INTRODUCTION FROM THE AUTHOR:
I have spent about one-half of my adult life as a scientist in cancer
research. from the world of the surgical pathology lab - where I studied
tumors removed from the bodies of living cancer patients - to the rarefield
world of medical school research on cells living in petri dishes, I have
immersed myself in knowledge about one of the greatest scourges of our
time. And I have learned that there is a vast and deadly gap between the
reality of cancer, which strikes human beings, and the theory of cancer,
which thousands of researchers are using in their search for a cure.
There is an East Indian folktale, about a group of blind men and an
elephant, that is tragically descriptive of the state of cancer research
today. In the fable, several blind men are asked to describe an elephant.
One, after feeling the elephant's trunk, asserts that it is "very
like a snake." Another, feeling a leg, insists it is "very like
a tree." Another, feeling the tail, insists it is "very like
a rope." Each leaves the scene certain that his impression is correct.
In cancer research, most scientists are in a far worse position than
the blind men of the fable. The blind men were gathering what data they
could from an actual elephant. Most cancer researchers, using all their
faculties, are investigating an un-natural "animal" created in
the laboratory, mistakenly applying their data to the real "elephant"
of human cancer.
Although some of my colleagues are aware of this gap, few are willing
to risk their careers by discussing it openly. In the absence of public
debate, cancer scientists around the country are free to propagate the
myth of a productive "war on cancer." No one wants to admit that
this so-called war has been a worthless investment of taxpayers' money
and scientists' time. But as more and more money is spent, with fewer and
fewer meaningful results, increasing numbers of patients and their families,
taxpayers, and politicians want to know the reasons why.
The answers can be found within the hallowed halls of the National Cancer
Institute and other bastions of the cancer establishment, where well-funded
scientists are tilting at the molecular windmills of their favourite laboratory
representation of cancer - cells growing in petri dishes. Almost everything
in science and medicine, including the development of effective treatments,
hangs on the reliability of these experimental models. In cancer, the use
of these unnatural cells as a model for the human disease has been directly
responsible for our ongoing defeat. The cultures, termed cell lines, give
incorrect and clinically useless information about cancer.
I came to the world of academia from the hospital environment, after
more than a decade of working with tumors removed from the bodies of living
cancer patients. The discrepancies between what I knew of human cancer
and what I read in research journals and saw in researchers' petri dishes
were so striking that I could not keep silent. But soon I learned the fate
of those who would challenge a fashionable and very productive research
model, however incorrect it might be.
Although it is shielded from the public by high minded pronouncements
and scientific jargon, the cancer establishment is afflicted with a mental
and moral malaise. It is more interested in maintaining the status quo
than in finding the answers to the cancer riddle, and will defend that
status quo against all comers. Its struggle to retain credibility and power
may well last decades and cost millions of lives, unless the source of
its funding - the taxpaying public - demands reform.
I tried to interest the media in the problems in the cancer industry.
I wrote letters and made phone calls, but no one wanted to get involved.
The medical reporter from the Arizona Republic was concerned that if he
wrote stories critical of cancer research, the Cancer Center of the University
of Arizona School of Medicine would no longer give him its stories. I encountered
similar resistance throughout the media. Finally, in the summer of 1989,
I realized that if this story were ever to be made known to the public,
I would have to do it myself. I knew that most effective force for change
is informed citizens demanding it. The result is The Immortal Cell.
This book was written to alert the public to the truth behind the failed
war on cancer. I wrote it as neither a journalist nor a practising physician,
but rather as a research firsthand. In these pages I am harshly critical
of much of our medical science establishment. I do not laud dedicated researchers,
nor do I paint a rosy picture of soon-to-be-discovered cancer cures. Although
I firmly believe that research can and will produce practical and effective
treatments for cancer, such advances will never come from the present research
paradigm. Instead , I present a story of narrow-mindedness, vaulting ambition,
and self-interest among those to whom we have given our trust - cancer
scientists. It is an account of a scientific and medical scandal of the
highest order. But most of all, it is a tale of poor science and the pressures
that induce cancer scientists to do unsound work. *