Disturbing History - Is Big Pharma Hiding the Cure for Cancer?

Episode Date: October 2, 2026

This episode asks a simple question: if someone really discovered a cure for cancer, would the medical industry suppress it? Brian begins with a clear disclaimer that he is not a doctor and is making no medical claims, then looks at the history behind one of the most persistent conspiracy theories in modern medicine.The episode briefly examines Brown’s Gas, Yull Brown’s 1977 welding patent, and early research involving hydrogen and oxygen inhalation before turning to the larger claim of medical suppression. It starts with the infamous 2018 Goldman Sachs report that asked whether curing patients was a sustainable business model, using Gilead’s hepatitis C treatment as an example of what happens when a highly effective therapy eventually reduces its own customer base.From there, Brian traces more than a century of controversial cancer treatments and alleged suppressed cures, including William Coley, Royal Rife, Harry Hoxsey, Max Gerson, Krebiozen, Laetrile, Linus Pauling’s vitamin C research, Stanislaw Burzynski, and several alternative cancer clinics. Some were dismissed too quickly, others became major scientific disputes, and many ultimately failed when tested under controlled conditions.The episode also examines cases where powerful industries really did hide dangerous information, including the tobacco industry’s decades-long campaign to obscure the health risks of smoking, asbestos companies suppressing evidence, the sugar industry abandoning research that produced troubling results, and DuPont’s history with C8 contamination.Then Brian looks at what successful cancer treatments actually look like when evidence holds up. Cisplatin transformed survival for testicular cancer. Childhood leukemia went from nearly hopeless to highly treatable. Taxol emerged from a federal plant-screening program. Gleevec revolutionized treatment for chronic myeloid leukemia, and modern checkpoint inhibitors grew from ideas about using the immune system to attack cancer.The episode closes by asking where the line should be drawn between skepticism of powerful institutions and claims that cannot survive scientific testing.History shows that corporations and medical institutions have sometimes hidden inconvenient truths. It also shows that when a treatment truly works, repeated evidence has a way of becoming impossible to ignore.Email BrianGet Brian's Books Leave Us A VoicemailVisit Our WebsiteHave a forgotten historical mystery, disturbing event, unsolved crime, or hidden conspiracy you think deserves investigation?Send your suggestions to [e-mail] History is a dark history podcast exploring unsolved mysteries, secret societies, historical conspiracies, lost civilizations, and the shadowy stories buried beneath the surface of the past.Follow the show and enable automatic downloads so you never miss a deep dive into history’s most unsettling secrets.Because sometimes the truth is darker than fiction.

Some stories were never meant to be told. Others were buried on purpose. This podcast digs them all up. Disturbing history peels back the layers of the past to uncover the strange, the sinister, and the stories that were never supposed to survive. From shadowy presidential secrets to government experiments that sound more like fiction than fact, this is history they hoped you'd forget. I'm Brian, investigator, author, and your guide through the dark corner.

of our collective memory. Each week I'll narrate some of the most chilling and little-known tales from history that will make you question everything you thought you knew. And here's the twist. Sometimes the history is disturbing to us. And sometimes, we have to disturb history itself,

just to get to the truth. If you like your facts with the side of fear, if you're not afraid to pull at threads, others leave alone. You're in the right place. History isn't just written by the victors. victors. Sometimes it's rewritten by the disturbed. Before anything else, one thing needs to be made clear. I'm not a doctor, and nothing in this episode is medical advice. I'm not making any medical

claims about any treatment, and I'm not telling anybody what to do about their own health. This is history, put together for informational purposes only, and anybody facing a diagnosis should be talking to a physician they trust. Recently, a listener of this show named George, who's an inventor, reached out a while back to ask whether I'd be interested in doing an episode on something called Brown's Gas. I had never heard of Brown's Gas before his message came in, so I started looking into it, and what I found was interesting enough that I wanted to at least have a conversation with him. We scheduled the interview, and 45 minutes later, my mind was blown. I'm putting that episode together now, and the interview is going to run in its entirety, so George will get to make his case in his own words.

George made a lot of claims about Brown's gas over those 45 minutes. One of them was that he had several documented accounts of the gas curing melanoma in at least three patients. He also told me that cancer had already been cured in many countries and that the big pharmaceutical companies were suppressing that information. Skin cancer hits home for me. Almost 40 years ago, my mom was diagnosed with a rare form of it and given a few months to live. Thanks to some cutting-edge treatments and a doctor at Vanderbilt University Hospital, she's still alive and well today.

So when George told me cancer had already been cured and somebody was sitting on it, that got me thinking. And I decided to go down the rabbit hole and see what I could find. This episode deals with cancer and with people who died after choosing treatments that didn't work. Brown's gas takes its name from Yule Brown, a Bulgarian-born inventor who settled in Australia and was granted a United States patent in 1977 for a welding process built around a machine that splits water with electricity. An electric current run through water breaks it into hydrogen and oxygen, two parts hydrogen to

one part oxygen. And Brown's design kept the two gases together in a single stream instead of collecting them separately. Chemists have known that mixture as oxyhydrogen since the early 1800s. The medical side of it rests on a 2007 paper from Nippon Medical School in Tokyo, published in Nature Medicine, which reported that rats breathing a small amount of hydrogen suffered less brain damage after an induced stroke. That paper set off a long run of research into what's now called molecular hydrogen, and some of it, mostly out of China, involved giving advanced cancer patients a two-to-one hydrogen and oxygen mixture to breathe. Those are small studies and case reports without control groups, and I couldn't find a

randomized controlled trial anywhere showing that breathing hydrogen cured. melanoma or any other cancer. The single document that comes up more than any other when people argue that a cure is being hidden is a research note Goldman Sachs sent to its clients on the 10th of April 2018. It was a report on biotechnology called the Genome Revolution, and the line that got out into the world came from one of its sections. CNBC put it in a headline the next day. Is curing patients a sustainable business model? The analyst who wrote it, Salveen Richter used one company as her example. Gilead Sciences had brought a pill called Savaldi to market at the end of 2013, and it cured hepatitis C in more than 90% of the patients who took it. Gilead charged

$84,000 for a 12-week course, which came to about $1,000 a pill, and the follow-up drug it released the next year cost more. The drug and its successor worked so well that Gilead started running out of patients to sell them to. Hepatitis C sales in the United States peaked at around $12.5 billion in 2015, and the Goldman Note projected they'd fall under $4 billion in 2018. The note went on to suggest how a company could live with that problem. Go after very large markets, it said, and diseases where new patients keep turning up every year and keep a steady pipeline of new products coming.

