Is Big Pharma Hiding the Cure for Cancer?

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Some stories were never meant to be told. Others were
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buried on purpose. This podcast digs them all up. Disturbing
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history peels back the layers of the past to uncover
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the strange, the sinister, and the stories that were never
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supposed to survive. From shadowy presidential secrets to government experiments
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that sound more like fiction than fact, this is history
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they hoped you'd forget. I'm Brian, investigator, author, and your
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guide through the dark corners of our collective memory. Each week,
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I'll narrate some of the most chilling and little-known tales
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from history that will make you question everything you thought
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you knew. And here's the twist. Sometimes, the history is
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disturbing to us. And sometimes, we have to disturb history
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itself just to get to the truth. If you like
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your facts with a side of fear, if you're not
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afraid to pull at threads others leave alone, you're in
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the right place. History isn't just written by the victors. Sometimes,
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it's rewritten by the disturbed. Before anything else, one thing
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needs to be made clear. I'm not a doctor, and
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nothing in this episode is medical advice. I'm not making
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any medical claims about any treatment, and I'm not telling
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anybody what to do about their own health. This is history.
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put together for informational purposes only, and anybody facing a
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diagnosis should be talking to a physician they trust. Recently,
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a listener of this show named George, who's an inventor,
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reached out a while back to ask whether I'd be
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interested in doing an episode on something called Brown's Gas.
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I had never heard of Brown's Gas before his message
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came in, so I started looking into it, and what
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I found was interesting enough that I wanted to at
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least have a conversation with him. We scheduled the interview,
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And 45 minutes later, my mind was blown. I'm putting
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that episode together now, and the interview is going to
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run in its entirety, so George will get to make
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his case in his own words. George made a lot
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of claims about Brown's gas over those 45 minutes. One
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of them was that he had several documented accounts of
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the gas curing melanoma in at least three patients. He
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also told me that cancer had already been cured in
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many countries and that the big pharmaceutical companies were suppressing
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that information. Skin cancer hits home for me. Almost 40
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years ago, my mom was diagnosed with a rare form
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of it and given a few months to live. Thanks
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to some cutting-edge treatments and a doctor at Vanderbilt University Hospital,
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she's still alive and well today. So when George told
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me cancer had already been cured and somebody was sitting
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on it, that got me thinking. and I decided to
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go down the rabbit hole and see what I could find.
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This episode deals with cancer, and with people who died
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after choosing treatments that didn't work. Brown's Gas takes its
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name from Yul Brown, a Bulgarian-born inventor who settled in
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Australia and was granted a United States patent in 1977
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for a welding process built around a machine that splits
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water with electricity. An electric current run through water breaks
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it into hydrogen and oxygen. two parts hydrogen to one
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part oxygen. And Brown's design kept the two gases together
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in a single stream instead of collecting them separately. Chemists
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have known that mixture as oxyhydrogen since the early 1800s.
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The medical side of it rests on a 2007 paper
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from Nippon Medical School in Tokyo, published in Nature Medicine,
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which reported that rats breathing a small amount of hydrogen
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suffered less brain damage after an induced stroke. That paper
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set off a long run of research into what's now
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called molecular hydrogen, and some of it, mostly out of China,
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involved giving advanced cancer patients a 2-to-1 hydrogen and oxygen
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mixture to breathe. Those are small studies and case reports
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without control groups, and I couldn't find a randomized controlled
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trial anywhere showing that breathing hydrogen cures melanoma or any
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other cancer. The single document that comes up more than
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any other when people argue that a cure is being
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hidden is a research note Goldman Sachs sent to its
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clients on the 10th of April, 2018. It was a
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report on biotechnology called The Genome Revolution, and the line
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that got out into the world came from one of
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its sections. CNBC put it in a headline the next day.
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Is curing patients a sustainable business model? The analyst who
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wrote it, Salveen Richter, used one company as her example.
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Gilead Sciences had brought a pill called Sovaldi to market
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at the end of 2013, and it cured hepatitis C
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in more than 90% of the patients who took it.
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Gilead charged $ 84, 000 for a 12-week course, which came to
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about $ 1, 000 a pill. And the follow-up drug it released
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the next year cost more. The drug and its successor
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worked so well that Gilead started running out of patients
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to sell them to. Its hepatitis C sales in the
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United States peaked at around $ 12. 5 billion in 2015, and
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the Goldman note projected they'd fall under $ 4 billion in 2018.
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The note went on to suggest how a company could
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live with that problem. Go after very large markets, it said,
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and diseases where new patients keep turning up every year,
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and keep a steady pipeline of new products coming. For
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anybody who already suspected the drug industry would rather manage
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a disease than end it, That note reads like a confession.
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Read in full, it's a warning to investors that a
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cure is a one-time sale, and nowhere in it does
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Goldman suggest that a company sit on one. Gilead sold
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its cure, and it set the price high enough that
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a United States Senate Finance Committee investigation, released in December
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of 2015, concluded the company had priced the drug to
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maximize revenue while knowing the price would keep it out
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of reach for a lot of patients who needed it.
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That investigation, run by Senators Ron Wyden and Chuck Grassley,
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took about 18 months and went through Gilead's internal documents.
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It found that the company had looked at lower prices
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that would have reached more patients and passed on them.
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State Medicaid programs, facing bills they couldn't pay, responded by
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rationing the drug. And in many states, a patient had
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to show serious liver damage before the program would cover
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a cure that could have been given years earlier. That's
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a documented case of a company putting money ahead of
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sick people. And in that case, the cure was on
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pharmacy shelves the entire time. The oldest version of the
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suppressed cure story that holds up to real scrutiny begins
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with a New York bone surgeon named William Coley. In 1890,
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Coley treated a 17-year-old named Bessie Daschle for a sarcoma
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that started in her hand. He amputated her arm below
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the elbow, and the cancer spread anyway. and she died
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in January of 1891. Bessie Daschle had been a close
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friend of John D. Rockefeller Jr., and her death is
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one of the reasons the Rockefeller family later put money
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into cancer research at the hospital where Coley worked. Coley
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went through the hospital's old records looking for anything that
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might have gone differently in some other patient, and he
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found the file of a German immigrant named Fred Stein.
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Years earlier, Stein had come in with a sarcoma in
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his neck that surgeons couldn't fully remove. Then he came
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down with a severe skin infection called erysipelas, and after
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the infection, the tumor went away. Coley went looking for
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Stein on the Lower East Side of Manhattan and, by
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his own account, found him alive with no sign of
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the tumor. Starting in 1891, Coley began deliberately infecting cancer
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patients with the Streptococcus bacteria that cause erysipelas. Live infections
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were dangerous and hard to control, so he moved to
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a mixture of killed bacteria that became known as Coley's toxins.
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Some of his patients had remissions that astonished the doctors
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who saw them. A lot of others didn't respond at all.
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The preparations varied from batch to batch, and nobody, Coley included,
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could explain why it worked when it did. His boss
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at Memorial Hospital in New York, a pathologist named James Ewing,
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was one of the most powerful cancer doctors in the
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country and a firm believer in radiation. Ewing didn't think
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much of Coley's toxins and said so. Radiation could be measured, dosed,
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and repeated, and over the following decades, radiation and then
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chemotherapy became the standard. The drug company Park Davis manufactured
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Coley's toxins for doctors who wanted them into the 1950s,
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but the number of physicians using them kept shrinking. William
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Coley died in 1936. His daughter, Helen Coley Knotts, spent
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years going through his papers and compiling case histories, and
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in 1953, she founded the Cancer Research Institute in New
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York to keep the idea alive. In 1962, after the
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thalidomide disaster, Congress rewrote federal drug law to require proof
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that a medicine actually works, and Coley's toxins, which had
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never been through modern clinical trials, ended up classified as
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an unapproved drug. Of everything in the suppression file, Coley
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is the case I'd put the most weight on. The
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establishment of his day did turn its back on him.
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and the core of his idea, that the body's own
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immune system can be provoked into attacking a tumor, turned
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out to be right. The record shows a treatment that
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couldn't be made to work reliably with what medicine knew
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at the time, losing out to treatments that could, and
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his idea came back on its own about a century later.
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Royal Raymond Reif was a San Diego inventor who built
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microscopes in the 1920s and 30s and said he could
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see living viruses with them, which the optical microscopes of
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that era couldn't do. He also built a device he
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said could kill microbes by bombarding them with a frequency
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he called their mortal oscillatory rate. In 1934, a group
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sponsored by a Los Angeles physician named Milbank Johnson treated
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a small number of patients described as terminal with Reif's device.
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Reif's supporters later said nearly all of them were cured.
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No results from that work were ever published in a
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medical journal, and I couldn't find any surviving patient records
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that anyone has made public. In the late 1930s, the
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business partners behind Reif's device ended up suing one another,
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and the project came apart. Reif died in 1971, and
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he was mostly forgotten until a writer named Barry Lines
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published a book in 1987 called The Cancer Cure That Worked.
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Reif machines have been sold to cancer patients ever since.
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the Food and Drug Administration has never approved one to
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treat cancer. Harry Hoxie said his cure came from a horse.
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The family story, as Hoxie told it, went back to 1840,
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when his great-grandfather John Hoxie had a horse with a
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cancerous growth on its leg turned out to pasture on
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a farm in Illinois. The horse kept grazing on certain plants.
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The growth went away, and the great-grandfather collected those plants
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and worked them into remedies. According to Harry, The formulas
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came down through the family to his father, a veterinarian
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who treated people on the side, and his father handed
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them to him before he died in 1919. Harry Hoxie
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had no medical training. What he had was an internal tonic,
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a mixture of potassium iodide and herbs that included red clover, burdock,
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and poke root, and two external treatments, one of them
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a paste made with arsenic sulfide. The paste was an escharotic,
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which means it burned away tissues. Applied to a tumor
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on the skin, it could destroy the tumor along with
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the healthy skin around it. He opened his first clinic
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in Taylorville, Illinois in 1924, and he was arrested over
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and over for practicing medicine without a license. In 1936,
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he opened a clinic in Dallas, and by the mid-50s,
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by Hoxie's own figures, it was treating around 12,000 patients
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and had affiliated clinics in more than a dozen states.
