On a substance that can make us sick (if we do not eat it!)

i cxecutivc health the report that briefs you on what to watch ©WORLD COPYRIGHT RESERVED 1977 BY EXECUTIVE PUBLICATIONS Volume XIII, Number 9 a June, 1977 ® Pickfair Bldg., Rancho Santa Fe, Calif. 92067 • Area 714:756-2600 Albert Szent-Gyorgyi, M.D., Ph.D. ON A SUBSTANCE THAT CAN MAKE US SICK (IF WE DO NOT EAT IV) ) One of the world's most honored scientists, winner of the 1937 Nobel Prize for Physiology and Medicine, explains the fascinating paradox of vitamins. PUBLISHER'S NOTE: A long-time member of our Editorial Board, Dr. SzentGyorgyi is currently a visiting professor at the University of Miami's Institute for Molecular and Cellular Evolution. He is world-renown for his discovery of ascorbic acid, (vitamin C) his studies on cellular respiration and on muscles, which resulted in the first workable theory of muscle contraction. Now, at the age of 84, and after 20 years of research, he has evolved a theory that may solve the deadly mystery of cancer.  —Richard Stanton I am aware that having discovered ascorbic acid did not make me into an expert on the medical use of vitamins. All the same, this work made me come in touch with vitamin C more often than I would have come without it. I had hardly announced my result when I was invited by E. Merck and Co. to come to Darmstadt, Germany, to discuss the medical uses of ascorbic acid with leading German clinicians. I did not have much to say but went all the same. I found the clinicians very nice but was shocked by their lack of biological insight and lack of interest in the basic problems. They told me that they had no need of my ascorbic acid because ascorbic acid prevented scurvy, and there was no scurvy. The logic was simple, almost irrefutable. Though I could bring up no argument against it, I felt that it was completely wrong. It was wrong because "no-scurvy" does not mean health. There is a wide gap between health and no-scurvy. Scurvy is a preSIR HANS KREBS, M.D., F.R.C.P. (England), Nobel Laureate in Physiology and Medicine. Emeritus Professor of Biochemistry, Oxford University, Metabolic Research Laboratory, Nuffield Department of Clinical Medicine, Radcliffe Infirmary, Oxford, England. RICHARD L. BOHANNON, M.D., F.A.C.P., Lieutenant-General, United States Air Force (Ret.); Medical Director, The Institute for Aerobics Research, Dallas, Texas. HARD IN B. JONES, Ph.D., Professor of Medical Physics and Physiology, Senior Scientist, Donner Laboratory of Medical Research, University of California, Berkeley. LEONARD HAYFLICK, Ph.D., Senior Research Cell Biologist, Children's Hospital Medical Center, Bruce Lyon Manorial Research Laboratory, Oakland, California. DEMETRIO SODI-PALLARES, M.D., Professor of Medicine, Chief of the Department of ElectroVectorcardiography, Institute National de Cardiologia, Mexico, D.F. EDITORIAL BOARD ALBERT SZENT-GYORGYI, M.D., Ph.D., Nobel Laureate for Physiology and Medicine, Scientific Director, The National Foundation for Cancer Research, The Institute for Molecular and Cellular Evolution, Coral Gables, Florida. JOHN K. LATTIMER, M.D., ScD., PACs, Professor and Chairman, Department of Urology, College of Physicians and Surgeons, Columbia University; Director, Squier Urological Clinic and Director, Urological Service, Presbyterian Hospital, New York City. JOHN STIRLING MEYER, M.D., Professor, Department of Neurology, Baylor College of Medicine; Director, Baylor-Methodist Center for Cerebravascular Disease, Texas Medical Center, Houston, Texas. SOLON PALMER, Jr., M.D., Scripps Clinic and Research Foundation, La Jolla, California. HANS SELYE, C.C., M.D., Ph.D., D.Sc., F.R.S. (C), President, International Institute of Stress, University of Montreal, Montreal, Quebec, Canada. LINUS PAULING, Ph.D., Nobel Laureate in Chemistry and in Peace; Emeritus Professor of Chemistry, Stanford University, Stanford, California. Research Professor, Linus Pauling Institute of Science and Medicine, Menlo Park, California. MARK D. ALTSCHULE, M.D., Visiting Professor of Medicine, Harvard Medical School; Lecturer in Medicine, Yale University; Staff Consultant, Boston City Hospital; Attending Physician, Boston Veterans Administration Hospital, Boston, Massachusetts. ALTON OCHSNER, M.D., Senior Consultant in Surgery, Ochsner Clinic and Ochsner Foundation Hospital and Emeritus Professor of Surgery, Tulane University School of Medicine, New Orleans, Louisiana. ROGER J. WILLIAMS, Ph.D., D.Sc., Professor of Chemistry, Co-founder and Consultant, Clayton Foundation Biochemical Institute, The