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