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The man who made himself Hoxie's chief enemy was Morris Fishbein,
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the editor of the Journal of the American Medical Association
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from 1924 to 1949, and the most famous crusader against
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medical quackery in the country. Fishbein went after Hoxie in
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print for years. In 1949, in an article for a
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Hearst Sunday magazine, he called Hoxie a cancer charlatan. Hoxie
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sued him for libel and a Dallas jury found in
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Hoxie's favor. The damages it awarded were close to nothing.
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and the verdict said nothing about whether Hoxie's treatment worked.
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Fishbein himself had already been pushed out at the American
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Medical Association that year. Hoxie told his side of it
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in a 1956 autobiography he titled, You Don't Have to Die.
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In it, he claimed that Fishbein and people around him
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had once tried to get control of his formulas, and
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that his war with organized medicine started when he refused
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to hand them over. That account is Hoxie's own. and
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I couldn't find any document outside his book that backs
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it up. The National Cancer Institute asked Hoxie for proof,
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and in the early 1950s, he sent it a set
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of case histories. The Institute said the records didn't establish
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that the patients had cancer to begin with, or that
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the treatment had anything to do with how they did,
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because so many lacked biopsies or documentation of what other
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treatment they'd had. In 1953, a Senate committee hired a
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lawyer named Benedict Fitzgerald as special counsel to look into
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the cancer field, and his report has been a central
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document of the suppression argument ever since. Fitzgerald examined how
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the American Medical Association and others had treated Hoxie and
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several other alternative practitioners, and he concluded there was reason
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to believe in a concerted effort to suppress them and
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that a full investigation was warranted. Senator William Langer of
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North Dakota had the report entered into the congressional record.
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Fitzgerald's assignment ended, and the full investigation he called for
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never happened. That report is real, and I think it
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shows a medical establishment in the 1950s that behaved like
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a guild protecting its territory. What it didn't contain was
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any clinical evidence that Hoxie's tonic cured cancer, because none
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existed then, and none has been produced since. In 1956,
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the Food and Drug Administration had warning notices posted in
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post offices around the country telling the public not to
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be misled by the Hoxie treatment. Hoxie fought the agency
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in court and lost, and by 1960, his clinics in
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the United States were closed. Morris Fishbein lived until 1976,
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and in 1987, a filmmaker named Kenny Ausubel released a
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documentary called Hoxie, How Healing Becomes a Crime, which turned
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the feud between the two men into a founding text
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of the modern suppression movement. Stay tuned for more disturbing history.
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We'll be back after these messages. Max Gerson was a
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German physician who fled the Nazis and settled in New
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York in the 1930s. He developed a diet therapy, first
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for migraines and tuberculosis, and later for cancer, built around
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large amounts of fresh fruit and vegetable juice, a diet
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with almost no salt, and coffee enemas taken several times
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a day. In July of 1946, Gerson testified before a
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United States Senate subcommittee, chaired by Claude Pepper of Florida,
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that was considering a bill to put federal money into
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cancer research, and he brought patients with him who described
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their recoveries to the senators. The bill he testified for
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never became law. The Journal of the American Medical Association,
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still under Morris Fishbein, ran a short item dismissing his approach,
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and the National Cancer Institute after looking at 10 of
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his cases in the late 1940s, said they didn't show
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the diet had done anything. Gerson published a book of
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50 case histories in 1958 and died the following year.
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His daughter Charlotte carried the therapy on for decades, and
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the institute that bears the family name now works with
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clinics in Mexico. Coffee enemas taken that often can throw
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the body's electrolytes badly out of balance, and the medical
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literature has recorded deaths linked to them. including two reported
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in the Journal of the American Medical Association in 1980.
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Andrew Ivey was one of the best-known physiologists in the
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United States, with a reputation nothing like Harry Hoxie's. He
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was a vice president of the University of Illinois, and
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after the Second World War, the American Medical Association sent
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him to Nuremberg as its expert at the trial of
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the Nazi doctors, where he helped lay out the principles
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of informed consent that became the Nuremberg Code. When Andrew
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Ivey said something about medicine in the early 1950s, newspapers
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printed it. In 1949, a Yugoslav physician named Stevan Durovic
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arrived in the United States from Argentina with a substance
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he said he'd extracted from the blood of horses injected
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with a fungus-like organism. He gave the substance the name krebiosin.
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Ivey tested it on patients, and in March of 1951,
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he announced at a gathering in Chicago that it showed
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promise against cancer. The American Medical Association reviewed 100 patients
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who'd been given krebiosin and reported that it found no benefit.
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Ivey said the association had prejudged the drug, and the
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fight that followed cost him his position at the university.
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Dudovich and his brother Marko, who handled the business side,
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refused for years to turn over a sample of the
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substance for independent analysis, which he said was to protect
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it from people who wanted to steal or discredit it.
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In 1963, the Food and Drug Administration finally got a
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sample of the powder Durevich said krebiosin was made from.
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Its chemist identified it as creatine monohydrate, a common compound
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found in muscle tissue and sold today as a supplement
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in gyms. The ampules that had actually been injected into
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patients were mostly mineral oil. That same year, The National
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Cancer Institute reviewed more than 500 patient case records submitted
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by Krebiosin's backers and found no evidence the drug had
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helped anyone. Ivey and Durovich were indicted on federal fraud charges.
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After a trial in Chicago that ran about nine months,
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a jury acquitted them in January of 1966. Krebiosin's supporters,
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including Senator Paul Douglas of Illinois, treated the acquittal as vindication.
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The jury had found that the government didn't prove the
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men intended to defraud anyone, and the chemistry the government's
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lab reported on the powder was never overturned. By every account,
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Andrew Ivey believed in krebiosin until he died in 1978,
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and thousands of patients took it on the strength of
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his name. Laetrile came out of San Francisco, out of
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a father and son who were both named Ernst Krebs.
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Ernst Krebs Sr. was a physician. His son, Ernst Krebs Jr.,
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never earned a medical degree. But in the early 1950s,
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he developed a compound from apricot pits that he called laetrile.
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It was related to a natural substance called amygdalin, which
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is found in the kernels of apricots, peaches, and bitter almonds,
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and which the body can break down into cyanide. The
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Krebs' theory was that cancer cells released the cyanide inside
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the tumor and poisoned themselves, while healthy cells were spared.
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In the 1970s, Laetrile's backers started calling it vitamin B-17.
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Amygdalin isn't a vitamin, and the body doesn't need it
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for anything. But a vitamin could be sold in ways
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a drug couldn't. A political movement grew up around it,
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led in part by a group called the Committee for
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Freedom of Choice in Cancer Therapy, whose founder, Robert Bradford,
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was convicted in 1977 of of smuggling laetrile in from Mexico.
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And the argument they made was about liberty as much
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as medicine. A dying person, they said, had the right
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to try whatever he wanted. That argument worked in state legislatures.
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By the end of the decade, more than 20 states
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had passed laws legalizing laetrile in one form or another.
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And the National Cancer Institute estimated that something like 70,000
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Americans had used it. Most of the supply came up
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from clinics in Tijuana, Mexico. where a Mexican pathologist named
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Ernesto Contreras had been giving laetrile to patients since the
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early 1960s. One federal case went all the way to
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the top. A Kansas man with cancer named Glenn Rutherford
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sued in the mid-70s to be allowed to get laetrile
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despite the federal ban, and a lower court agreed that
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terminally ill patients should have access. In 1979, the Supreme
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Court ruled unanimously that federal drug law made no exception
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for the terminally ill. because the law's safety and effectiveness
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requirements protected dying patients as much as anyone else. Nearly
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40 years later, the movement's argument won in a narrower form.
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In May of 2018, President Donald Trump signed the Federal
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Right to Try Act, which followed similar laws in roughly
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40 states and lets terminally ill patients ask a drug
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company directly for an experimental medicine that has passed the
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first phase of human safety testing. The law doesn't reach
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anything that hasn't been through at least that first phase,
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and it doesn't require any company to say yes. The
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part of the Laetrile story that still drives the suppression
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argument happened inside Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York,
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the same institution that grew out of the hospital where
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William Coley and James Ewing had fought. In the early 1970s,
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a veteran Sloan Kettering researcher named Kanematsu Sugiura ran experiments
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giving amygdalin to mice with breast tumors. Sugiyura was in
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his 80s and had a reputation for meticulous work. And
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in some of his experiments, the treated mice developed fewer
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lung metastases than the untreated ones. Other researchers at the
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institution tried to reproduce his results and couldn't. One attempt
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at a blinded experiment ran into problems that left both
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sides claiming it supported them. In 1977, Sloan Kettering held
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a press conference to announce that its testing had shown
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laetrile to be ineffective. An assistant director in the center's
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public affairs department, a young science writer named Ralph Moss,
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had become convinced the institution was burying Sugiura's results. In
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November of that year, he stood up at a press
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conference of his own and accused Sloan Kettering of a cover-up,
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and the center fired him the next day. Moss spent
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the rest of his career writing about cancer treatment from
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outside the establishment. starting with a book called The Cancer Syndrome.
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The firing of Ralph Moss is documented, and so is
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the internal disagreement over Sugiura's mice. What the record shows
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is a dispute over whether an effect in one strain
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of mice was real, and the way medicine settles that
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kind of dispute is a trial in people. Before that
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trial reported, the most famous Laetrile patient in history went
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to Mexico. Steve McQueen, one of the biggest movie stars
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in the world, was diagnosed in December of 1979 with
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pleural mesothelioma, a cancer of the lining of the lungs.