University of Texas; Past President, The American Chemical Society, Austin, Texas. mortal syndrome, the sign of the final collapse of the whole edifice of life. What medicine has to aim for is not "no-scurvy," but full health. I would define full health as the condition in which we feel best, work best, love best, sleep and eat best, but who knows what is "best?" Later I learned of the other pitfalls surrounding vitamins. The whole idea of a vitamin is paradox and difficult to digest. Everybody knows that things we eat can make us sick, but it seems utterly senseless to say that something which we have not eaten could make us sick. And this is exactly what a vitamin is: a substance which makes us sick by not eating it. On the differences between artificial drugs and vitamins We usually characterize the activity of a drug by the quantity in which we have administered it to achieve a certain effect. The sensitivity of various people to our artificial drugs seems to be fairly uniform. Not so the sensitivity to vitamins. There seem to be people who are unable to absorb or store them, and such people may develop symptoms of a vitamin deficiency on a diet which is completely satisfactory to others. I happened to meet two such cases. The first I met thirty years ago in Belgium where I was honorary professor and was in touch with the royal family. The Belgium cuisine is very good and the royal family had the best, and so it is likely that its food left nothing to desire. All the same, the second son of the king, the Prince of Liege, had troubles. He had temperatures, did not develop properly, and nobody knew what was wrong until the idea occurred that he might suffer from a lack of vitamin C. So he received vitamin C and in no time all his troubles were over. Later I met an almost identical case in Sweden, where the son of the Hungarian cultural attache had similar troubles. I prescribed vitamin C and D, and the trouble disappeared. On flavonoids (vitamin P) These relations were born out in a still more striking fashion by my studies on vitamin P. The story was this: while I isolated vitamin C, but still had it only in impure condition, the medical clinic of my university had a patient who had strong subcutaneous capillary bleedings. Such bleedings belong to the symptoms of scurvy, so I was asked for my impure vitamin preparation which promptly cured the bleedings. After I had isolated ascorbicacid and had it in pure form a similar patient turned up. He was given pure ascorbic acid, which was ineffective. My impure preparation was still active, so, evidently, it had to contain besides ascorbic acid some substance responsible for the therapeutic action which I had purified out of it. It was a matter of intuitive guesswork on my part to think that the active substance might have been a f lavonoid, a member of a group of well known dyestuffs. My pure flavonoid promptly cured the bleedings, as it did in other later cases. I felt very strongly that this substance had to be a vitamin, so I called it "vitamin P." On professional controversies of the past ... There followed various professional controversies in official nutrition circles which forbade calling this substance a vitamin at all. The substance was declared useless. The situation went so far that the New York Times printed a front page news article on the "uselessness" of flavonoids, (vitamin P). Now years and years later we know that these flavonoids are substances which can cure or prevent cataract (see article of Roger Williams in Executive Health, Vol. 13, No. 3, Dec. 1976). This leaves no doubt in my mind that flavonoids are vitamins, the lack of which cause subcutaneous bleeding and cataract among other troubles. Flavonoids are widely spread in nature and so most people take in enough of them with their food to avoid symptoms of deficiency, but those hundreds of thousands who are unable to store or assimilate the substance, or have for some other reason a greater demand, develop bleedings, cataract, and other serious troubles. Both vitamin C and P are very cheap and have no toxic effect, unless used to great excess, so the conclusion I am inclined to draw is that one does well to make sure that one is well provided with them, even if there are no evident symptoms of a deficiency. On the nature of the action of vitamins Another most dangerous pitfall connected with vitamins is in the nature of the action of these substances. This pitfall is responsible for the fact that the real meaning and importance of vitamins is still not sufficiently recognized. This