Republic of Lies by Anna Merlan

Author:Anna Merlan
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Henry Holt and Co.

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The—sometimes justifiable—paranoia about government control in medicine has also led to the conviction that the government has deliberately suppressed or withheld real cures for disease. Nowhere is that more evident than in the history of laetrile, a quack cancer cure making a startling comeback.

There is a centuries-long saga of curious cures claiming to beat cancer: a 1914 medical text called The Cancer Problem lists some of them, including green frogs attached to the body like leeches, the liver of a tortoise “laid on the cancer continuously,” and a horrid-sounding concoction made of “crow’s feet, dog fennel, sulphur, and arsenic.” Turpentine and kerosene were both used in the 1950s, and so was a discredited drug called krebiozen, which subsequent analyses showed contained only a common amino acid called creatine mixed with mineral oil.

None of those products took hold quite like laetrile, however, which was originally developed in the early 1920s and patented in the 1940s by Ernst Krebs, Sr., a California physician, and his son, Ernst Krebs, Jr. The two claimed that amygdalin, a chemical compound found in apricot seeds, had anticancer properties (a claim that scientists and researchers had periodically been making since the mid-1800s). Amygdalin is also found in bitter almond, apple, and plum seeds, and Krebs Sr. reportedly discovered its miraculous properties while tinkering at home, trying to find “a method for improving the taste of bootleg whiskey,” according to Dr. Irving Lerner, who in the 1980s wrote a history of laetrile’s use. (Laetrile was the trade name for the chemical compound they created.)

There was one small drawback. The other thing those pits contain is cyanide. That means laetrile, as several studies would later discover, can have side effects that mimic cyanide poisoning. Those include liver damage, nausea, vomiting, blue skin due to lack of oxygen in the blood, low blood pressure, fever, coma, and death.

Krebs Sr. began selling laetrile as a remedy for cancer, for which he was arrested in 1962 and then in 1966 and fined $4,000. He died in 1970, but his son carried on his work, crucially refining the message about what exactly laetrile did. Krebs Jr. came to claim that cancer was, contrary to all established science, a vitamin deficiency and that amygdalin, in laetrile, supplied the missing vitamin, which he called “vitamin B17.” (He also dubbed himself a doctor and a biochemist, despite having no medical degree.) There is no such thing as vitamin B17, but Krebs Jr. made his claims at a felicitous time. As Lerner points out, it was during the Watergate crisis, and suspicions of government were at their height. The trend in favor of natural foods, healing crystals, and astrology was just taking off. And, crucially, calling amygdalin a vitamin rather than a drug took advantage of the new public interest in vitamins and meant that Krebs didn’t need to seek approval from the Food and Drug Administration.

In 1972, Krebs Jr. set up clinics in Mexico and West Germany peddling laetrile. Patients touted a wonder drug that shrank their tumors.

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