Cancer Man
The
Government-Funded Cancer Injection Experiments of Chester M. Southam
by Jerry Leonard
“For about a decade a team of cancer researchers led by Chester M. Southam of the Sloan-Kettering Institute for Cancer Research has been injecting human beings with live cancer cells in order to study human immunity to cancer. Their work has been widely regarded as among the most promising of all lines of research on cancer and it has been far from secretive.”[1]
What is the price of learning how cancer grows in humans? One particular
“establishment” cancer researcher named Chester Southam thought the result was
worth overcoming any obstacles, including human life, that stood in the way of
that discovery, so he injected live cancers into humans without their
permission.
Southam’s line of research, creating model cancer infections in human subjects for the purpose of vaccine research, is extremely important for two reasons. First, it set a dangerous precedent for exposing both healthy and diseased humans to cancer-causing agents without their consent in numerous experiments. Second, his work set a precedent for exploiting immune system damage, or immunosuppression, as a means of deliberately increasing cancer growth in humans.[2] In addition to serving as chilling precedents in human cancer research, Southam’s experiments illustrate the reasoning behind even more dangerous experiments that built on his research. In these experiments, researchers seeking to understand the mechanism of cancer growth in human beings directly exposed human subjects to dangerous animal cancer viruses—including monkey cancer and tumor viruses.[3]
Inducing Cancer
Growth in Human Guinea Pigs by Exploiting Immunosuppression
Immune System Modeling
Chester Southam’s research, like that of many of his peers, involved extensive investigation of the role of the human immune system in cancer susceptibility. The overarching goal of his research was to show that human cancer could be traced to a viral source and that susceptibility to cancer could be explained by a lack of a natural immunity to such viruses. Additionally Southam attempted to show that the human immune system could not only ward off cancer in healthy subjects, but that it could be artificially enhanced through vaccination procedures to prevent cancer in those lacking a natural form of this immunity. In short, Southam sought to cure human cancer much like Jonas Salk and others had helped cure polio through vaccination.
As part of his research into finding out if cancer patients were in possession of a dysfunctional immune system that might explain their susceptibility to cancer, Southam began to inject viruses in both cancer patients and persons with diseases other than cancer.[4]
The viruses Southam used in these early immune probing tests
were chosen because they had previously been shown to reduce cancer when injected
into experimental lab animals. This choice of viruses allowed Southam
simultaneously to measure the immune response to foreign antigens in human
subjects as well as to evaluate the viability of these viruses as human
anticancer agents.[5]
In the course of this research, Southam and various colleagues routinely inoculated cancer patients[6] by the hundreds with dangerous viruses which included West Nile, Ilheus, and Bunyamwera viruses.[7]
Although these experiments with injections of “anticancer viruses” were not successful in substantively reducing tumors in human patients, they did show immune responses which, as suspected, varied according to the patients’ disease states. (They also produced encephalitis and brain damage in some patients.[8])
Southam noted after one of his early experiments that the immune systems of patients with different forms of cancer and tumors (or “neoplasms”) showed differences in the response to the injected viruses:
There were suggestive data to indicate that antibody
formation in patients with lymphamatous neoplasms is poorer than in patients
with other types of neoplastic disease.[9]
Cancer Injections in Human Subjects
The observation of differing immune responses to injected viruses among patients with different types of cancer not only encouraged vaccine researchers,[10] it emboldened them to take the experiments a step further. In the next round of experiments researchers replaced the injections of anticancer viruses with injections of cancer cells. These incredibly dangerous experiments would allow Southam and his colleagues to measure direct cancer susceptibility in humans as a function of immune system health just as it had been measured in lab animals.
In this next phase of research Southam and his colleagues found patients of varying degrees of health (and therefore varying immune system capability) and systematically injected them with human cancer cells to measure how cancer growth varied with their immune system capability. After the cancer cells were injected in a patient in one of these experiments, the site of the cancer injection was periodically monitored to determine whether the cells were “accepted” by the patient (that is, whether tumors formed). Cancer susceptibility was determined by measuring the size of the “nodule” or tumor formation at the injection site and by recording the time between injection and rejection.[11]
In order to measure the hoped-for immune response to the injected cancer cells, various methods were used to determine whether antibodies were produced in the subjects to fight the injected cancer cells. These methods included removing blood or biopsying induced tumors (sometimes in a postmortem examination) and measuring them for antibody activity.[12] Chester Southam summarized this procedure in a letter to a colleague:
The procedure, as I explained, requires simply the hypodermic
injection of a suspension of tissue-cultured cells at two sites on the anterior
thigh or arm and observation of the sites at about weekly intervals for six
weeks or until regression is complete. These cells are of two or more cancer
cell lines. These cancer cell lines were chosen because they have the necessary
growth capacity to produce a measurable reaction. ...Other than the two
hypodermic injections and observation of the reaction, the only other procedure
would be drawing serum for study of antibody reactions to the transplanted
cells at approximately two-week intervals during the observation period.[13]
During these experiments patients with impaired immune systems were obtained by using patients with debilitating forms of cancer near death,[14] cancer patients undergoing various forms of therapy, cured cancer patients and patients with debilitating but noncancerous diseases.[15] In a startlingly callous manner, healthy human patients (prisoners obtained from the Ohio State Penitentiary) were used as “controls” throughout these cancer injection experiments.[16] This allowed Southam and his colleagues to measure and compare the effect of cancer injections on humans with healthy immune systems relative to patients with deficient systems. This enabled researchers to directly test their theory that human cancer susceptibility was a function of immune system health.