may be illustrated by the following case (concerning vitamin C) which repeats itself yearly by many thousands: Mr. X has a lack of vitamin C and contracts a cold. The cold leads to pneumonia, Mr. X dies and his body is taken to the mortuary, but it is not taken there with the diagnosis "lack of vitamin C," but with the diagnosis "Pneumonia." This does not matter for him any more, but matters for the rest of mankind which is misled in its thinking and judgment about vitamins. On comparing vitamins with lubricants ... This leads me to the problem of the mechanism of action of vitamins. I could illuminate this relation by comparing vitamins with lubricants, while comparing your own body with your car. It is wrong to look upon a vitamin as a substance which just combats specific symptoms. Like a lubricant, the vitamin makes the nor- mal working of your body possible. If there is not enough vitamin, the working will be disturbed, leading to all sorts of damages which may accumulate and declare themselves in an early senescence and il_1 health. In your car, insufficient lubrication will declare itself in the wearing out of pistons and cylinders, with the result that after 40,000 miles your car will run as if it had made 80,000, and you will look at 40 as if you were over 60. On being human ... It is only human that we like to give thoughts to our health only after we get into trouble. Once in trouble we beg for help and are willing to do anything to get better, but we dislike to be told to do this or that to prevent trouble. The doctor who makes too many recommendations to prevent trouble will soon have made himself unpopular. He makes himself popular only by pulling people out of the trouble they have worked themselves into. Our bodies are much more perfect than we believe. . After more than sixty years of intense research work in biology I am deeply convinced that our bodies are much more perfect than we believe and most of our untimely troubles are due to our abusing them. Most of this we cannot blame on circumstances. In the "have" nations, such as America, far more people die of the end results of overeating than of starvation, and a better understanding of our own body and a respect for its needs may mean a drastic reduction of self-inflicted human suffering. On the relation of vitamin C to cancer ... This article would have to seem very incomplete without any reference to the relation of ascorbic acid to cancer. That there is some relation has been shown beyond doubt by L. Pauling and E. Cameron (see Executive Health Vol. 13, No. 4, Jan. 1977) . I have worked myself on cancer for several decades, blazing my own trail. I have finished a comprehensive cancer theory which not only explains in a harmonious way the known facts about cancer but also opens a wide new way for therapy. I regret that the technicalities involved make my theory unsuitable for the pages of Executive Health. I am also at a loss to say how my theory relates to Pauling's results. The mechanism of action of ascorbic acid is not sufficiently cleared up to allow correlation with my theory. My feeling is that, as I stated before, ascorbic acid helps to keep the living machinery in good shape. Cancer is, according to my findings, a breakdown of the normal mechanism of the cell, and so it follows that there is the less chance for a breakdown the better the condition of the whole mechanism. If we can keep the living system in good shape by providing for its needs in vitamins, then cancer will have less chance to strike. I would be inclined to explain Pauling's and Cameron's results by saying that the ordering and conserving influence of ascorbic acid may be felt even in terminal cases. It is easier to prevent than cure and so a more extensive use of ascorbic acid throughout life may lead to a considerable decrease of cancer incidence. If ascorbic acid is helpful even in a terminal case, then it may prevent cancer altogether if applied in advance, throughout life. So Pauling's and Cameron's results may have far reaching consequences. Cancer research was hitherto greatly retarded by different factors. One factor was that, moved by the suffering this disease causes, our main concern was to cure and not to understand cancer. We forgot what Bernal told us, that we can control only what we understand. Cancer should be looked upon, in the first place, as a problem which has to be solved, and not merely a disease which has to be cured. The other factor which retarded cancer research was that we asked the wrong question. We asked: why does cancer