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It's caused almost entirely by asbestos, and McQueen believed his
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exposure came from his time in the Marines, when he'd
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stripped asbestos insulation from pipes aboard a troop ship and
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from the asbestos in the protective suits he wore racing cars.
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His doctors in the United States told him there wasn't
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much they could offer. In the summer of 1980, he
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went to a clinic in Rosarito Beach, Mexico, for a
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program run under the methods of William Donald Kelly, a
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Texas orthodontist whose dental license had been suspended and who
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promoted cancer treatment through enzymes, vitamins, coffee enemas, and laetrile.
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Kelly had laid out his program in a self-published book
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called One Answer to Cancer, and Texas authorities had already
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moved to stop him from treating cancer patients there. In October,
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McQueen recorded a message for Mexican television thanking the clinic
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and saying Mexico was showing the world a new way
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of fighting cancer. In November, he went to a hospital
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in Juarez for surgery to remove large tumors from his
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abdomen and neck. He died there of a heart attack
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on the 7th of November, 1980, at 50 years old.
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The trial came out about 14 months later. The National
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Cancer Institute sponsored it, and the study was run through
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the Mayo Clinic and several other major cancer centers under
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an oncologist named Charles Mortel. Mortel was a gastrointestinal cancer
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specialist at Mayo, and a few years later, he'd lead
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the trial that established a standard drug treatment after surgery
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for colon cancer. 178 patients with cancers that standard treatment
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couldn't help were given laetrile along with the diet and
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vitamin regimen its advocates recommended. The results were published in
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the New England Journal of Medicine in January of 1982.
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Not one of the 178 patients was cured. None was
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stabilized in a way that could be credited to the drug.
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The cancers kept growing in nearly all of them, and
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the median survival was under five months. Several patients had
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cyanide levels in their blood that approached the toxic range.
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Laetrile's advocates said the trial was rigged, that the wrong
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form of the drug was used, or that it was
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given to patients who were too sick. The clinics in
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Tijuana kept selling it, and they're still selling it. The
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program Steve McQueen followed got its own trial decades later.
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A New York physician named Nicholas Gonzalez had taken up
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William Kelly's enzyme and diet regimen in the 1980s, and
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after a small series of pancreatic cancer patients he reported
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in the 1990s seemed to do unusually well, the National
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Cancer Institute agreed to fund a proper comparison. Patients with
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00:26:10.849 --> 00:26:14.829
inoperable pancreatic cancer were enrolled either in the Gonzalez regimen,
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00:26:15.009 --> 00:26:19.230
with its enzymes, supplements, diet, and coffee enemas, or in
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standard chemotherapy. The results were published in the Journal of
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00:26:22.630 --> 00:26:26.940
Clinical Oncology in 2010. The patients on chemotherapy lived a
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median of about 14 months. The patients on the Gonzalez
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regimen lived a median of a little over four and
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reported a worse quality of life while they did. Gonzalez
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said the trial had been mismanaged and that patients hadn't
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followed the protocol, and he kept treating patients in New
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York until he died in 2015. Charles Mortle was in
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the middle of another one of these fights, against the
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most famous scientist in the country. Linus Pauling had won
439
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the Nobel Prize in Chemistry and the Nobel Peace Prize,
440
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and in the 1970s, he teamed up with a Scottish
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surgeon named Ewan Cameron, who'd been giving large doses of
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vitamin C to terminal cancer patients at the Vale of
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Leaven Hospital. In 1976, they published a paper reporting that
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those patients had lived far longer than comparable patients who
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didn't get it. The Mayo Clinic tested the claim twice
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under mortal, with results published in 1979 and 1985. And
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both times, vitamin C did no better than a placebo.
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Pauling attacked both studies in public. He argued that the
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second trial stopped the vitamin C too soon, and that
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the first had used patients already weakened by chemotherapy. and
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he accused Mortal of misrepresenting the work. Part of Pauling's
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complaint held up later. Researchers at the National Institutes of
453
00:27:44.670 --> 00:27:48.470
Health found in the 1990s and 2000s that vitamin C
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taken by mouth can't reach anywhere near the blood levels
455
00:27:51.940 --> 00:27:55.279
that it reaches when it's given intravenously, and Cameron had
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00:27:55.319 --> 00:27:59.160
given his patients both. Intravenous vitamin C has been studied
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00:27:59.279 --> 00:28:03.559
ever since, mostly alongside chemotherapy, and it's still being studied.
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None of that work has turned it into a cure.
459
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Pauling kept taking large doses himself until he died in
460
00:28:10.769 --> 00:28:15.910
1994 at 93. Stanislaw Brzezinski, a Polish-born physician in Houston,
461
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is the closest thing the suppression story has to a
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modern hero. He came to the United States in 1970
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and did research at Baylor College of Medicine on peptides
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he isolated from human blood and urine. He named them
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antineoplastins and said they could switch off cancer. and in 1977,
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he opened his own clinic in Houston to treat patients
467
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with them. The Texas Medical Board and the Food and
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Drug Administration went after him for years. In 1995, a
469
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federal grand jury indicted him on 75 counts connected to
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00:28:49.670 --> 00:28:53.150
shipping an unapproved drug across state lines. He went to
471
00:28:53.210 --> 00:28:56.710
trial in 1997, and he walked out without a conviction,
472
00:28:57.150 --> 00:29:00.200
after one jury deadlocked and a second acquitted him on
473
00:29:00.220 --> 00:29:03.410
the count that remained. His patients had rallied around him,
474
00:29:03.869 --> 00:29:07.089
some of them testifying before Congress. And the government's case
475
00:29:07.130 --> 00:29:09.519
against him became one of the central exhibits in the
476
00:29:09.680 --> 00:29:14.019
argument that regulators persecute anybody who threatens the cancer business.
477
00:29:14.299 --> 00:29:16.940
What the government did afterward was let him keep going
478
00:29:17.019 --> 00:29:21.390
under clinical trial rules. Brzezinski registered dozens of trials and
479
00:29:21.450 --> 00:29:24.130
treated patients in them, who in many cases paid him
480
00:29:24.250 --> 00:29:28.289
large sums to take part. In 2012, after a child
481
00:29:28.329 --> 00:29:30.789
in one of his trials died, the Food and Drug
482
00:29:30.829 --> 00:29:34.690
Administration put a partial hold on enrolling new children. In
483
00:29:34.750 --> 00:29:38.339
more than four decades, no randomized trial has shown that
484
00:29:38.460 --> 00:29:43.269
antineoplastins work. and the drug has never been approved. For decades,
485
00:29:43.589 --> 00:29:46.430
a patient who walked into that clinic got an unproven
486
00:29:46.490 --> 00:29:50.329
treatment under a federal trial program with the government's permission.
487
00:29:50.890 --> 00:29:53.589
Two other names from the same era come up whenever
488
00:29:53.630 --> 00:29:56.890
the suppression argument gets made, and both ended with the
489
00:29:56.950 --> 00:30:01.039
government shutting something down. Stay tuned for more disturbing history.
490
00:30:01.279 --> 00:30:07.880
We'll be back after these messages. Lawrence Burton was a
491
00:30:07.900 --> 00:30:10.980
zoologist who ran a clinic in the Bahamas offering what
492
00:30:11.019 --> 00:30:15.660
he called immuno-augmentative therapy. A regimen of injections, he said,
493
00:30:15.779 --> 00:30:20.269
balanced the body's immune proteins against cancer. American patients flew
494
00:30:20.309 --> 00:30:23.200
to Freeport by the hundreds in the late 1970s and
495
00:30:23.289 --> 00:30:28.190
early 80s. In 1985, Bahamian health authorities closed the clinic
496
00:30:28.559 --> 00:30:31.740
after tests on the serum being injected into patients, found
497
00:30:31.779 --> 00:30:35.920
it contaminated with hepatitis B and, in some samples, the
498
00:30:35.960 --> 00:30:40.069
virus that causes AIDS. The clinic reopened under conditions the
499
00:30:40.119 --> 00:30:43.329
next year, and Burton's supporters have described the closure as
500
00:30:43.390 --> 00:30:48.009
a political hit arranged from Washington. The contamination findings came
501
00:30:48.049 --> 00:30:52.470
from laboratory tests on his own vials. Gaston Naissons was
502
00:30:52.529 --> 00:30:56.599
a French-born researcher working outside Sherbrooke, Quebec, who developed an
503
00:30:56.660 --> 00:31:01.619
injected camphor-based compound he called 714X and said it fed
504
00:31:01.660 --> 00:31:06.210
the immune system by way of the lymphatic system. In 1989,
505
00:31:06.210 --> 00:31:08.869
after a woman with breast cancer who'd chosen his treatment
506
00:31:08.950 --> 00:31:12.809
over conventional care died, Quebec prosecutors charged him as an
507
00:31:12.869 --> 00:31:16.349
accessory to her death. The trial drew patients from across
508
00:31:16.410 --> 00:31:19.380
North America to testify for him, and in December of 1989,
509
00:31:19.359 --> 00:31:24.380
a jury acquitted him. The acquittal is what his supporters cite.
