‘Second Opinion’ documentary revives stifling of cancer drug tests
Experimenting with apricot pits in the basement of their Mission District mansion a half century ago, Ernst T. Krebs Jr. and his father invented laetrile with scientist Charles Gurchot. The substance, marketed as a cancer treatment, was denounced as quackery in 1953 but became popular in the early 1970s when people traveled to Mexico to try the treatment. The Sloan Kettering Cancer Center dismissed laetrile as worthless in 1974, even though one of its own scientists, Kanematsu Sugiura, co-inventor of chemotherapy, had tested the substance on mice with excellent results. When employee
Ralph Moss went public with the promising research, he was fired.
Filmmaker Eric Merola revisits the story in his documentary “Second Opinion: Laetrile at SloanKettering,” which opened Friday.
“I think most people will agree there hasn’t been much progress in the war on cancer, yet here’s this promising thing that’s natural, inexpensive and nontoxic if it were properly tested on people.”
Merola became fascinated with connections between private pharmaceutical companies, scientific research and public agencies like the FDA after he picked up a copy of Moss’ book “The Cancer Industry” seven years ago. “I want people to realize that the cancer quote unquote industry is no different from any other industries that we perceive as being broken in terms of the levels of corruption,” Merola says.
Joining the conversation, Moss adds, “We don’t advocate that people run out and use laetrile to combat cancer. Our message is simply that laetrile was extremely positive at the research level, but it was quashed for economic, political and personal reasons.”
In conjunction with the documentary, Merola and Moss have started a petition on Change.org asking Sloan Kettering to do more research on laetrile.
“We would love it if Sloan Kettering apologized for letting this happen 40 years ago and decided, ‘Let’s open up a clinical trial for laetrile, let’s do a randomized study and see what happens,’ ” Merola says. “Doesn’t the human race deserve that?”