grow? Experience tells us that this is the wrong question, because surgery is based on the experience that wherever we make a cut, the cells at the side of the cut proliferate and continue to do so until the wound is healed. Then they stop. This happens wherever we cut, showing that our cells have an explosive ability to grow and multiply. The question is thus not what makes a cell grow. What makes a cancer cell grow is its innate ability to multiply. The cancer and normal cell do not differ in their ability to grow. They differ in their ability to stop growing when no more growth is needed. The cancer cell is unable to stop. The normal cell has a brake which the cancer cell is missing. There are also other factors which retard cancer research and prevent new ideas from being developed. Research demands money but if one asks for a grant from any of the granting agencies one has to tell exactly what one will do and discover. Research means going out into the unknown and if one knows too well ahead what one will do and find, then it is not research at all, and is not worth doing. For this reason I was unable to get grants for the last ten years and would have had to give up research had the great American Public not come to my help most generously by supporting the National Foundation for Cancer Research, which enables me to work. 4 1  1 6,4 ~ 4 4 ~ Albert Szent-Gyorgyi, M.D., Ph.D., N.L. PUBLISHER'S NOTE: By special permission of the Saturday Evening Post, we are reprinting their copyrighted article about Dr. Szent-Gyorgyi from their March 1976 issue. We believe this will give you a fascinating glimpse of the life history of this amazing man.  —Richard Stanton ALBERT SZENT-GYORGYI, M.D. —A LIFE AGAINST DEATH The Nobel prize winner in medicine has a debt to settle with cancer, which robbed him of his wife and only child. By Joan Rice Wyatt Until he was in his late teens, Albert Szent-Gyorgyi's family thought he was retarded. But he went on to become one of the world's most honored scientists. He won the Nobel Prize in 1937 for discovering ascorbic acid, which is vitamin C, and for his studies on cellular respiration. In 1954 he received the Albert Lasker Award of the American Heart Association for his studies on muscles, which resulted in the first workable theory of muscle contraction. Now, at the age of eightythree and after years of research, he has evolved a theory which may solve the deadly mystery of cancer. Dr. Szent-Gyorgyi calls his discovery the "electronic theory of cancer." It is based on understanding how cells divide and how this process goes wrong to produce wildly dividing and growing "sick" cells — cancer. Because electrons make cells move, they are the key to understanding cell division. Dr. Szent-Gyorgyi has a very personal stake in his cancer research. Breast cancer took the lives of his beloved and vibrant wife, Marta, and his only child, Cornelia. He wants, he says, "to get even with cancer." Summarizing his life work, in 1972 Dr. Szent-Gyorgyi wrote: "My own scientific career was a descent from higher to lower dimension, led by the desire to understand life. I went from animals to cells, from cells to bacteria, from bacteria to molecules, from molecules to electrons. . . . On my way life ran out between my fingers. The present book (on cancer) is the result of my effort to find my way back again, climbing up the same ladder I so laboriously descended. Having started in medicine, it is befitting that I should end with a medical problem, cancer, which took away most of what was dear to me." Having been hunted by Hitler's Gestapo and having experienced the "criminal methods of Stalin's gangsters," Dr. Szent-Gyorgyi enjoys a good fight. He says it keeps him young. His battle, however, is not only with cancer; it is with the government's scientific funding bureaucracy. It will not give him funds to continue his research. Seeming to take the same dim view of his theory as Dr. Szent-Gyorgyi's family did of his intellect, it could be just as wrong. Last fall a two-day symposium in his honor was held at the Boston University School of Medicine. Many great and famous scientists gathered there to show their respect and love for Dr. Szent-Gyorgyi and to hear him deliver an address on his revolutionary theory. While not endorsing his theory as definitely correct in all its details, the consensus of these eminent scientists was that Dr. Szent-Gyorgyi has "had something" in the past and may very well "have something" now. Dr. Benjamin Kaminer, chairman of the department of physiology at the medical