510
00:31:25.019 --> 00:31:28.940
No controlled trial has ever shown 714X to do anything
511
00:31:29.029 --> 00:31:32.329
against cancer. And Health Canada later allowed it only on
512
00:31:32.369 --> 00:31:36.430
a case-by-case, compassionate basis. A lot of the suppression argument's
513
00:31:36.509 --> 00:31:40.450
emotional power comes from the fact that powerful institutions really
514
00:31:40.549 --> 00:31:43.950
did hide what they knew about cancer for decades from
515
00:31:44.069 --> 00:31:47.109
millions of people. And what they were hiding was what
516
00:31:47.190 --> 00:31:51.309
caused it. In 1950, Two studies came out within months
517
00:31:51.349 --> 00:31:54.609
of each other on opposite sides of the Atlantic, one
518
00:31:54.650 --> 00:31:57.890
by Richard Dahl and Austin Bradford Hill in Britain, and
519
00:31:58.009 --> 00:32:01.170
one by Ernst Winder and Everts Graham in the United States,
520
00:32:01.630 --> 00:32:06.509
and both linked cigarette smoking to lung cancer. In 1953,
521
00:32:06.509 --> 00:32:09.740
Winder and Graham's team at Washington University in St. Louis
522
00:32:10.059 --> 00:32:12.960
painted cigarette tar on the backs of mice, and a
523
00:32:13.039 --> 00:32:16.799
large share of the mice developed cancerous tumors. The story
524
00:32:16.859 --> 00:32:20.619
was everywhere. and cigarette sales took a hit. On the
525
00:32:20.880 --> 00:32:24.980
15th of December, 1953, the presidents of the major American
526
00:32:25.019 --> 00:32:28.059
tobacco companies met at the Plaza Hotel in New York
527
00:32:28.339 --> 00:32:31.240
with John Hill, the head of the public relations firm
528
00:32:31.500 --> 00:32:34.700
Hill & Knowlton. Out of that meeting came a full-page
529
00:32:34.839 --> 00:32:39.430
advertisement that ran on the 4th of January, 1954, in
530
00:32:39.430 --> 00:32:43.450
448 newspapers across the country. It was called, A Frank
531
00:32:43.509 --> 00:32:47.049
Statement to Cigarette Smokers. And in it, the companies told
532
00:32:47.089 --> 00:32:50.029
the public they believed their products were not injurious to
533
00:32:50.089 --> 00:32:53.670
health and promised to support research into the question. The
534
00:32:53.730 --> 00:32:57.369
research body they set up, the Tobacco Industry Research Committee,
535
00:32:57.730 --> 00:33:01.549
later renamed the Council for Tobacco Research, spent the following
536
00:33:01.630 --> 00:33:04.910
decades handing out grants that mostly steered around the question
537
00:33:05.230 --> 00:33:09.410
of whether cigarettes caused cancer. The industry's own internal documents,
538
00:33:09.730 --> 00:33:13.480
pried loose decades later through litigation, show what that research
539
00:33:13.519 --> 00:33:17.750
program was for. A 1969 memo inside the Brown and
540
00:33:17.789 --> 00:33:21.789
Williamson Tobacco Company put it in one line. Doubt is
541
00:33:21.849 --> 00:33:24.859
our product, since it is the best means of competing
542
00:33:24.900 --> 00:33:27.579
with the body of fact that exists in the mind
543
00:33:27.640 --> 00:33:31.839
of the general public. Ten years after the Plaza Hotel meeting,
544
00:33:32.180 --> 00:33:36.940
in January of 1964, Surgeon General Luther Terry released a
545
00:33:37.000 --> 00:33:41.190
federal report concluding that cigarette smoking caused lung cancer in men.
546
00:33:41.930 --> 00:33:44.650
The companies kept disputing the science in public for more
547
00:33:44.670 --> 00:33:49.069
than three decades after that. A biochemist named Jeffrey Weigand,
548
00:33:49.329 --> 00:33:52.109
who'd run research at Brown and Williamson until the company
549
00:33:52.210 --> 00:33:56.250
fired him in 1993, eventually went on the CBS program
550
00:33:56.250 --> 00:34:00.519
60 Minutes in February of 1996 to describe what the
551
00:34:00.559 --> 00:34:03.779
company knew about nicotine and how it handled that knowledge.
552
00:34:04.359 --> 00:34:07.599
His story became the film The Insider three years later.
553
00:34:08.079 --> 00:34:12.170
Before Weigand ever went on camera, On the 14th of April, 1994,
554
00:34:12.170 --> 00:34:16.389
the chief executives of the seven largest tobacco companies stood
555
00:34:16.449 --> 00:34:20.309
before a congressional subcommittee, raised their right hands, and one
556
00:34:20.469 --> 00:34:24.329
after another testified that they didn't believe nicotine was addictive.
557
00:34:25.010 --> 00:34:28.389
Four years later, the companies signed the Master Settlement Agreement
558
00:34:28.429 --> 00:34:32.760
with 46 states, agreeing to pay more than $ 200 billion
559
00:34:33.039 --> 00:34:36.099
over 25 years and to shut down the research council
560
00:34:36.119 --> 00:34:39.639
they'd set up in 1954. In August of 2006, a
561
00:34:40.460 --> 00:34:43.860
federal judge in Washington named Gladys Kessler ruled in a
562
00:34:43.929 --> 00:34:47.329
racketeering case brought by the Justice Department that the companies
563
00:34:47.369 --> 00:34:51.389
had lied, misrepresented, and deceived the American public about the
564
00:34:51.449 --> 00:34:55.289
dangers of smoking for more than 50 years. Judge Kessler's
565
00:34:55.349 --> 00:34:58.469
ruling is the closest thing in this entire story to
566
00:34:58.510 --> 00:35:02.530
a proven conspiracy to suppress information about cancer. And the
567
00:35:02.619 --> 00:35:06.340
information those companies suppressed was the evidence that their product
568
00:35:06.440 --> 00:35:11.280
caused it. the asbestos industry followed the same path. In
569
00:35:11.300 --> 00:35:15.219
the 1930s, executives at two of the biggest asbestos companies
570
00:35:15.260 --> 00:35:19.820
in the country, Raybestos Manhattan and Johns Manville, traded letters
571
00:35:19.880 --> 00:35:22.760
about how to handle the growing medical evidence that their
572
00:35:22.820 --> 00:35:25.619
product was harming the people who worked with it. The
573
00:35:25.659 --> 00:35:28.869
thrust of that correspondence was that the less said publicly
574
00:35:28.929 --> 00:35:33.610
about asbestos, the better for the companies. In 1964, a
575
00:35:33.630 --> 00:35:36.969
physician at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York named Irving
576
00:35:37.050 --> 00:35:41.239
Selikoff published a study of insulation workers showing high rates
577
00:35:41.280 --> 00:35:44.900
of lung cancer and mesothelioma among them, and the industry
578
00:35:44.940 --> 00:35:48.739
spent years attacking his work. The letters from the 30s
579
00:35:48.780 --> 00:35:53.000
stayed private until they surfaced in a lawsuit in 1977,
580
00:35:53.000 --> 00:35:56.019
and they've been known ever since as the Sumner-Simpson Papers,
581
00:35:56.460 --> 00:36:00.190
after the Raybestos president who kept them. Testimony in later
582
00:36:00.289 --> 00:36:04.860
asbestos litigation described Johns Manville's policy of not telling workers
583
00:36:04.889 --> 00:36:10.679
when their own company chest x-rays showed asbestos disease. In 1982,
584
00:36:10.679 --> 00:36:14.940
buried under thousands of lawsuits, Johns Manville filed for bankruptcy,
585
00:36:15.400 --> 00:36:18.900
at the time, the largest in American history. In the
586
00:36:18.960 --> 00:36:22.940
late 1960s, a trade group then called the International Sugar
587
00:36:23.030 --> 00:36:26.190
Research Foundation paid for a study at the University of
588
00:36:26.250 --> 00:36:30.190
Birmingham in England on how sugar affected rats. It was
589
00:36:30.269 --> 00:36:34.849
listed internally as Project 259. Before the study was finished,
590
00:36:35.190 --> 00:36:38.190
the early results suggested that a diet heavy in sugar
591
00:36:38.530 --> 00:36:41.530
raised levels of an enzyme that researchers at the time
592
00:36:41.630 --> 00:36:45.570
associated with bladder cancer. The foundation ended the funding, and
593
00:36:45.590 --> 00:36:49.769
the results were never published. Researchers at the University of California,
594
00:36:49.829 --> 00:36:53.690
San Francisco found the internal documents and published the story
595
00:36:53.789 --> 00:36:58.719
in 2017. In Parkersburg, West Virginia, DuPont spent decades dumping
596
00:36:58.760 --> 00:37:02.380
a chemical called C8 from its Washington Works plant. a
597
00:37:02.400 --> 00:37:05.929
chemical the company's own internal studies had raised concerns about.
598
00:37:06.530 --> 00:37:09.230
A panel of independent scientists set up under a class
599
00:37:09.389 --> 00:37:13.130
action settlement later found probable links between that chemical and
600
00:37:13.170 --> 00:37:17.949
both kidney cancer and testicular cancer. In 2017, DuPont and
601
00:37:17.989 --> 00:37:23.170
its spinoff Chemours agreed to pay $ 671 million to settle
602
00:37:23.230 --> 00:37:27.409
about 3,500 lawsuits. Every one of those cases involves a
603
00:37:27.469 --> 00:37:30.969
company that knew something about cancer and spent money keeping
604
00:37:31.010 --> 00:37:33.739
the public from knowing it. And I think that history
605
00:37:33.800 --> 00:37:36.719
goes a long way toward explaining why a hidden cure
606
00:37:37.059 --> 00:37:40.480
is so easy for people to believe. The institutions that
607
00:37:40.519 --> 00:37:43.840
were supposed to be fighting cancer gave people reasons too.
608
00:37:44.579 --> 00:37:48.840
In July of 1963, a Sloan Kettering researcher named Chester
609
00:37:48.900 --> 00:37:52.980
Southam arranged to have live cancer cells grown in laboratory
610
00:37:53.039 --> 00:37:56.300
cultures that included the famous HeLa line taken from Henrietta
611
00:37:56.360 --> 00:38:00.570
Lacks injected under the skin of 22 elderly patients at
612
00:38:00.610 --> 00:38:04.610
the Jewish Chronic Disease Hospital in Brooklyn. Southam was studying
613
00:38:04.679 --> 00:38:07.940
how the immune system rejected cancer, and he'd already done
614
00:38:08.039 --> 00:38:12.079
similar work on inmates at the Ohio State Penitentiary who volunteered.