For anybody who already suspected the drug industry would rather manage a disease than end it, that note reads like a confession. Read in full, it's a warning to investors that a cure is a one-time sale, and nowhere in it does Goldman suggest that a company sit on one. Gilead sold its cure, and it set the price high enough that a United States Senate Finance Committee investigation, released in December of 2015, concluded the company had priced the drug to maximize revenue

while knowing the price would keep it out of reach for a lot of patients who needed it. That investigation, run by Senators Ron Wyden and Chuck Grassley, took about 18 months and went through Gilead's internal documents. It found that the company had looked at lower prices that would have reached more patients and passed on them. State Medicaid programs, facing bills they couldn't pay, responded by rationing the drug. And in many states, a patient had to show serious liver damage

before the program would cover a cure that could have been given years earlier. That's a documented case of a company putting money ahead of sick people. And in that case, the cure was on pharmacy shelves the entire time. The oldest version of the suppressed cure story that holds up to real scrutiny begins with a New York bone surgeon named William Coley. In 1890, Coley treated a 17-year-old named Bessie Dashel for a sarcoma that started in her hand. He amputated her arm below the elbow, and the cancer spread anyway, and she died in

January of 1891. Bessie Dashel had been a close friend of John D. Rockefeller Jr. And her death is one of the reasons the Rockefeller family later put money into cancer research at the hospital where Coli worked. Coli went through the hospital's old records looking for anything that might have gone differently in some other patient. And he found the file of a German immigrant named Fred Stein. Years earlier, Stein had come in with a sarcoma in his neck that surgeons couldn't fully remove. Then he came down with a severe skin infection called aerosipolis, and after the infection, the tumor went away. Coley went looking for Stein on the lower east side of Manhattan, and by his own account, found him alive with no sign of

the tumor. Starting in 1891, Coley began deliberately infecting cancer patients with the streptococcus bacteria that cause erycipolis. Live infections were dangerous and hard to control, so he moved to a mixture of killed bacteria that became known as Coley's toxins. Some of his patients had remissions that astonished the doctors who saw them. A lot of others didn't respond at all. The preparations varied from batch to batch, and nobody, Coley included, could explain why it worked when it did. His boss at Memorial Hospital in New York, a pathologist named James Ewing, was one of the most

powerful cancer doctors in the country and a firm believer in radiation. Ewing didn't think much of Coley's toxins and said so. Radiation could be measured, dosed, and repeated, and over the following decades, radiation and then chemotherapy became the standard. The drug company Park Davis manufactured Coley's toxins for doctors who wanted them into the 1950s, but the number of physicians using them kept shrinking. William Coley died in 1936. His daughter, Helen Coley-naughts, spent years going through his papers and commenced.

compiling case histories, and in 1953, she founded the Cancer Research Institute in New York to keep the idea alive. In 1962, after the thalidomide disaster, Congress rewrote federal drug law to require proof that a medicine actually works, and Coley's toxins, which had never been through modern clinical trials, ended up classified as an unapproved drug. Of everything in the suppression file, Coley is the case I'd put the most weight on. The establishment of his day did turn its back on him, and the core of his idea that the body's own immune system can be provoked into attacking a tumor turned out to be right. The record shows a treatment that couldn't be made to work reliably with what medicine knew at the time, losing out to treatments that could,

and his idea came back on its own about a century later. Royal Raymond Rife was a San Diego inventor who built microscopes in the 1920s and 30s and said he could see living viruses with them, which the optical microscopes of that era couldn't do. He also built a device he said could kill microbes by bombarding them with a frequency he called their mortal oscillatory rate. In 1934, a group sponsored by a Los Angeles physician named Milbank Johnson treated a small number of patients described as terminal with Rife's device. Rife's supporters later said nearly all of them were cured.

No results from that work were ever published in a medical journal, and I couldn't find any surviving patient records that anyone has made public. In the late 1930s, the business partners behind Rife's device ended up suing one another, and the project came apart. Rife died in 1971, and he was mostly forgotten until a writer named Barry Lines published a book in 1987 called The Cancer Cure That Worked. Rife machines have been sold to cancer patients ever since. The Food and Drug Administration has never approved one to treat cancer.

Harry Hoxie said his cure came from a horse. The family story, as Hoxie told it, went back to 1840, when his great-grandfather John Hoxie had a horse with a cancerous growth on its leg turned out to pasture on a farm in Illinois. The horse kept grazing on certain plants. The growth went away, and the great-grandfather collected those plants and worked them into remedies. According to Harry, the formulas came down through the family to his father, a veterinarian who treated people on the side, and his father handed them to him before he died in

1919. Harry Hoxie had no medical training. What he had was an internal tonic, a mixture of potassium iodide and herbs that included red clover, burdock, and poke root, and two external treatments, one of them a paste made with arsenic sulfide. The paste was an escharotic, which means it burned away tissue. Applied to a tumor on the skin, it could destroy the tumour, with the healthy skin around it. He opened his first clinic in Taylorville, Illinois, in 1924, and he was arrested over and over for practicing medicine without a license. In 1936, he opened a clinic in Dallas, and by the mid-50s, by Hoxie's own figures, it was treating around 12,000 patients and had affiliated clinics in more than a dozen states.

The man who made himself Hoxie's chief enemy was Morris Fishbine, the editor of the Journal of the American Medical Association from 1924 to 1949 and the most famous crusader against medical quackery in the country. Fishbine went after Hoxie in print for years. In 1949, in an article for a Hearst Sunday magazine, he called Hoxie a cancer charlatan. Hoxie sued him for libel and a Dallas jury found in Hoxie's favor. The damages it awarded were close to nothing and the verdict said nothing about whether Hoxie's treatment worked. Fishbine himself had already been pushed out at the American Medical Association that year.