school, said that "any hypothesis of Szent-Gyorgyi is worth testing." Why, then, do the funders keep turning him down? Before they allot funds, they want to know where the research is headed. And Dr. Szent-Gyorgyi can't tell them because, according to Dr. Kaminer, "he doesn't know. He's moving into an uncharted territory." Another reason is that Dr. Szent-Gyorgyi has no hard evidence to prove his theory. Since that is what he needs the money for, he is in a double bind. He has been in "binds" before, however, and got out. Dr. Szent-Gyorgyi was born in Budapest, Hungary, in 1893, the second of three brothers. His father was a landowner, his mother a member of a noted scientific family. His grandfather, great uncles, and uncles were professors of anatomy at the University of Budapest. His brothers were clever, but he was not, he says. His mind did not really develop until he was past puberty, causing his family to wonder what to do with him. They thought that with some scientific education, he might become a cosmetician. Albert Szent-Gyorgyi entered the University of Budapest in 1911 when he was eighteen and came up fast. He did anatomic research in his uncle's laboratory in his freshman year. By the time he was a junior, be had published a series of papers on the structure of the eye. World War I interrupted his studies. He joined the Austro-Hungarian Army, fought on the Russian and Italian fronts, was wounded, and decorated for bravery. Returning to his studies, he received his M.D. in 1917. One thing was wrong. Anatomy bored him. Dr. Szent-Gyorgyi turned to the new field of biochemistry, the study of the smallest living and inert things, seen only with the aid of a microscope. In this tiny universe, Dr. Szent-Gyorgyi was able to find his intellectual home. While doing research in Holland, he discovered the acid in fruits which gives them their anti-scurvy or vitamin-C factors. He later found that paprika, the Hungarian red pepper, was an unbelievably rich source of this substance. Dr. Szent-Gyorgyi prepared two full pounds of the pure white acid, which he named ascorbic acid. He shared this material with other chemists and the world, giving some to the World Health Organization in Geneva. This spirit of generosity marks Dr. Szent-Gyorgyi's life. He has carefully given credit to everyone who has worked with him or whose work be has utilized. He helped many friends to get out from behind the Iron Curtain, whisking one out of a Siberia-bound work gang. When told of financial difficulties by a young assistant, he asked simply, "How much do you need?" In postwar Hungary he ran a free dining room and free grocery store for friends and associates. He received the Nobel Prize when Hitler was menacing Europe. The prize included a sum of money, the largest Dr. Szent-Gyorgyi had ever seen. Not wanting to profit from war, he invested in stocks that would go down in value in wartime. When war came, Dr. SzentGyorgyi says, "I lost my money and saved my soul." He also joined the Resistance as "every decent fellow did." At the time, he and his team were studying the action of muscles. Dr. Szent-Gyorgyi used these studies to cloak his work for the underground. He traveled to neutral countries to deliver important political and scientific papers to the British legations there. Aware of this, Hitler once shouted out his name, demanding his capture and death. By 1941, the Gestapo was closing in. Hiding in the Swedish Legation in Budapest, Dr. Szent-Gyorgyi was anxious that his work on muscles be continued if he were captured. He wrote a report on his researches and sent it to the editor of a Swedish scientific journal. The editor wired an acknowledgment in care of the Swedish Legation. The Gestapo intercepted it. Luckily, they searched the neighboring houses first, looking for secret tunnels. Dr. Szent-Gyorgyi, thus alerted, escaped into the underground. Totalitarianism did not end with Hitler. After the war, Dr. Szent-Gyorgyi hoped that some kind of democracy could be maintained under Russian control. But he was soon disillusioned and came to the United States where he and a number of his associates set up a laboratory at the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, Massachusetts. He is still there, working on cancer, at the National Foundation for Cancer Research. Unlike other cancer researchers who are concentrating on the causes of the disease — there are many causes, from viruses to food additives — Dr. SzentGyorgyi focuses on the cell. "You cannot cure what you do not understand. To fix an automobile