615
00:38:12.840 --> 00:38:15.539
The Brooklyn patients weren't told they were being injected with
616
00:38:15.579 --> 00:38:18.280
cancer cells. They were told only that it was a
617
00:38:18.320 --> 00:38:22.139
test of their immunity. Southam defended that afterward by saying
618
00:38:22.199 --> 00:38:24.820
he hadn't wanted to frighten and he argued that the
619
00:38:24.860 --> 00:38:28.329
cells would be rejected and do no harm. Three young
620
00:38:28.369 --> 00:38:31.590
doctors at the hospital refused to take part and resigned.
621
00:38:32.230 --> 00:38:35.349
A lawyer on the hospital's board of directors, William Hyman,
622
00:38:35.670 --> 00:38:39.349
went to court to get the records. In 1965, the
623
00:38:39.389 --> 00:38:42.269
Board of Regents of New York State found Southam guilty
624
00:38:42.309 --> 00:38:46.969
of fraud, deceit, and unprofessional conduct. It suspended his medical
625
00:38:47.030 --> 00:38:50.130
license for a year, then stayed the suspension and put
626
00:38:50.170 --> 00:38:53.050
him on probation. The Brooklyn case was one of the
627
00:38:53.110 --> 00:38:57.809
examples a Harvard anesthesiologist named Henry Beecher drew on in
628
00:38:57.809 --> 00:39:00.929
1966 when he published an article in the New England
629
00:39:00.969 --> 00:39:04.969
Journal of Medicine laying out ethically questionable studies that had
630
00:39:05.010 --> 00:39:09.050
appeared in respectable journals. And the same year, the United
631
00:39:09.110 --> 00:39:13.239
States Public Health Service began requiring independent review of the
632
00:39:13.280 --> 00:39:18.250
human research it paid for. In 1968, the American Association
633
00:39:18.269 --> 00:39:22.800
for Cancer Research elected Chester Southam its president. On the
634
00:39:22.940 --> 00:39:27.730
23rd of December, 1971, Richard Nixon signed the National Cancer
635
00:39:27.869 --> 00:39:30.880
Act and put the federal government behind what the newspapers
636
00:39:30.929 --> 00:39:34.579
were already calling the War on Cancer. Some of the
637
00:39:34.619 --> 00:39:37.659
people who lobbied for that law talked openly about having
638
00:39:37.719 --> 00:39:42.820
a cure in time for the nation's 200th birthday in 1976.
639
00:39:42.820 --> 00:39:45.619
That didn't happen, and the gap between the promise and
640
00:39:45.659 --> 00:39:48.820
the result has been feeding the suppression story ever since.
641
00:39:49.519 --> 00:39:52.199
If the country put billions of dollars into the problem
642
00:39:52.480 --> 00:39:55.699
and still hasn't announced a cure 50-some years later, the
643
00:39:55.739 --> 00:39:59.320
reasoning goes, then somebody must be sitting on it. The
644
00:39:59.380 --> 00:40:02.960
trouble with that reasoning starts with the word cancer. A
645
00:40:03.000 --> 00:40:06.559
breast tumor, a childhood leukemia, and a melanoma on somebody's
646
00:40:06.639 --> 00:40:11.059
back start in different tissues, they're driven by different genetic mistakes,
647
00:40:11.440 --> 00:40:14.780
they spread in different ways, and they respond to different drugs.
648
00:40:15.440 --> 00:40:19.360
Pathologists now sort cancer into hundreds of distinct types. and
649
00:40:19.409 --> 00:40:22.449
many of those types split further by the specific mutations
650
00:40:22.610 --> 00:40:25.670
inside the tumor. A single cure for all of them
651
00:40:25.730 --> 00:40:28.329
would have to be one treatment that works against hundreds
652
00:40:28.369 --> 00:40:31.710
of different diseases at once. What happened instead of one
653
00:40:31.789 --> 00:40:36.110
cure is a long list of partial wins, uneven and expensive,
654
00:40:36.489 --> 00:40:40.599
and some of them complete. According to the American Cancer Society,
655
00:40:40.960 --> 00:40:43.659
the cancer death rate in the United States has fallen
656
00:40:43.699 --> 00:40:47.269
by about a third since its peak in 1991. And
657
00:40:47.309 --> 00:40:51.559
the society estimates that decline amounts to roughly 4.5 million
658
00:40:51.639 --> 00:40:55.260
deaths that didn't happen. Most of that drop came from
659
00:40:55.340 --> 00:40:58.760
fewer people smoking and from earlier detection. And some of
660
00:40:58.820 --> 00:41:01.760
it came from cancers that went from almost always fatal
661
00:41:02.099 --> 00:41:05.969
to almost always curable. None of that progress has dented
662
00:41:06.030 --> 00:41:10.530
the belief. In 2014, two political scientists at the University
663
00:41:10.550 --> 00:41:14.530
of Chicago, Eric Oliver and Thomas Wood, published a survey
664
00:41:14.610 --> 00:41:17.940
in the journal JAMA Internal Medicine. that asked a national
665
00:41:18.000 --> 00:41:21.639
sample of Americans about a series of medical conspiracy theories.
666
00:41:22.340 --> 00:41:24.780
The one that drew the most agreement was the statement
667
00:41:24.800 --> 00:41:28.309
that the Food and Drug Administration was deliberately keeping natural
668
00:41:28.369 --> 00:41:31.590
cures for cancer and other diseases from the public because
669
00:41:31.630 --> 00:41:35.710
of pressure from drug companies. 37% of the people surveyed
670
00:41:35.750 --> 00:41:38.289
agreed with it, and fewer than a third were willing
671
00:41:38.329 --> 00:41:42.210
to disagree. Most of the basic research behind cancer treatment
672
00:41:42.250 --> 00:41:45.159
in the United States isn't paid for by drug companies
673
00:41:45.219 --> 00:41:49.289
at all. The National Cancer Institute alone spends more than
674
00:41:49.289 --> 00:41:52.730
$ 7 billion a year, most of it on grants to
675
00:41:52.829 --> 00:41:56.690
university and hospital laboratories. And the discoveries that come out
676
00:41:56.730 --> 00:41:59.840
of those labs get published in open journals and licensed
677
00:41:59.880 --> 00:42:03.739
to companies afterward. Any one of those thousands of researchers
678
00:42:03.760 --> 00:42:06.880
who found a cure would have every professional reason to
679
00:42:06.940 --> 00:42:12.309
publish it. In 1965, a biophysicist at Michigan State University
680
00:42:12.389 --> 00:42:16.139
named Barnett Rosenberg was running electric current through a culture
681
00:42:16.159 --> 00:42:20.840
of bacteria using platinum electrodes. He was studying whether electric
682
00:42:20.940 --> 00:42:25.300
fields affected how cells divide. The bacteria stopped dividing and
683
00:42:25.340 --> 00:42:29.309
grew into long strands, and Rosenberg eventually traced the effect
684
00:42:29.369 --> 00:42:32.389
to a compound formed from the platinum in his electrodes.
685
00:42:33.010 --> 00:42:37.469
That platinum compound came to be called cisplatin. Cisplatin turned
686
00:42:37.550 --> 00:42:40.789
out to be extremely good at killing dividing cancer cells.
687
00:42:41.550 --> 00:42:46.449
In 1974, an oncologist at Indiana University named Lawrence Einhorn
688
00:42:46.800 --> 00:42:49.340
combined it with two other drugs to treat young men
689
00:42:49.599 --> 00:42:53.260
whose testicular cancer had spread through their bodies. Before that,
690
00:42:53.699 --> 00:42:57.960
men with widespread testicular cancer usually died of it. One
691
00:42:57.980 --> 00:43:00.860
of Einhorn's first patients on the new regimen, a young
692
00:43:00.920 --> 00:43:06.610
man named John Cleland, was still alive decades later. In 1996,
693
00:43:06.610 --> 00:43:09.969
Lance Armstrong, whose testicular cancer had spread to his lungs
694
00:43:10.030 --> 00:43:13.349
and brain, was treated at Indiana University with a version
695
00:43:13.409 --> 00:43:17.010
of the same regimen. Today, the overall cure rate for
696
00:43:17.070 --> 00:43:22.429
testicular cancer in the United States runs above 95%. Michigan
697
00:43:22.489 --> 00:43:26.880
State patented cisplatin and licensed it to the drug company Bristol-Myers,
698
00:43:27.219 --> 00:43:29.460
which sold it around the world after the Food and
699
00:43:29.480 --> 00:43:33.980
Drug Administration approved it in 1978, and the royalties paid
700
00:43:34.000 --> 00:43:38.440
the university for years. At St. Jude Children's Research Hospital
701
00:43:38.500 --> 00:43:43.059
in Memphis, starting in the early 1960s, a pediatric oncologist
702
00:43:43.119 --> 00:43:47.659
named Donald Pinkle began treating children with acute lymphoblastic leukemia
703
00:43:48.039 --> 00:43:51.670
using combinations of drugs, radiation to the brain and spine,
704
00:43:52.030 --> 00:43:56.210
and long courses of maintenance therapy. When Pinkle started, almost
705
00:43:56.429 --> 00:44:00.530
every child diagnosed with that disease died of it. Pinkle
706
00:44:00.550 --> 00:44:02.929
won the Lasker Award for that work in 1972, and today,
707
00:44:02.969 --> 00:44:08.360
according to St. Jude, Around 94% of children with that
708
00:44:08.409 --> 00:44:13.440
leukemia survive. At the National Cancer Institute in the 1960s,
709
00:44:13.820 --> 00:44:17.719
Vincent DeVita and his colleagues put together a four-drug combination
710
00:44:17.780 --> 00:44:21.159
for advanced Hodgkin's lymphoma, a disease that had been close
711
00:44:21.179 --> 00:44:25.920
to uniformly fatal once it spread. Their results, published in 1970,
712
00:44:25.920 --> 00:44:30.480
showed that a large share of those patients could be cured. Today,
713
00:44:30.780 --> 00:44:34.139
more than 8 in 10 people diagnosed with Hodgkin's lymphoma
714
00:44:34.239 --> 00:44:37.849
survive it. Some of those drugs came straight out of plants.