Hoxie told his side of it in a 1956 autobiography he titled, You Don't Have to Die. In it, he claimed that Fishbine and people around him had once tried to get control of his formulas and that his war with organized medicine started when he refused to hand them over. That account is Hoxie's own, and I couldn't find any document outside his book

that backs it up. The National Cancer Institute asked Hoxie for proof, and in the early 1950s, he sent it a set of case histories. The Institute said the records didn't establish that the patients had cancer to begin with, or that the treatment had anything to do with how they did, because so many lacked biopsies or documentation of what other treatment they'd had. In 1953, a Senate committee hired a lawyer named Benedict Fitzgerald as special counsel to look into the cancer field, and his report has been a central document of the suppression argument ever since. Fitzgerald examined how the American Medical Association and others had treated Hoxie and several other alternative practitioners, and he concluded there was reason to believe

in a concerted effort to suppress them and that a full investigation was warranted. Senator William Langer of North Dakota had the report entered into the congressional record. Fitzgerald's assignment ended and the full investigation he called for never had. happened, that report is real, and I think it shows a medical establishment in the 1950s that behaved like a guild protecting its territory. What it didn't contain was any clinical evidence that Hoxie's tonic cured cancer, because none existed then and none has been produced since. In 1956, the Food and Drug Administration had warning notices posted in post offices around the country, telling the public not to be misled by the Hoxie treatment. Hoxi fought the agency in

court and lost. And by 1960, his clinics in the United States were closed. Morris Fishbein lived until 1976, and in 1987, a filmmaker named Kenny Ossebel released a documentary called Hoxie, How Healing Becomes a Crime, which turned the feud between the two men into a founding text of the modern suppression movement. Stay tuned for more disturbing history. We'll be back after these messages. Max Gerson was a German physician who fled the Nazis and settled in New York in the 1930s. He developed a diet therapy, first for migraines and tuberculosis, and later for cancer, built around large amounts of fresh fruit and vegetable juice, a diet with almost no salt, and coffee enemas taken several times a day. In July of 1946,

Gerson testified before a United States Senate subcommittee, chaired by Claude Pepper of Florida, that was considering a bill to put federal money into cancer research, and he brought patients with him who described their recoveries to the senators. The bill he testified for never became law. The Journal of the American Medical Association, still under Morris Fishbine, ran a short item dismissing his approach, and the National Cancer Institute, after looking at 10 of his cases in the late 1940s, said they didn't show the diet had done anything.

Gerson published a book of 50 case histories in 1958, and died the following year. His daughter Charlotte carried the therapy on for decades, and the Institute that bears the family name now works with clinics in Mexico. Coffee enema's taken that often can throw the body's electrolytes badly out of balance, and the medical literature has recorded deaths linked to them,

including two reported in the Journal of the American Medical Association in 1980. Andrew Ivy was one of the best known physiologists in the United States, with a reputation nothing, like Harry Huxes. He was a vice president of the University of Illinois, and after the Second World War, the American Medical Association sent him to Nuremberg as its expert at the trial of the Nazi doctors, where he helped lay out the principles of informed consent that became the Nuremberg Code.

When Andrew Ivy said something about medicine in the early 1950s, newspapers printed it. In In 1949, a Yugoslav physician named Steven Durevich arrived in the United States from Argentina with a substance he said he'd extracted from the blood of horses injected with a fungus-like organism. He gave the substance the name Krebiosin. Ivy tested it on patients, and in March of 1951, he announced at a gathering in Chicago that it showed promise against cancer. The American Medical Association reviewed 100 patients who'd been given Krebiosin and reported

that it found no benefit. Ivy said the association had prejudged the drug, and the fight that followed cost him his position at the university. Dutrovich and his brother Marco, who handled the business side, refused for years to turn over a sample of the substance for independent analysis, which he said was to protect it from people who wanted to steal or discredit it. In 1963, the Food and Drug Administration finally got a sample of the powder Durevich said Krebiosin was made from. Its chemist identified it as creatine monohydrate, a common compound found in muscle tissue and sold today as a supplement in gems. The ampules that had actually been injected into patients were mostly mineral oil. That same year, the National Cancer Institute reviewed more than 500 patient case records submitted by Krebiosin's backers

and found no evidence the drug had helped anyone. Ivy and Durevich were indicted on federal fraud charges. After a trial in Chicago that ran about nine months, a jury acquitted them in January of 1966. Krebioszen supporters, including Senator Paul Douglas of Illinois, treated the acquittal as vindication. The jury had found that the government didn't prove the men intended to defraud anyone, and the chemistry the government's lab reported on the powder was never overturned. By every account, Andrew Ivy believed in Krebelsen until he died in 1978, and thousands of patients took it on the strength of his name.

Laetrile came out of San Francisco, out of a father and son who were both named Ernst Krebs. Ernst Krebs Sr. was a physician. His son, Ernst Krebs Jr., never earned a medical degree. But in the early 1950s, he developed a compound from apricot pits that he called Laetrel. It was related to a natural substance called amygdalen, which is found in the kernels of apricots, peaches, and bitter almonds and which the body can break down into cyanide. The Krebs' theory was that cancer cells released the cyanide inside the tumor and poisoned themselves while healthy cells were spared. In the 1970s, Laetrile's backers started calling it vitamin B-17. Amygdalin isn't a vitamin, and the

body doesn't need it for anything, but a vitamin could be sold in ways a drug couldn't. A political movement grew up around it, led in part by a group called the Committee for Freedom of choice in cancer therapy, whose founder, Robert Bradford, was convicted in 1977 of smuggling leotril in from Mexico, and the argument they made was about liberty as much as medicine. A dying person, they said, had the right to try whatever he wanted. That argument worked in state legislatures. By the end of the decade, more than 20 states had passed laws legalizing leotril in one form or another, and the National Cancer Institute estimated that something like 70,000 Americans had used it. Most of the supply came up from clinics in Tijuana, Mexico, where a Mexican

pathologist named Ernesto Contreras had been giving leotril to patients since the early 1960s. One federal case went all the way to the top. A Kansas man with cancer named Glenn Rutherford sued in the mid-70s to be allowed to get leotril despite the federal ban, and a lower court agreed that terminally ill patients should have access. In 1979, the Supreme Court ruled unanimously that federal drug law made no exception for the terminally ill, because the law's safety and effectiveness requirements protected dying patients as much as anyone else. Nearly 40 years later, the movement's argument won in a narrower form. In May of 2018, President Donald Trump signed the Federal Right to Tri Act, which followed similar

laws in roughly 40 states and lets terminally ill patients ask a drug company directly for an experimental medicine that has passed the first phase of human safety testing. The law doesn't reach anything that hasn't been through at least that first phase, and it doesn't require any company to say yes. The part of the Laetrile story that still drives the suppression argument happened inside Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York, the same institution that grew out of the hospital where William Coley and James Ewing had fought. In the early 1970s, a veteran Sloan Kettering researcher named Kanamatsu Sugiura ran experiments giving amygdalin to mice with breast tumors. Sugiru was in his 80s and had a reputation for meticulous work.