engine, first you must know how it works," he says. While enormously complex in detail, in essence, his theory is simple. It is based on how cells grow. Cancer is a distortion of this growth, a wild, uncontrolled division of cells. Division is movement; the agent of movement is the electron. Cells are constantly moving between two states. One is a state of proliferation or division. The other is a resting state. When a cell gets stuck in the first or proliferating state, as it will if its electronic moving system is out of order, it will divide uncontrollably and the result will be a cancerous growth. "What makes the cell pathological is that it cannot find its way back to the resting state," Dr. Szent-Gyorgyi says. If a way can be found to introduce electronic mobility into a cancerous cell to move it out of the wild growth state and into the resting state, it could be the eventual answer to cure or prevention of the disease. In his address at the Boston University School of Medicine Symposium Dr. Szent-Gyorgyi dramatically demonstrated a key element in his theory — that certain proteins can carry electrons. He showed a test tube with a yellow liquid, the color indicating that it was not a "semiconductor" of electrons. But then he showed a second tube. It was an identical liquid, but the color had been changed by adding a chemical solution to a dark, opaque red. Some proteins then are semiconductors. But, as Dr. Szent-Gyorgyi puts it, "research needs eyes, brains, machines — and money." He has the eyes and the brain. This summer an essential but old machine that had been broken was patched up by a visiting physicist. The last necessity is being met by the American people through their mail donations to the National Foundation for Cancer Research. In 1972 Franklin C. Salisbury, a retired Washington, D.C. lawyer, read a newspaper account of Dr. SzentGyorgyi's financial dilemma. His interest was aroused and his subsequent efforts to aid the biochemist led to a strong friendship. Notably, Salisbury helped found the National Foundation for Cancer Research now located at Bethesda, Maryland. This small foundation — Dr. Szent-Gyorgyi's major support for the last two years — seeks by mail and personal contacts gifts from all who themselves or whose loved ones may, in the future, benefit from Dr. SzentGyorgyi's work. The foundation so far has 35,000 loyal members or contributors. The average contribution is $10. The largest donation received at the time of the Boston University Symposium which was held last fall was $10,000 — peanuts in terms of the government's multimillion-dollar cancer research grant. However, these peanuts may add up to the prevention and to the eventual cure for cancer. Dr. Szent-Gyorgyi, known to his associates as "Prof," is a physical as well as mental dynamo. Like the electrons he studies, he is all movement, with a forwardthrusting walk, gesturing hands, and flying silver white hair. His penetrating eyes are saved from the total objectivity of the scientist by the humor and wisdom of his years. He lives by the sea in a comfortable but plain home, shining with simplicity and beauty. Framed honors are half-hidden along a staircase wall. His workshop is cluttered but orderly; a recording by the late Pablo Casals is on the desk. Dr. Szent-Gyorgyi says he did not inherit his vigorous longevity, since members of his family were not longlived. He attributes it to eating and exercising wisely and moderately. He swims regularly in the ocean, even in the brisk day of the New England autumn. Every day he takes one gram of vitamin C to supplement what he receives in fruit juices and salads. He also takes wheat germ because of its rich supply of vitamin E. "The human body," Dr. Szent-Gyorgyi says, is a better machine than we think. It is only when we treat it badly that it fails." "Benefits from vitamins are not known for perhaps ten years after we start taking them," he says, "and then we do not know why we feel good." Another reason for his hearty old age is that he loves his work — research — and the fight against cancer gives him a strong opponent. It has made him, he says, a "happy man." These words are borne out in a prayer he published at the end of his book, The Crazy Ape (Grosset and Dunlap), which urges that science be used to better man's condition, not to destroy him through war. He wrote: "God, Let me praise You by improving my corner of Your creation By filling this little world of mine With light, warmth, goodwill and happiness." 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