715
00:44:38.590 --> 00:44:42.090
One of the four in Davida's combination was vincristine, which
716
00:44:42.150 --> 00:44:46.409
researchers at Eli Lilly developed from the Madagascar periwinkle around
717
00:44:46.429 --> 00:44:49.409
the turn of the 1960s, and it's still a standard
718
00:44:49.449 --> 00:44:54.219
part of treatment for childhood leukemia. In 1962, under a
719
00:44:54.280 --> 00:44:57.400
joint program in which the National Cancer Institute and the
720
00:44:57.440 --> 00:45:01.420
Department of Agriculture gathered plant samples by the thousands to
721
00:45:01.460 --> 00:45:05.980
screen for anti-cancer activity, A botanist named Arthur Barkley collected
722
00:45:06.039 --> 00:45:08.900
bark from a Pacific yew tree in a national forest
723
00:45:08.980 --> 00:45:12.920
in Washington state. Two chemists at the Research Triangle Institute
724
00:45:12.960 --> 00:45:17.170
in North Carolina, Monroe Wall and Mansukh Wani, isolated the
725
00:45:17.309 --> 00:45:21.429
active compound and published its structure in 1971. It took
726
00:45:21.489 --> 00:45:25.809
another two decades, a federal partnership with Bristol-Myers Squibb, and
727
00:45:25.829 --> 00:45:28.480
a fight over how many old-growth yew trees would have
728
00:45:28.500 --> 00:45:30.920
to be stripped to supply it, before the Food and
729
00:45:30.940 --> 00:45:35.159
Drug Administration approved it in 1992 under the brand name
730
00:45:35.219 --> 00:45:39.510
Taxol for ovarian cancer. Stay tuned for more disturbing history.
731
00:45:40.030 --> 00:45:46.630
We'll be back after these messages. The bark problem was
732
00:45:46.670 --> 00:45:49.659
eventually solved by making the drug partly from the needles
733
00:45:49.739 --> 00:45:52.960
of the European yew, which grow back. It's become one
734
00:45:52.980 --> 00:45:56.019
of the most widely used chemotherapy drugs in the world.
735
00:45:56.760 --> 00:46:00.179
Cisplatin and the drugs behind those other cures went generic
736
00:46:00.300 --> 00:46:04.139
decades ago. They're cheap now, and they're manufactured all over
737
00:46:04.179 --> 00:46:08.920
the world. The best-known modern cancer drug story runs through Portland, Oregon.
738
00:46:09.559 --> 00:46:13.469
Chronic myeloid leukemia is driven by a single, faulty enzyme
739
00:46:13.530 --> 00:46:17.909
created when two chromosomes swap pieces. An oncologist at Oregon
740
00:46:17.949 --> 00:46:21.949
Health and Science University named Brian Druker worked with researchers
741
00:46:22.010 --> 00:46:25.760
at the drug company SebaGygi, which later merged into Novartis,
742
00:46:26.219 --> 00:46:29.760
on a compound designed to shut that enzyme off. Drucker
743
00:46:29.800 --> 00:46:32.340
has said in interviews over the years that the company
744
00:46:32.380 --> 00:46:35.739
was hesitant to push the compound forward, partly because the
745
00:46:35.800 --> 00:46:38.909
market for a drug aimed at one fairly rare leukemia
746
00:46:39.179 --> 00:46:43.269
looked small. The early trials were remarkable enough that patients
747
00:46:43.409 --> 00:46:47.269
organized and petitioned the company for wider access. The Food
748
00:46:47.309 --> 00:46:50.429
and Drug Administration approved the drug under the brand name
749
00:46:50.489 --> 00:46:54.400
Gleevec in May of 2001 after one of the fastest
750
00:46:54.460 --> 00:46:57.800
reviews in the agency's history. A disease that used to
751
00:46:57.840 --> 00:47:00.610
mean a few years of life or a dangerous bone
752
00:47:00.650 --> 00:47:04.230
marrow transplant, became something most patients could live with for
753
00:47:04.329 --> 00:47:08.679
decades by taking a pill every day. Novartis launched Gleevec
754
00:47:08.719 --> 00:47:13.139
at about $ 26, 000 a year. Over the following decade, it
755
00:47:13.199 --> 00:47:16.199
raised the price again and again until it was close
756
00:47:16.219 --> 00:47:20.369
to $ 100, 000 a year on a drug whose development costs
757
00:47:20.630 --> 00:47:24.420
had long since been recovered. In 2013, more than 100
758
00:47:24.420 --> 00:47:28.559
leukemia specialists from around the world published a commentary in
759
00:47:28.599 --> 00:47:32.030
the journal Blood, attacking the prices of Gleevec and the
760
00:47:32.070 --> 00:47:35.929
drugs that followed it, and calling them unsustainable and immoral.
761
00:47:36.510 --> 00:47:39.590
The same drug was a different story in India. In
762
00:47:39.710 --> 00:47:43.840
April of 2013, after a seven-year legal fight, the Supreme
763
00:47:43.900 --> 00:47:46.780
Court of India refused to grant Novartis a patent on
764
00:47:46.800 --> 00:47:49.550
the version of Gleevec it sold. ruling that it was
765
00:47:49.659 --> 00:47:51.880
too small a change from an older form of the
766
00:47:51.920 --> 00:47:56.000
molecule to deserve new protection. Indian generic makers had already
767
00:47:56.019 --> 00:47:58.940
been selling copies of the drug, and patients there paid
768
00:47:58.980 --> 00:48:02.199
a small fraction of the American price. When people say
769
00:48:02.239 --> 00:48:05.239
cancer treatment is easier to get in other countries, that's
770
00:48:05.340 --> 00:48:07.840
one of the places where they're right. And the reason
771
00:48:08.099 --> 00:48:11.340
was a patent ruling, with the drug itself fully known
772
00:48:11.400 --> 00:48:13.739
to the world. The same kind of pressure made the
773
00:48:13.780 --> 00:48:17.570
news in October of 2012, when three doctors at Memorial
774
00:48:17.630 --> 00:48:22.269
Sloan Kettering, Peter Bach, Leonard Saltz, and Robert Wittes wrote
775
00:48:22.329 --> 00:48:24.969
in the New York Times that their hospital would not
776
00:48:25.030 --> 00:48:28.829
be using a new colon cancer drug called Zoltrap. The
777
00:48:28.869 --> 00:48:33.619
drug's maker, Sanofi, had priced it at about $ 11, 000 a month,
778
00:48:34.159 --> 00:48:36.820
more than twice the cost of an existing drug that
779
00:48:36.860 --> 00:48:39.920
worked about as well. A month after the column ran,
780
00:48:40.320 --> 00:48:45.369
Sanofi effectively cut the price in half. The industry's documented
781
00:48:45.389 --> 00:48:49.719
misconduct around cancer patients goes past pricing, In December of 2012,
782
00:48:49.719 --> 00:48:54.820
the biotech company Amgen pleaded guilty in federal court and
783
00:48:54.860 --> 00:48:59.719
agreed to pay $ 762 million to resolve charges over how
784
00:48:59.780 --> 00:49:03.639
it marketed Aranesp, an anemia drug given to large numbers
785
00:49:03.679 --> 00:49:07.090
of cancer patients, including promoting it for uses the Food
786
00:49:07.110 --> 00:49:11.570
and Drug Administration had never approved. Gleevec and Zoltrap both
787
00:49:11.630 --> 00:49:14.230
show a drug industry that will charge whatever it can
788
00:49:14.289 --> 00:49:16.650
get for a cancer treatment once it's on the market.
789
00:49:17.090 --> 00:49:19.710
And a patent on a drug that works only pays
790
00:49:19.849 --> 00:49:23.619
off if somebody's selling it. William Coley's idea came back
791
00:49:23.679 --> 00:49:28.119
in the 1990s in a laboratory at the University of California, Berkeley.
792
00:49:28.699 --> 00:49:32.550
An immunologist there named James Allison was studying a molecule
793
00:49:32.630 --> 00:49:37.150
on the surface of immune cells called CTLA-4, which works
794
00:49:37.190 --> 00:49:41.579
like a brake on the immune response. In 1996, Allison's
795
00:49:41.659 --> 00:49:44.719
lab showed that blocking that break in mice let their
796
00:49:44.760 --> 00:49:49.320
immune systems attack and clear tumors. In Japan, a researcher
797
00:49:49.380 --> 00:49:53.690
named Tasuku Honjo had discovered a second break called PD-1
798
00:49:54.010 --> 00:49:57.670
in the early 1990s. Drugs that release those breaks are
799
00:49:57.710 --> 00:50:01.210
called checkpoint inhibitors. The first one approved in the United
800
00:50:01.289 --> 00:50:05.170
States was a drug called Yervoy in March of 2011,
801
00:50:05.170 --> 00:50:08.309
and the disease it was approved for was advanced melanoma.