And in some of his experiments, the treated mice developed fewer lung metastases than the untreated ones. Other researchers at the institution tried to reproduce his results and couldn't. One attempt at a blinded experiment ran into problems that left both sides claiming it supported them. In 1977, Sloan Kettering held a press conference to announce that its testing had shown Laotril to be ineffective. An assistant director in the Center's Public Affairs Department, a young science writer named Ralph Moss, had become convinced the institution was burying Seguera's results. In November of that year, he stood up at a press conference of his own and accused Sloan Kettering of a cover-up, and the center fired him the next day. Moss spent the rest of his career

writing about cancer treatment from outside the establishment, starting with a book called The Cancer Syndrome. The firing of Ralph Moss is documented, and so is the internal disagreement over Sugura's mice. What the record shows is a dispute over whether an effect in one strain of mice was real, and the way medicine settles that kind of dispute is a trial in people. Before that trial reported, the most famous leotril patient in history went to Mexico. Steve McQueen, one of the biggest movie stars in the world, was diagnosed in December of 1979 with plural mesothelioma, a cancer of the lining of the lungs.

It's caused almost entirely by asbestos, and McQueen believed his exposure came from his time in the Marines when he'd stripped asbestos insulation from pipes aboard a troop ship and from the asbestos in the protective suits he wore racing cars. His doctors in the United States told him there wasn't much they could offer. In the summer of 1980, he went to a clinic in Rosarito Beach, Mexico for a program run under the methods of William Donald Kelly, a Texas orthodontist whose dental license had been suspended and who promoted cancer treatment through enzymes, vitamins, coffee enumas, and leotril. Kelly had laid out his program in a self-published book called One Answer to Cancer, and Texas authorities had already moved to stop him from treating cancer patients there. In October, McQueen recorded a message for Mexican television, thanking the clinic and saying Mexico was showing the world a new way of fighting cancer. In November, he went to a hospital in Juarez for surgery to remove large tumors from his abdomen and neck.

He died there of a heart attack on the 7th of November, 1980, at 50 years old. The trial came out about 14 months later. The National Cancer Institute sponsored it, and the study was run through the Mayo Clinic and several other. major cancer centers under an oncologist named Charles Mordal. Mortel was a gastrointestinal cancer specialist at Mayo, and a few years later, he'd lead the trial that established a standard drug treatment after surgery for colon cancer. 178 patients with cancers that standard treatment couldn't help were given laetrile, along with the diet and vitamin regimen its advocates recommended. The results were published in the New England Journal of Medicine in January of 1982. Not one

of the 178 patients was cured. None was stabilized in a way that could be credited to the drug. The cancers kept growing in nearly all of them, and the median survival was under five months. Several patients had cyanide levels in their blood that approached the toxic range. Laetrile's advocates said the trial was rigged, that the wrong form of the drug was used, or that it was given to patients who were too sick. The clinics in Tijuana kept selling it, and they're still selling it. The program Steve McQueen followed got its own trial. Decades later, a New York physician named Nicholas Gonzalez had taken up William Kelly's

enzyme and diet regimen in the 1980s, and after a small series of pancreatic cancer patients he reported in the 1990s seemed to do unusually well, the National Cancer Institute agreed to fund a proper comparison. Patients with inoperable pancreatic cancer were enrolled either in the Gonzalez Regiment with its enzymes, supplements, diet, and coffee enemas, or in standard chemotherapy. The results were published in the Journal of Clinical Oncology in 2010. The patients on chemotherapy lived a median of about 14 months. The patients on the Gonzales Regiment lived a median of a little over four and reported a

worse quality of life while they did. Gonzalez said the trial had been mismanaged and that patients hadn't followed the protocol, and he kept treating patients in New York until he died in time. 2015. Charles Mortall was in the middle of another one of these fights, against the most famous scientist in the country. Linus Pauling had won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry and the Nobel Peace Prize, and in the 1970s, he teamed up with a Scottish surgeon named Ewan Cameron, who'd been giving large doses of vitamin C to terminal cancer patients at the Vale of Levin Hospital. In 1976, they published a paper reporting that those patients had lived far longer than comparable patients who

didn't get it. The Mayo Clinic tested the claim twice under Mortal, with results published in 1979 and 1985, and both times, vitamin C did no better than a placebo. Pauling attacked both studies in public. He argued that the second trial stopped the vitamin C too soon, and that the first had used patients already weakened by chemotherapy, and he accused Mortal of misrepresenting the work. Part of Pauling's complaint held up later. Researchers at the National Institutes of Health found in the 1990s and 2000s that vitamin C taken by mouth can't reach anywhere near the blood levels that it reaches when it's given intravenously.

