laetrile, the emotional debates and battles, have faded over the past 40 years. “War on Cancer” dynamics, the profit system that underlies medicine, the questions about scientific integrity remain. Second Opinion provides a compelling, historical look at an ongoing problem.

Quote: “If science is mutable, based on the needs of the moment, then science is dead.” Ralph W. Moss, PhD