802
00:50:09.010 --> 00:50:12.159
Before that, a patient whose melanoma had spread to distant
803
00:50:12.260 --> 00:50:15.480
organs typically had less than a year to live, and
804
00:50:15.579 --> 00:50:18.099
nothing on the market had been shown in a randomized
805
00:50:18.159 --> 00:50:22.440
trial to extend that. In September of 2014, the Food
806
00:50:22.480 --> 00:50:27.139
and Drug Administration approved Merck's drug Keytruda, which blocks PD-1,
807
00:50:27.559 --> 00:50:32.429
again for advanced melanoma. Three months later, Bristol-Myers Squibb won
808
00:50:32.469 --> 00:50:36.139
approval for its own drug aimed at the same target, Opdivo,
809
00:50:36.639 --> 00:50:38.880
and the two companies have been racing each other into
810
00:50:38.960 --> 00:50:42.659
new cancer types ever since, each trying to get there first.
811
00:50:43.480 --> 00:50:47.000
In August of 2015, after surgeons removed a mass from
812
00:50:47.039 --> 00:50:50.360
his liver, former president Jimmy Carter announced that he had
813
00:50:50.440 --> 00:50:53.559
melanoma and that it had spread to his brain at
814
00:50:53.579 --> 00:50:57.079
the age of 90. He was treated with radiation and
815
00:50:57.119 --> 00:50:59.539
with Keytruda, a drug that had been on the market
816
00:50:59.579 --> 00:51:02.289
for less than a year. and in December of that year,
817
00:51:02.630 --> 00:51:05.389
he told his Sunday school class in Plains, Georgia that
818
00:51:05.409 --> 00:51:08.849
his latest scans showed no sign of cancer. He lived
819
00:51:08.889 --> 00:51:12.650
another nine years and died in December of 2024 at
820
00:51:12.670 --> 00:51:17.590
the age of 100. In 2018, James Allison and Tasuku
821
00:51:17.650 --> 00:51:21.659
Honjo shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for
822
00:51:21.699 --> 00:51:25.639
the discovery behind those drugs. Long-term follow-up of the big
823
00:51:25.699 --> 00:51:29.500
checkpoint inhibitor trials has found a substantial share of patients
824
00:51:29.539 --> 00:51:33.880
with advanced melanoma still alive 10 years after treatment, an
825
00:51:34.019 --> 00:51:37.929
outcome that didn't exist for that disease before 2011. Some
826
00:51:37.969 --> 00:51:41.130
of those patients, by any ordinary definition of the word,
827
00:51:41.510 --> 00:51:45.670
are cured. Merck's sales of Keytruda in 2024 came to
828
00:51:45.710 --> 00:51:50.440
about $ 29. 5 billion, which made it the best-selling drug in
829
00:51:50.480 --> 00:51:53.380
the world. That's what a drug company does with a
830
00:51:53.440 --> 00:51:57.760
treatment that can make metastatic melanoma disappear. Merck launched it
831
00:51:57.860 --> 00:52:01.900
at around $ 150, 000 a year, and sells it in dozens
832
00:52:01.940 --> 00:52:06.610
of countries. Checkpoint inhibitors don't work for everybody. Most patients
833
00:52:06.639 --> 00:52:09.630
with most cancers still don't respond to them, and the
834
00:52:09.690 --> 00:52:13.090
side effects can be severe because a released immune system
835
00:52:13.130 --> 00:52:16.730
can attack healthy organs as well as tumors. But the
836
00:52:16.750 --> 00:52:19.110
people in this story who believed the body could be
837
00:52:19.159 --> 00:52:23.320
turned against its own cancer from William Coley in 1891
838
00:52:23.320 --> 00:52:26.559
forward turned out to be right, and the proof came
839
00:52:26.599 --> 00:52:31.269
through clinical trials and patents and a Nobel Prize. The
840
00:52:31.329 --> 00:52:34.070
other half of George's claim was that cancer has already
841
00:52:34.110 --> 00:52:37.119
been cured in many countries. I went looking for the
842
00:52:37.179 --> 00:52:39.820
treatments that come up most often when people say that,
843
00:52:40.159 --> 00:52:42.340
and the one with the most solid record behind it
844
00:52:42.599 --> 00:52:47.150
comes from Cuba. Researchers at the Center of Molecular Immunology
845
00:52:47.190 --> 00:52:52.230
in Havana developed a vaccine called CIMAVAX for advanced non-small
846
00:52:52.289 --> 00:52:55.570
cell lung cancer. It trains the immune system to go
847
00:52:55.650 --> 00:52:58.510
after a growth factor that some lung tumors depend on.
848
00:52:59.079 --> 00:53:02.800
Cuba approved it in 2011. Because of the embargo, it
849
00:53:02.840 --> 00:53:05.940
couldn't be tested in the United States until relations thawed.
850
00:53:06.320 --> 00:53:09.360
And in 2015, during a New York State trade mission
851
00:53:09.389 --> 00:53:13.289
to Havana, the Roswell Park Comprehensive Cancer Center in Buffalo
852
00:53:13.590 --> 00:53:16.230
reached an agreement to study it. The Food and Drug
853
00:53:16.269 --> 00:53:20.489
Administration cleared a trial the following year. The Cuban trials
854
00:53:20.570 --> 00:53:23.769
found that the vaccine extended survival for some patients with
855
00:53:23.809 --> 00:53:27.170
advanced lung cancer by a few months on average and
856
00:53:27.250 --> 00:53:30.840
longer in some cases. It's also cheap to make. which
857
00:53:30.880 --> 00:53:34.340
was part of what interested the Americans. The Cuban researchers
858
00:53:34.409 --> 00:53:37.289
themselves describe it as a way to turn advanced lung
859
00:53:37.309 --> 00:53:41.949
cancer into something closer to a manageable chronic disease. Nobody
860
00:53:41.969 --> 00:53:44.730
in the published research calls it a cure. And the
861
00:53:44.769 --> 00:53:47.690
first thing the American cancer establishment did when it got
862
00:53:47.710 --> 00:53:49.840
a chance at the drug was set up a trial
863
00:53:49.900 --> 00:53:53.280
to test it. The treatments most often sold abroad as
864
00:53:53.380 --> 00:53:56.579
cures that Americans aren't allowed to have are mostly the
865
00:53:56.739 --> 00:54:01.059
ones from earlier in this episode. Laetrile, the Hoxitonic, and
866
00:54:01.099 --> 00:54:03.960
a long list of other regimens are offered at clinics
867
00:54:04.000 --> 00:54:07.460
in Tijuana and elsewhere in Mexico, where the regulations are
868
00:54:07.539 --> 00:54:10.960
looser and American patients drive across the border to pay
869
00:54:11.000 --> 00:54:14.800
cash for them. Those treatments are available in Mexico because
870
00:54:14.880 --> 00:54:17.559
Mexican law allows it, and the ones that have been
871
00:54:17.599 --> 00:54:21.760
put through trials came up empty. The most interesting case
872
00:54:21.820 --> 00:54:24.019
I found of a cheap cancer drug that seemed to
873
00:54:24.059 --> 00:54:27.719
go nowhere for business reasons came out of Canada. In
874
00:54:27.760 --> 00:54:31.570
January of 2007, a team at the University of Alberta,
875
00:54:31.800 --> 00:54:35.449
led by Evangelos Mikalakis, published a paper in the journal
876
00:54:35.510 --> 00:54:41.789
Cancer Cell, reporting that a simple, old, unpatentable chemical called dichloroacetate,
877
00:54:42.130 --> 00:54:46.099
or DCA, shrank tumors in rats by reviving a part
878
00:54:46.139 --> 00:54:49.800
of the cell's machinery that cancer shuts down. The press
879
00:54:49.860 --> 00:54:52.820
ran with it, and patients around the world started ordering
880
00:54:52.860 --> 00:54:58.099
the chemical from industrial suppliers and dosing themselves. Michalakis couldn't
881
00:54:58.119 --> 00:55:01.159
get a drug company interested because nobody could patent a
882
00:55:01.199 --> 00:55:04.559
chemical that had been around for decades. His team raised
883
00:55:04.639 --> 00:55:07.559
money in donations from the public and from the university,
884
00:55:07.989 --> 00:55:11.110
and in 2010, they published a small study of five
885
00:55:11.190 --> 00:55:15.789
patients with an aggressive brain cancer called glioblastoma. The results
886
00:55:15.829 --> 00:55:19.510
were encouraging enough to justify larger trials, and nothing in
887
00:55:19.550 --> 00:55:22.730
the years since has shown dichloroacetate to be a cure.
888
00:55:23.550 --> 00:55:26.369
That case shows a real flaw in how cancer drugs
889
00:55:26.429 --> 00:55:29.920
get developed. A compound nobody can patent has a hard
890
00:55:29.960 --> 00:55:33.070
time finding anybody willing to spend the hundreds of millions
891
00:55:33.110 --> 00:55:36.409
of dollars it takes to run full clinical trials. And
892
00:55:36.449 --> 00:55:39.769
so promising cheap drugs can sit for years with nobody
893
00:55:39.829 --> 00:55:43.650
testing them properly. That's a problem of neglect and incentives,
894
00:55:44.030 --> 00:55:46.909
and it's documented. It's a different thing from a drug
895
00:55:46.929 --> 00:55:51.550
that's been shown to cure cancer and then hidden. In 1990,
896
00:55:51.550 --> 00:55:55.940
Congress's own research arm, the Office of Technology Assessment, published
897
00:55:56.000 --> 00:56:00.099
a report on unconventional cancer treatments. It examined several of
898
00:56:00.139 --> 00:56:03.550
the therapies in this episode, including the Gerson diet, the
899
00:56:03.570 --> 00:56:08.309
Hoxie treatment, and Brzezinski's antineoplastins, and it concluded that none
900
00:56:08.329 --> 00:56:11.429
of them had been shown to work. It also criticized
901
00:56:11.469 --> 00:56:15.030
the National Cancer Institute for doing too little to evaluate
902
00:56:15.070 --> 00:56:18.030
the more promising claims and recommended that it find a
903
00:56:18.070 --> 00:56:21.869
way to look at them seriously. The National Cancer Institute
904
00:56:21.909 --> 00:56:24.869
has had a door open for claims like George's ever since.