And Cameron had given his patients both. Intravenous vitamin C has been studied ever since, mostly alongside chemotherapy, and it's still being studied. None of that work has turned it into a cure. Pauling kept taking large doses himself until he died. in 1994 at 93. Stanislaw Brzezinski, a Polish-born physician in Houston, is the closest thing the suppression story has to a modern hero. He came to the United States in 1970 and did research at Baylor College of Medicine on peptides he isolated from human blood and urine. He named them

anti-neoplastins and said they could switch off cancer. And in 1977, he opened his own clinic in Houston to treat patients with them. The Texas Medical Board and the Food and Drug Administration went after him for years. In 1995, a federal grand jury indicted him on 75 counts connected to shipping an unapproved drug across state lines. He went to trial in 1997 and he walked out without a conviction after one jury deadlocked and a second acquitted him on the count that remained. His patients had rallied around him, some of them testifying before Congress, and the government case against him became one of the central exhibits in the argument that regulators persecute anybody who threatens the cancer business. What the government did afterward was let him keep going under

clinical trial rules. Bersensky registered dozens of trials and treated patients in them, who in many cases paid him large sums to take part. In 2012, after a child in one of his trials died, the Food and Drug Administration put a partial hold on enrolling new children. In more than four decades, randomized trial has shown that anti-neoplastin's work, and the drug has never been approved. For decades, a patient who walked into that clinic got an unproven treatment under a federal trial program with the government's permission. Two other names from the same era come up whenever the suppression argument gets made, and both ended with a government shutting something down. Stay tuned for more disturbing history. We'll be back after these messages.

Lawrence Burton was a zoologist who ran a clinic in the Bahamas, offering what he called immuno-augmentative therapy. A regimen of injections, he said, balanced the body's immune proteins against cancer. American patients flew to Freeport by the hundreds in the late 1970s and early 80s. In 1985, Bahamian health authorities closed the clinic after tests on the serum being injected into patients, found it contaminated with hepatitis B, and, in some samples, the virus that causes AIDS. The clinic reopened under Conduendiping the next year, and Burton supporters have described the closure as a political hit arranged from Washington. The contamination findings came from laboratory tests on his own vials.

Gaston Nessens was a French-born researcher working outside Sherbrook, Quebec, who developed an injected camphor-based compound he called 714-X, and said it fed the immune system by way of the lymphatic system. In 1989, after a woman with breast cancer who'd chosen his treatment over conventional care died, Quebec prosecutors charged him as an accessory to her death. The trial drew patients from across North America to testify for him, and in December of 1989, a jury acquitted him. The acquittal is what his supporters cite. No controlled trial has ever shown 714X to do anything against cancer, and Health Canada later allowed it only on a case-by-case, compassionate basis. A lot of the suppression argument's emotional power comes from the fact that powerful institutions,

really did hide what they knew about cancer for decades from millions of people. And what they were hiding was what caused it. In 1950, two studies came out within months of each other on opposite sides of the Atlantic, one by Richard Dahl and Austin Bradford Hill in Britain, and one by Ernst Winder and Everett's Graham in the United States, and both linked cigarette smoking to lung cancer. In 1953, Winder and Graham's team at Washington University in St. Louis, painted cigarette tar on the backs of mice, and a large share of the mice developed cancerous tumors.

The story was everywhere, and cigarette sales took a hit. On the 15th of December, 1953, the presidents of the major American tobacco companies met at the Plaza Hotel in New York with John Hill, the head of the public relations firm, Hill and Knowlton. Out of that meeting came a full-page advertisement that ran on the 4th of January, 1954, in 448 newspapers across the country. It was called a frank statement to cigarette smokers. And in it, the companies told the public they believed their products were not injurious to health

and promised to support research into the question. The research body they set up, the Tobacco Industry Research Committee, later renamed the Council for Tobacco Research, spent the following decades handing out grants that mostly steered around the question of whether cigarettes caused cancer. The industry's own internal documents, pride loose decades later through litigation, show what that research program was for. A 1969 memo inside the Brown and Williamson Tobacco Company put it in one line.

Doubt is our product, since it is the best means of competing with the body of fact that exists in the mind of the general public. Ten years after the Plaza Hotel meeting, in January of 1964, Surgeon General Luther Terry released a federal report concluding that cigarette smoking caused lung cancer in men. The companies kept disputing the science in public for more than three decades after that. A biochemist named Jeffrey Wigand, who'd run research at Brown and Williamson until the company fired him in 1993, eventually went on the CBS program 60 Minutes in February of 1996 to describe what the company knew about nicotine and how it handled that knowledge. His story became the film The Insider, three years later.

Before Wiganed ever went on camera, on the 14th of April 1994, the chief executives of the seven largest tobacco companies stood before a congressional subcommittee, raised their right hands, and one after another testified that they didn't believe nicotine was addictive. Four years later, the company signed the master settlement agreement with 46 states, agreeing to pay more than $200 billion over 25 years. years and to shut down the Research Council they'd set up in 1954. In August of 2006, a federal judge in Washington named Gladys Kessler ruled in a racketeering case brought by the Justice Department that the companies had lied, misrepresented, and deceived

the American public about the dangers of smoking for more than 50 years. Judge Kessler's ruling is the closest thing in this entire story to a proven conspiracy to suppress information about cancer. and the information those companies suppressed was the evidence that their product caused it. The asbestos industry followed the same path. In the 1930s, executives at two of the biggest asbestos companies in the country, Rehbestos Manhattan and Johns Manville traded letters about how to handle the growing medical evidence that their product was harming the people who worked with it.

The thrust of that correspondence was that the less said publicly about asbestos, the better for the companies. In 1964, a physician at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York named Irving Selikoff published a study of insulation workers showing high rates of lung cancer and mesothelioma among them, and the industry spent years attacking his work. The letters from the 30s stayed private until they surfaced in a lawsuit in 1977, and they've been known ever since as the Sumner-Simpson Papers, after the Rebestus president who kept them. Testimony in later asbestos litigation described Johns Manville's policy of not telling workers when their own company chest x-rays showed asbestos disease. In 1982, buried under thousands of lawsuits, Johns Manville filed for bankruptcy, at the time, the largest in American history. In the late 1960s, a trade group then called the International Sugar Research Foundation paid for a study at the University of Birmingham in England on how sugar, affected rats. It was listed internally as Project 259. Before the study was finished, the early results suggested that a diet heavy in sugar raised levels of an enzyme that researchers at the time

associated with bladder cancer. The foundation ended the funding and the results were never published. Researchers at the University of California, San Francisco found the internal documents and published the story in 2017. In Parkersburg, West Virginia, DuPont spent decades done. dumping a chemical called C8 from its Washington Works plant, a chemical the company's own internal studies had raised concerns about. A panel of independent scientists set up under a class action settlement later found probable links between that chemical and both kidney cancer and testicular cancer. In 2017, DuPont and its spinoff Camores agreed to pay $671 million to settle about 3500 lawsuits. Every one of those cases involves a company that new something that new,

something about cancer and spent money keeping the public from knowing it. And I think that history goes a long way toward explaining why a hidden cure is so easy for people to believe. The institutions that were supposed to be fighting cancer gave people reasons too. In July of 1963, a Sloan Kettering researcher named Chester Southam arranged to have live cancer cells, grown in laboratory cultures that included the famous Heela line taken from Henrietta Lacks, injected under the skin, of 22 elderly patients at the Jewish Chronic Disease Hospital in Brooklyn. Saltham was studying how the immune system rejected cancer, and he'd already done similar work on inmates at the Ohio State Penitentiary who volunteered.

