“Deceit, delusion, and a classic medical fraud”: An excerpt from a new book about a cancer treatment hoax

There once was a drug named Krebiozen;

It came from below the horizon.

It used to be said, by patients now dead,

Now what do we put our reliance on?

–Limerick attributed to University of Illinois president George Stoddard and University of Illinois provost Coleman Griffith, both of whom would lose their jobs over Krebiozen

It is a story that resonates with the present: A 1950s cancer treatment hoax that showed “charges of conspiracy, elitism, and un-Americanism directed against the educational, scientific, and medical establishment are nothing new; neither is uncritical news coverage of what turns out to be quackery.” We’re pleased to share an adapted excerpt from Matthew Ehrlich’s The Krebiozen Hoax:  How a Mysterious Cancer Drug Shook Organized Medicine, out today.

On March 26, 1951, one of America’s most respected scientists called a meeting at Chicago’s Drake Hotel to make a dramatic announcement: he and a Yugoslavian refugee doctor had found a drug that showed great promise in treating cancer. The scientist was Andrew Ivy, vice president of the University of Illinois (U of I) and designated spokesperson for medical ethics at the Nazi war crimes trials in Nuremberg. Time magazine had gone as far as to pronounce him “the conscience of U.S. science.” Ivy’s Yugoslavian collaborator was Stevan Durovic, said to have discovered the new drug in Argentina after the Nazis forced him to flee his homeland. The drug itself was called Krebiozen, a name that was supposed to connote “cancer suppressor” or “regulator of growth.”

Krebiozen’s unveiling electrified people around the world. Cancer sufferers and their loved ones deluged the U of I with thousands of calls and messages begging for the drug. One doctor opined that “Krebiozen may be one of the greatest, if not the greatest” discoveries in medical history. But other representatives of organized medicine were immediately suspicious. Virtually none of them had ever heard of Stevan Durovic or his brother Marko, who had followed Stevan to Chicago to promote Krebiozen. Stevan had never published in a scientific journal. The Durovics refused to reveal even to Andrew Ivy precisely how the drug was made, other than that it involved stimulating the immune systems of horses and extracting their blood. Rather than using the conventional means of announcing a new scientific discovery–through academic venues subject to rigorous peer review–Ivy had staged the equivalent of a product launch, inviting prominent politicians from Chicago and downstate Illinois along with wealthy benefactors and members of the press. Moreover, although Ivy denied any advance knowledge of it, that meeting had been promoted through a sensational news release: “The battle of medical science to find a cure for cancer achieved its realization today.” Within months, the American Medical Association (AMA) announced that its review of patient case histories had shown Krebiozen to be worthless; later, U of I president George Stoddard asserted that there was no such thing as Krebiozen.

Ivy and the Durovics fought back. They accused the AMA of conspiring with powerful business interests to kill Krebiozen after failing to seize control of it. Illinois lawmakers, some of whom despised Stoddard because of his liberalism and seeming highhandedness, began a lengthy set of hearings on the conspiracy charges and the state university’s possible complicity in suppressing the drug. Stoddard and U of I provost Coleman Griffith were ousted from their administrative posts. In the following years, the controversy spread beyond Illinois as groups formed across the country championing Krebiozen. Movie star Gloria Swanson raised money for the drug; environmentalist Rachel Carson took the medicine to try to fight her cancer. Pro-Krebiozen demonstrators (some wearing badges saying, “I need Krebiozen to live!”) were arrested outside the White House and bodily hauled out of federal offices. Along with members of Congress, they lobbied fiercely for what they called a “fair test” of the drug. Nevertheless, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), which had just been granted expanded powers, declared that Krebiozen did nothing to stop cancer. Ivy and the Durovics were indicted on charges of defrauding people who had paid nearly ten dollars per ampule of the drug. After a nine-month trial in Chicago that ended in early 1966, the defendants were acquitted, with the verdicts tainted by accusations of jury tampering. Then Krebiozen sank back below the horizon, to be replaced by other unproven remedies purported to treat cancer and other medical ills.