905
00:56:25.599 --> 00:56:28.960
Starting in 1991, it's run what it calls the Best
906
00:56:29.039 --> 00:56:33.510
Case Series program, which invites practitioners of alternative cancer treatments
907
00:56:33.820 --> 00:56:38.650
to submit their best documented cases with medical records, pathology reports,
908
00:56:38.929 --> 00:56:43.110
and imaging for review by the Institute's own staff. Cases
909
00:56:43.150 --> 00:56:46.610
that hold up can lead to further study. The idea
910
00:56:46.650 --> 00:56:50.170
that a cure is being withheld costs people something, and
911
00:56:50.210 --> 00:56:54.269
that cost has been measured. In 2018, A team at
912
00:56:54.309 --> 00:56:58.289
Yale led by a radiation oncology resident named Skylar Johnson
913
00:56:58.650 --> 00:57:01.800
published a study in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute.
914
00:57:02.360 --> 00:57:06.179
They went through a national cancer database and found 281
915
00:57:06.179 --> 00:57:10.239
patients with curable cancers of the breast, prostate, lung, or
916
00:57:10.280 --> 00:57:14.340
colon who had chosen alternative medicine alone. And they compared
917
00:57:14.380 --> 00:57:19.150
them with 560 similar patients who'd had conventional treatment. Over
918
00:57:19.190 --> 00:57:22.510
the years of follow-up, the patients who chose alternative medicine
919
00:57:22.590 --> 00:57:25.340
alone were about two and a half times as likely
920
00:57:25.380 --> 00:57:28.780
to die. Among the women with breast cancer, the risk
921
00:57:28.800 --> 00:57:31.880
was more than five times as high. The same team
922
00:57:31.940 --> 00:57:35.570
published a second study that summer in JAMA Oncology, looking
923
00:57:35.610 --> 00:57:39.829
at patients who used complementary medicine alongside conventional care, and
924
00:57:39.889 --> 00:57:43.989
found that those patients were more likely to refuse surgery, chemotherapy,
925
00:57:44.070 --> 00:57:47.119
or radiation when it was recommended, and were about twice
926
00:57:47.159 --> 00:57:49.690
as likely to die as patients who didn't use it.
927
00:57:50.280 --> 00:57:53.489
The patients who chose alternative medicine on their own tended
928
00:57:53.530 --> 00:57:57.210
to be younger, better educated, and better off financially than
929
00:57:57.250 --> 00:58:01.010
the ones who didn't. Steve Jobs was diagnosed in October
930
00:58:01.030 --> 00:58:05.050
of 2003 with a rare and relatively slow-growing form of
931
00:58:05.110 --> 00:58:09.360
pancreatic cancer called a neuroendocrine tumor, a kind that can
932
00:58:09.469 --> 00:58:14.539
often be removed surgically. According to his authorized biographer, Walter Isaacson,
933
00:58:15.000 --> 00:58:18.000
Jobs put off surgery for about nine months while he
934
00:58:18.039 --> 00:58:23.019
tried diet changes, acupuncture, and other alternative approaches, despite his
935
00:58:23.099 --> 00:58:26.570
wife and several close friends pressing him to have the operation.
936
00:58:27.269 --> 00:58:31.030
He had the operation in July of 2004. The cancer
937
00:58:31.070 --> 00:58:36.380
came back, and he died in October of 2011 at 56.
938
00:58:36.380 --> 00:58:39.340
Nobody can say for certain that surgery nine months earlier
939
00:58:39.380 --> 00:58:42.420
would have saved him, and Isaacson's account doesn't claim it.
940
00:58:43.250 --> 00:58:46.530
People who credit an alternative treatment with curing their cancer
941
00:58:46.829 --> 00:58:50.610
are usually telling the truth as they understand it. 16
942
00:58:50.610 --> 00:58:53.159
years as a police officer taught me how often an
943
00:58:53.239 --> 00:58:56.380
honest witness gets the sequence of events right and gets
944
00:58:56.420 --> 00:59:00.260
the cause wrong. Many of them had surgery, radiation, or
945
00:59:00.300 --> 00:59:04.769
chemotherapy too, before or alongside it. Some had tumors that
946
00:59:04.789 --> 00:59:08.210
were never confirmed by a biopsy. And a very small
947
00:59:08.250 --> 00:59:12.690
number of cancers go away on their own. In 1966,
948
00:59:12.690 --> 00:59:16.280
two surgeons named Tilden Everson and Warren Cole combed the
949
00:59:16.320 --> 00:59:18.099
medical literature from 1900 to 1960 and documented 176 cases
950
00:59:18.199 --> 00:59:20.780
of spontaneous regression across those 60 years of published medicine.
951
00:59:26.869 --> 00:59:30.070
Melanoma turns up on that list more often than most cancers,
952
00:59:30.429 --> 00:59:34.150
along with kidney cancer and a childhood cancer called neuroblastoma.
953
00:59:34.849 --> 00:59:37.969
That's why the Best Case series asks for pathology reports
954
00:59:38.070 --> 00:59:41.409
and scans, and why the National Cancer Institute told Harry
955
00:59:41.449 --> 00:59:44.909
Hoxie in the 1950s that his case histories weren't enough.
956
00:59:45.630 --> 00:59:48.389
A recovery that can't be separated from the other treatment
957
00:59:48.429 --> 00:59:51.869
the patient had, or from a diagnosis that was never confirmed,
958
00:59:52.309 --> 00:59:55.699
doesn't tell anybody what caused it. I went into this
959
00:59:55.760 --> 00:59:59.280
looking for a hidden cure, and I don't believe there's one.
960
01:00:00.070 --> 01:00:02.349
Part of the reason is the one the pathologists give,
961
01:00:02.730 --> 01:00:06.389
that cancer is hundreds of different diseases. The rest is
962
01:00:06.429 --> 01:00:09.929
what the record shows happening every time something worked, which
963
01:00:09.969 --> 01:00:12.389
is that the cures and near cures went to market,
964
01:00:12.909 --> 01:00:16.340
often at prices that ought to bother anybody. A drug
965
01:00:16.380 --> 01:00:18.880
that wiped out cancer would be worth more than any
966
01:00:18.940 --> 01:00:22.039
product ever made, to any company that owned it, and
967
01:00:22.059 --> 01:00:25.719
to every government that pays for cancer care. Britain's National
968
01:00:25.760 --> 01:00:29.550
Health Service, Canada's provincial health plans, and the state-run labs
969
01:00:29.610 --> 01:00:32.989
in China and Cuba don't answer to American drug companies.
970
01:00:33.730 --> 01:00:36.530
The people running drug companies get cancer, and so do
971
01:00:36.550 --> 01:00:40.170
their wives and children and parents. A cure that worked
972
01:00:40.329 --> 01:00:43.869
would also leak, the way every breakthrough in this episode did.
973
01:00:44.489 --> 01:00:47.219
The checkpoint drugs came out of a laboratory in Berkeley
974
01:00:47.440 --> 01:00:51.179
and a laboratory in Kyoto, published in journals anyone could read,
975
01:00:51.639 --> 01:00:55.159
years before any company had a product to sell. Harry
976
01:00:55.199 --> 01:00:58.699
Hoxie's head nurse in Dallas was a woman named Mildred Nelson,
977
01:00:59.079 --> 01:01:01.840
who'd come to work for him in the 1940s after,
978
01:01:02.019 --> 01:01:04.860
by her family's account, her own mother was treated at
979
01:01:04.909 --> 01:01:08.630
his clinic. When the American clinics were shut down, Nelson
980
01:01:08.650 --> 01:01:12.309
took the treatment across the border, and in 1963, she
981
01:01:12.429 --> 01:01:16.110
opened the Biomedical Center in Tijuana. She ran it until
982
01:01:16.150 --> 01:01:19.389
she died in 1999, and her sister took it over
983
01:01:19.530 --> 01:01:25.550
after her. Harry Hoxie was diagnosed with prostate cancer in 1967.
984
01:01:25.550 --> 01:01:28.190
His own tonic didn't stop it, and he had surgery.
985
01:01:28.809 --> 01:01:32.369
He died in Dallas in 1974. As far as I
986
01:01:32.389 --> 01:01:35.889
could find, the biomedical center is still open in Tijuana,
987
01:01:36.269 --> 01:01:39.010
and patients still cross over from San Diego to buy
988
01:01:39.050 --> 01:01:42.059
the tonic that Harry Hoxie said started with a sick
989
01:01:42.119 --> 01:01:46.460
horse grazing in an Illinois pasture in 1840. In a
990
01:01:46.480 --> 01:01:49.840
week or so, George gets his turn. He's an inventor
991
01:01:49.880 --> 01:01:52.840
who spent years with Brown's Gas. He came to me
992
01:01:52.880 --> 01:01:55.389
with claims I couldn't have made up, and I'm going
993
01:01:55.429 --> 01:01:57.469
to let him make every one of them in his
994
01:01:57.610 --> 01:02:01.849
own words. Until then, take care of yourself and each other.
995
01:02:01.869 --> 01:02:21.449
I shot your skin I've got a taste for you
996
01:02:22.090 --> 01:02:37.929
You're high, I'm seeking Watch out, I'm coming for you Ooh,
997
01:02:38.590 --> 01:02:45.940
you better run now Ooh, the moon is out now Ooh.
998
01:02:48.190 --> 01:02:50.789
You're gonna hear my.
999
01:02:52.719 --> 01:03:03.320
Howl. Howl, howl, howl, howl. Blood skies, red eyes. Can't
1000
01:03:03.489 --> 01:03:11.889
get enough of it. My dream is your nightmare.
1001
01:03:20.900 --> 01:03:21.139
Bye. Bye.