The Brooklyn patients weren't told they were being injected with cancer cells. They were told only that it was a test of their immunity. Saltham defended that afterward by saying he hadn't wanted to frighten them, and he argued that the cells would be rejected and do no harm. Three young doctors at the hospital refused to take part and resigned. A lawyer on the hospital's board of directors, William Hyman, went to court to get the records. In 1965, the Board of Regents of New York State found Southam guilty of fraud, deceit, and unprofessional conduct. It suspended his medical license for a year, then stayed the suspension and put him on probation.

The Brooklyn case was one of the examples a Harvard anesthesiologist named Henry Beecher Drew on, in 1966, when he published an article in the New England Journal of Medicine, laying out ethically questionable studies that had appeared in respectable journals. And the same year, the United States Public Health Service began requiring independent review of the human research it paid for. In 1968, the American Association for Cancer Research elected Chester Southam its president. On the 23rd of December, 1971, Richard Nixon signed the National National National. Cancer Act and put the federal government behind what the newspapers were already calling

the war on cancer. Some of the people who lobbied for that law talked openly about having a cure in time for the nation's 200th birthday in 1976. That didn't happen, and the gap between the promise and the result has been feeding the suppression story ever since. If the country put billions of dollars into the problem and still hasn't announced a cure 50-some years later, the reasoning goes, then somebody must be sitting on it. The trouble with that reasoning starts with the word cancer. A breast tumor, a childhood leukemia, and a melanoma on somebody's back start in different tissues.

They're driven by different genetic mistakes. They spread in different ways, and they respond to different drugs. Pathologists now sort cancer into hundreds of distinct types, and many of those types split further by the specific mutations inside the tumor. A single cure for all of them would have to be one. one treatment that works against hundreds of different diseases at once. What happened instead of one cure is a long list of partial wins, uneven and expensive, and some of them complete. According to the American Cancer Society, the cancer death rate in the United States has fallen by about a third

since its peak in 1991. And the society estimates that decline amounts to roughly four and a half million deaths that didn't happen. Most of that drop came from fewer people smoking. and from earlier detection, and some of it came from cancers that went from almost always fatal to almost always curable. None of that progress has dented the belief. In 2014, two political scientists at the University of Chicago, Eric Oliver and Thomas Wood, published a survey in the journal JAMA Internal Medicine that asked a national sample of Americans about a series of medical conspiracy theories. The one that drew the most agreement was the statement that the food and drug administration was deliberately keeping natural cures for cancer and other diseases from the public

because of pressure from drug companies. 37% of the people surveyed agreed with it, and fewer than a third were willing to disagree. Most of the basic research behind cancer treatment in the United States isn't paid for by drug companies at all. The National Cancer Institute alone spends more than $7 billion a year, most of it on grants to university and hospital laboratories. And the discoveries that come out of those labs get published in open journals and licensed to companies afterward. Any one of those thousands of researchers who found a cure would have every professional reason to publish it.

In 1965, a biophysicist at Michigan State University named Barnett Rosenberg was running electric current through a culture of bacteria using platinum electrodes. He was studying whether electric fields affected how cells divide. The bacteria stopped dividing and grew into long strands, and Rosenberg eventually traced the effect to a compound formed from the platinum in his electrodes. That platinum compound came to be called cisplatin. Cisplatin turned out to be extremely good at killing dividing cancer cells. In 1974, an oncologist at Indiana University named Lawrence Einhorn combined it with two other drugs to treat young men whose testicular cancer had spread through their bodies. Before that, men with widespread testicular cancer usually died of it. One of Einhorn's first patients on the new regiment, a young man named John Cleland, was still alive decades later.

In 1996, Lance Armstrong, whose testicular cancer had spread to his lungs and brain, was treated at Indiana University with a version of the same regiment. Today, the overall cure rate for testicular cancer in the United States runs above 95%. Michigan State patented cisplatin and licensed it to the drug company Bristol Myers, which sold it around the world after the Food and Drug Administration approved it in 1978, and the royalties paid the university for years. At St. Jude Children's Research Hospital in Memphis, starting in the early 1960s, a pediatric oncologist named Donald Pinkle began treating children with acute lymphoblastic leukemia using combinations of drugs, radiation to the brain and spine, and long courses of maintenance therapy.

When Pinkle started, almost every child diagnosed with that disease died of it. Pinkel won the Lasker Award for that work in 1972, and today, according to St. Jude, around 94% of children with that leukemia survive. At the National Cancer Institute in the 1960s, Vincent DeVita and his colleagues put together a four-drugug combination for advanced Hodgkins lymphoma, a disease that had been close to uniformly fatal once it spread. Their results, published in 1970, showed that a large share of those patients could be cured. Today, more than 8 and 10 people diagnosed with Hodgkin's lymphoma survive it. Some of those drugs came straight out of plants. One of the four in DeVita's combination was

Vin-Christine, which researchers at Eli Lilly developed from the Madagascar Perrywinkle around the turn of the 1960s, and it's still a standard part of treatment for childhood leukemia. In 1962, under a joint program in which the National Cancer Institute and the Department of Agriculture gathered plant samples by the thousands to screen for anti-cancer activity, a botanist named Arthur Barkley collected bark from a Pacific yew tree in a national forest in Washington state. Two chemists at the Research Triangle Institute in North Carolina, Monroe Wall and Mansukwani, isolated the active compound and published its structure in 1971. It took another two decades, a federal partnership with Bristol-Myers Squibb and a fight over how many old-growth U-trees would have to be stripped to supply it,

before the Food and Drug Administration approved it in 1992 under the brand name Taxol for ovarian cancer. Stay tuned for more disturbing history. We'll be back after these messages. The bark problem was eventually solved by making the drug partly from the needles of the European U, which grow back. It's become one of the most widely used chemotherapy drugs in the world. Cisplatin and the drugs behind those other cures went generic decades ago. They're cheap now, and they're manufactured all over the world. The best-known modern cancer drug story runs through Portland, Oregon.