The Krebiozen saga shows that charges of conspiracy, elitism, and un-Americanism directed against the educational, scientific, and medical establishment are nothing new; neither is uncritical news coverage of what turns out to be quackery. And Krebiozen was in fact quackery: it displayed all the characteristics that historian James Harvey Young identified as being typical of medical fraud. Krebiozen’s sponsors exploited the fear of painful surgery and radiation to promote a nontoxic wonder remedy that they maintained was the scientific key to treating cancer. They insisted that the full details of the drug’s composition and production were a business secret. Proponents of the drug frequently compared Andrew Ivy to Louis Pasteur and other visionaries whose scientific breakthroughs were initially scorned by mainstream medicine. Krebiozen’s backers also charged that the AMA had conspired to crush the drug, charges similar to those previously leveled by such cancer quacks as Norman Baker and Harry Hoxsey. Evidence suggested that after Stevan Durovic was unable to win support for a hypertension medicine that he called “Kositerin,” he rebranded the exact same concoction as a cancer medicine called “Krebiozen”–a rebranding to adjust to circumstances. The medicine was advertised via such means as a pulp magazine trumpeting the miraculous results that cancer patients had experienced: “Doomed to die–they still live!” The drug’s supporters declared that they stood for health-care freedom, continually vexing the AMA, the FDA, and the National Cancer Institute (NCI). In time, according to bank records introduced at the fraud trial, Krebiozen became a multi-million-dollar enterprise.

The Krebiozen story was not bereft of good intentions or good ideas. Before his involvement with the drug, Andrew Ivy was the last person whom anyone would have compared with the likes of Baker or Hoxsey. Instead, he was much more like Linus Pauling, the later proponent of vitamin C as a cancer therapy. Ivy was widely acknowledged as a distinguished scientist with impeccable academic credentials. Few people suggested that he promoted Krebiozen just to get rich, in contrast with Stevan Durovic, who would be accused by the US government of extracting a vast sum of money out of the country and depositing it into overseas accounts. Ivy always would insist that he wanted only to get an impartial test of the hypothesis that he said he had developed out of the existing scientific literature: that people carried within them a natural cancer inhibitor, most likely a hormone produced by the reticuloendothelial system. (Krebiozen’s supporters said that cancer patients needed the drug to manage their conditions just as diabetics needed insulin to manage glucose levels.) Subsequent cancer research has suggested that in some ways, at least, Ivy was on the right track. Scientists have discovered the existence of tumor-suppressor genes. Studies have linked insulin and other hormones to the metabolism of cancer. And one of the most promising new areas of research and treatment–immunotherapy–harnesses the body’s natural defenses against cancer.

What is more, Krebiozen users were not all hapless dupes. Many of them had felt abandoned by mainstream medicine or, as in the case of Rachel Carson, had been misled by their doctors about the gravity of their conditions. For them, Krebiozen seemed a rational choice. “I’m not expecting miracles,” said Carson of Krebiozen. “As far as I’ve been able to learn it will do no harm, so what do I have to lose?” If people subsequently decided that the drug did not work for them (as turned out to be the case with Carson), they simply could stop taking it. Other cancer patients and their loved ones were convinced that Krebiozen was the one thing keeping them alive.

In the end, though, Krebiozen turned out to be a hoax, regardless of whether it was planned as such. The medicine always would remain a secret remedy that was never scientifically shown to be effective. Stevan Durovic blocked efforts by federal agencies to witness the drug’s manufacture from start to finish. Patient records intended to demonstrate Krebiozen’s efficacy never met the standards set by the NCI to justify a clinical test of the drug. Eventually, Durovic and Ivy would alienate some of their most steadfast allies after they repeatedly failed to uphold their promises for Krebiozen. Still, the hoax persisted for years–so many people wanted so fervently to believe that the drug worked.

From The Krebiozen Hoax:  How a Mysterious Cancer Drug Shook Organized Medicine. Copyright 2024 by the Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois. Used with permission of the University of Illinois Press.

Matthew C. Ehrlich is professor emeritus of journalism at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. He has previously published five books including Dangerous Ideas on Campus: Sex, Conspiracy, and Academic Freedom in the Age of JFK and Kansas City vs. Oakland: The Bitter Sports Rivalry That Defined an Era.

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