Chronic myeloid leukemia is driven by a single faulty enzyme created when two chronic chromosomes swap pieces. An oncologist at Oregon Health and Science University named Brian Drouker worked with researchers at the drug company Siba Geigy, which later merged into Novartis, on a compound designed to shut that enzyme off. Drouker has said in interviews over the years that the company was hesitant to push the compound forward, partly because the market for a drug aimed at one fairly rare leukemia looked small. The early trials were remarkable enough that patients organized and petitioned the company for wider access. The Food and Drug Administration approved the drug under the brand name Glevec in May of 2001,

after one of the fastest reviews in the agency's history. A disease that used to mean a few years of life or a dangerous bone marrow transplant became something most patients could live with for decades by taking a pill every day. Novartis launched Glevec at about $26,000 a year. Over the following decade, it raised the price again and again until it was close to $100,000 a year on a drug whose development costs had long since been recovered. In 2013, more than 100 leukemia specialists from around the world published a commentary in the journal Blood, attacking the prices of Glevec and the drugs that followed it, and calling them

unsustainable and immoral. The same drug was a different story in India. In April of 2013, after a seven-year legal fight, the Supreme Court of India refused to grant Novartis a patent on the version of Glevec it sold, ruling that it was too small a change from an older form of the molecule to deserve new protection. Indian generic makers had already been selling copies of the drug, and patients there paid a small fraction of the American price. When people say cancer treatment is easier to get in other countries, that's one of the places where they're right. And the reason was a patent ruling, with the drug itself fully known to the world. The same kind of pressure made the news in October of 2012 when three doctors at Memorial Sloan

Kettering, Peter Bach, Leonard Salts, and Robert Wittes wrote in the New York Times that their hospital would not be using a new colon cancer drug called Zaltrap. The drug's maker, Sanofi, had priced it at about $11,000 a month, more than twice the cost of an existing drug that worked about as well. A month after the column ran, Sanofi effectively cut the price in half. The industry's documented misconduct around cancer patients goes past pricing. In December of 2012, the biotech company Amgen pleaded guilty in federal court and agreed to pay $762 million to resolve charges over how it marketed Aranesp, an anemia drug given to large numbers of cancer patients, including promoting it for uses the Food and Drug Administration

had never approved. Glevec and Zaltrap both show a drug industry that will charge whatever it can get for a cancer treatment once it's on the market, and a patent on a drug that works only pays off if somebody's selling it. William Coley's idea came back in the 1990s, in a laboratory at the University of California, Berkeley. An immunologist there named James Allison was studying a molecule on the surface of immune cells called CTLA4, which works like a break on the immune response. In 1996, Allison's lab showed that blocking that break in mice let their immune systems attack and clear tumors. In Japan, a researcher named Tasuku-Honjo had discovered a second break called PD-1 in the early 1990s. Drugs that release those breaks are called checkpoint inhibitors.

The first one approved in the United States was a drug called a drug called. called Urvoy in March of 2011, and the disease it was approved for was advanced melanoma. Before that, a patient whose melanoma had spread to distant organs typically had less than a year to live, and nothing on the market had been shown in a randomized trial to extend that. In September of 2014, the Food and Drug Administration approved Merck's drug Ketruda, which blocks PD-1, again for advanced melanoma. Three months later, Bristol Myers Squibb won approval for its own drug aimed at the same target, Opdivo, and the two companies have been racing each other into new cancer types ever since,

each trying to get there first. In August of 2015, after surgeons removed a mass from his liver, former president Jimmy Carter announced that he had melanoma and that it had spread to his brain, at the age of 90. He was treated with radiation and with Ketruda, a drug that had been on the market, for less than a year. And in December of that year, he told his Sunday school class in Plains, Georgia, that his latest scans showed no sign of cancer. He lived another nine years and died in December of 2024 at the age of 100. In 2018, James Allison and Tusuku Honjo shared the Nobel Prize

in Physiology or Medicine for the discovery behind those drugs. Long-term follow-up of the Big Checkpoint Inhibitor trials has found a substantial share of patients. with advanced melanoma still alive 10 years after treatment, an outcome that didn't exist for that disease before 2011. Some of those patients, by any ordinary definition of the word, are cured. Merck's sales of Ketruda in 2024 came to about $29.5 billion, which made it the best-selling drug in the world. That's what a drug company does with a treatment that can make metastatic melanoma disappear. Merck launched it at around 150,000. thousand dollars a year and sells it in dozens of countries. Checkpoint inhibitors don't work for

everybody. Most patients with most cancers still don't respond to them and the side effects can be severe because a released immune system can attack healthy organs as well as tumors. But the people in this story who believed the body could be turned against its own cancer from William Coley in 1891 forward turned out to be right, and the proof came through clinical trials and patents and a Nobel Prize. The other half of Georgia's claim was that cancer has already been cured in many countries. I went looking for the treatments that come up most often when people say that, and the one with the most solid record behind it comes from Cuba. Researchers at the center of molecular immunology in Havana developed a vaccine called

SeemaVax for advanced non-small cell lung cancer. It trains the immune system to go after a growth factor that some lung tumors depend on. Cuba approved it in 2011. Because of the embargo, it couldn't be tested in the United States until relations thawed. And in 2015, during a New York State trade mission to Havana, the Roswell Park Comprehensive Cancer Center in Buffalo reached an agreement to study it. The Food and Drug Administration cleared a trial the following year. The Cuban trials found that the vaccine extended survival for some patients with

with advanced lung cancer by a few months on average and longer in some cases. It's also cheap to make, which was part of what interested the Americans. The Cuban researchers themselves describe it as a way to turn advanced lung cancer into something closer to a manageable chronic disease. Nobody in the published research calls it a cure. And the first thing the American cancer establishment did when it got a chance at the drug was set up a trial to test it. The treatments most often sold abroad as cure,

that Americans aren't allowed to have are mostly the ones from earlier in this episode. Leotril, the Hoxitonic, and a long list of other regimens are offered at clinics in Tijuana and elsewhere in Mexico, where the regulations are looser and American patients drive

across the border to pay cash for them. Those treatments are available in Mexico because Mexican law allows it, and the ones that have been put through trials came up empty. The most interesting case I found of a cheap cancer drug that seemed to go nowhere for business reasons came out of Canada.

In January of 2007, a team at the University of Alberta, led by Evangelos Mikalakis, published a paper in the journal Cancer Cell, reporting that a simple, old, unpatentable chemical called dichloroacetate, or DCA, shrank tumors in rats by reviving a part of the cell's machinery that cancer shuts down. The press ran with it, and patients around the world started ordering the chemical from industrial suppliers and dosing themselves. Mikalakis couldn't get a drug company interested because nobody could patent a chemical that had been around for decades. His team raised money and donations from the public and from the university, and in 2010, they published a small study of five patients with an aggressive brain cancer called glioblastoma.

The results were encouraging enough to justify larger trials, and nothing in the years since has shown dichloroacetate to be a cure. That case shows a real flaw in how cancer drugs get developed. A compound nobody can patent has a hard time finding anybody willing to spend the hundreds of millions of dollars it takes to run full clinical trials. And so promising cheap drugs can sit for years with nobody testing them properly. That's a problem of neglect and incentives, and it's documented. It's a different thing from a drug that's been shown to cure cancer and then hidden. In 1990, Congress's own research arm,

the Office of Technology Assessment published a report on unconventional cancer treatments. It examined several of the therapies in this episode, including the Gerson Diet, the Hoxie treatment, and Bersensky's anti-neoplastins, and it concluded that none of them had been shown to work. It also criticized the National Cancer Institute for doing too little to evaluate the more promising claims and recommended that it find a way to look at them seriously. The National Cancer Institute has had a door open for claims like George's ever since. Starting in 1991, it's run what it calls the Best Case Series program, which invites practitioners of alternative cancer treatments to submit their best documented cases

with medical records, pathology reports, and imaging for review by the Institute's own staff. Cases that hold up can lead to further study. The idea that a cure is being withheld costs people something. something, and that cost has been measured. In 2018, a team at Yale led by a radiation oncology resident named Skyler Johnson published a study in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute. They went through a national cancer database and found 281 patients with curable cancers of the breast, prostate, lung, or colon who had chosen alternative medicine alone, and they compared them with 560 similar patients who'd had conventional treatment. Over the years of follow-up, the patients who

chose alternative medicine alone were about two and a half times as likely to die. Among the women with breast cancer, the risk was more than five times as high. The same team published a second study that summer in JAMA oncology, looking at patients who used complementary medicine alongside conventional care and found that those patients were more likely to refuse surgery, chemotherapy, or radiation when it was recommended and were about twice as likely to die as patients who didn't use it. The patients who chose alternative medicine on their own tended to be younger, better educated, and better off financially than the ones who didn't. Steve Jobs was diagnosed in October of 2003 with a rare and relatively slow-growing form of pancreatic cancer called a neuroendocrine tumor,

a kind that can often be removed surgically. According to his authorized biographer, Walter I Isoxen. Jobs put off surgery for about nine months while he tried diet changes, acupuncture, and other alternative approaches, despite his wife and several close friends pressing him to have the operation. He had the operation in July of 2004. The cancer came back, and he died in October of 2011 at 56. Nobody can say for certain that surgery nine months earlier would have saved him, and Isaacson's account doesn't claim it. People who credit an alternative treatment with curing their cancer are usually telling the truth as they understand it. Sixteen years as a police officer taught me how often an honest witness gets the sequence of events right and gets the cause wrong.

Many of them had surgery, radiation, or chemotherapy too, before or alongside it. Some had tumors that were never confirmed by a biopsy, and a very small number of cancers go away on their own. In 1966, two surgeons named Tilden Everson and Warren Cole combed the medical literature from 1900 to 1960 and documented 176 cases of spontaneous regression across those 60 years of published medicine. Melanoma turns up on that list more often than most cancers, along with kidney cancer and a childhood cancer called neuroblastoma. That's why the Best Case series asks for pathology reports and scans, and why the National Cancer Institute told Harry Hoxie in the 1950s that his case histories weren't enough. A recovery that can't be separated from the other treatment the patient had,

or from a diagnosis that was never confirmed, doesn't tell anybody what caused it. I went into this looking for a hidden cure, and I don't believe there's one. Part of the reason is the one the pathologists give, that cancer is hundreds of different diseases. The rest is what the record shows happening every time something. worked, which is that the cures and near cures went to market, often at prices that ought to bother anybody. A drug that wiped out cancer would be worth more than any product ever made, to any company that owned it, and to every government that pays for cancer care. Britain's National Health Service, Canada's provincial health plans and the state-run labs in China and Cuba don't

answer to American drug companies. The people running drug companies get cancer, and so do their wives and children and parents. A cure that worked would also leak, the way every breakthrough in this episode did. The checkpoint drugs came out of a laboratory in Berkeley and a laboratory in Kyoto, published in journals anyone could read, years before any company had a product to sell.

Harry Hoxie's head nurse in Dallas was a woman named Mildred Nelson, who'd come to work for him in the 1940s, after, by her family's account, her own mother was treated at his clinic. When the American clinics were shut down, Nelson took the treatment across the border, and in 1963, she opened the biomedical center in Tijuana. She ran it until she died in 1999, and her sister took it over after her. Harry Hoxie was diagnosed with prostate cancer in 1967.

His own tonic didn't stop it, and he had surgery. He died in Dallas in 1974. As far as I could find, the biomedical center is still open in Tijuana. Tijuana, and patients still cross over from San Diego to buy the tonic that Harry Hoxi said started with a sick horse grazing in an Illinois pasture in 1840. In a week or so, George gets his turn. He's an inventor who spent years with Brown's gas. He came to me with claims I couldn't have made up, and I'm going to let him make every

one of them in his own words. Until then, take care of yourself and each other.