Results of Early Cancer Injection Experiments
The results of these “cancer injection” experiments repeatedly showed that the healthy patients, the diseased patients with debilitating illnesses other than cancer, and the cured cancer patients all routinely rejected the tumor cell injections. In contrast, the “immune impaired” subjects with advanced cancer were able to sustain tumor growth from the cancer transplants for a longer period of time.[17] Southam and a colleague summarized these observations:
In brief, normal recipients responded to implanted human
cancer cells with a marked local inflammatory reaction and rapid complete
regression of the implants within a maximum period of 3 to 4 weeks. ...In
striking contrast, however, those recipients that had advanced cancer showed
little or no acute inflammatory response, the implanted cancer cells grew
progressively for a period of 3 weeks or more before regression started, and
some individuals failed to reject implanted cancer cells over periods of
observation between 6 weeks and 6 months.[18]
[emphasis added]
These results tended to reinforce Southam’s belief that cancer patients had an impaired immune system capacity which was responsible for their susceptibility to cancer. He commented in one paper,
[t]he tumor inoculums survived for longer periods in patients
with more advanced cancer. These
observations could be explained by variations in the immunological responses of
the hosts.[19]
[emphasis added]
Thus, as a result of a decade of such experiments with hundreds of cancer cell injections into healthy and diseased subjects, Southam became convinced that he had found an immune system defect specific to cancer patients (since they were most susceptible to his cancer transplants) which might also explain their original susceptibility to cancer. Southam became more confident of his experimental conclusions after “chronically diseased” patients at the Jewish Chronic Disease Hospital, like his healthy prisoner guinea pigs, rejected his transplanted cancers:
During the past 10 years, as we have seen, cancer cells have
been implanted in almost 600 well persons and cancer patients. ... The
technique for measuring immune reactions is now standardized and the results
are predictable. All the patients in the sudy undertaken at the Jewish Chronic
Disease Hospital rejected the transplants as promptly as did the healthy
persons. Thus it has been demonstrated
that cancer patients lack an immune mechanism present in other individuals,
including chronically diseased patients.[20]
[emphasis added]
In addition to providing evidence for the “immune dysfunction” theory of cancer susceptibility, the accelerated rejection of repeated cancer cell implants in the healthy patients was seen as evidence for the existence of an innate and controllable immune system reaction (an “induced immunity”) to cancer in humans. Southam noted in one of his early papers describing his experiments,
[t]he growth of a repeat implant of the same cell type has
been studied in normal recipients. The repeated implants formed smaller nodules
and regressed more rapidly as judged by gross and microscopic examination. This accelerated rejection of a second
implant is presumably the result of an induced immunity.[21]
[emphasis added]
Thus it appeared that the first cancer cell injections administered to the healthy patients in these tests served as an “inoculation” against the subsequent cancer cell injections. These tests provided some hope for Southam and his colleagues that the mechanisms responsible for rejecting the cancer cells they were injecting might be harnessed to provide long-sought methods for inducing immunity to human cancer through vaccination. Southam summarized, “These results, of course, give hope that, through further clinical research, methods of stimulating such mechanisms to greater efficacy can be developed.” [22]
(Chester Southam was not the first or only researcher to inject cancer cells into cancer patients as a means of evaluating the potential for inoculating humans against cancer. Ludwik Gross reported that the practice of injecting cancer patients with their own cancer cells as a means of inoculation had been conducted since at least 1887, often with the cancer growing uncontrollably in the patients.[23] Harvey Stone reported in 1951 that he had injected cancer patients with treated cancer cells from their own bodies for the purpose of determining whether the cancer cells could serve as an inoculation against the patient’s own cancer. Stone froze the cells prior to injection in an attempt to reduce the possibility of the cancer cells growing uncontrollably when injected into the patients. Stone also reported one case in which he injected treated cancer cells directly from one patient with cancer to another patient with cancer.[24] Later researchers who were contemporaries of Chester Southam, such as George E. Moore at Roswell Park Memorial Institute of Buffalo, New York, and Dr. Alvin L. Watne at West Virginia Medical Center, admitted that they were using experimental procedures similar to Southam’s involving cancer cell injections into humans.[25])
Cancer Injections with Real-Time Immune System Modulation
In 1963 vaccine researchers published a follow-up to Chester Southam’s human cancer experiments. In this study cancer cells from six different human cancer cell lines were systematically injected into human cancer patients. In this case, however, the immune systems of the patients were modified during the experiment with chemotherapy so that the researchers could measure “tumor takes” as a function of immune system health.[26] The “transplanted tumors” which grew from the injections of cancer cells (consisting of both irradiated and nonirradiated cancer cell lines) were then compared with tumors induced by the same cells in “conditioned” or immunosuppressed rats. Although the researchers reported that “no relationship between tumor ‘take’ and chemotherapy was demonstrated” in the human subjects used in this experiment, the induced tumors in the human patients were coldly reported to be “rather similar to the tumors produced in conditioned animals but had much less fibrous tissue.”[27] Such experiments in which humans and lab animals were given the same cancer-causing injections to measure how tumors grew as a function of immune system damage set a dangerious precedent. (Researchers later injected humans with monkey tumor and cancer viruses.)
In 1966 Chester Southam published the results of a similar set of experiments in which cancer transplants were injected into patients undergoing real-time immune system manipulation in association with cancer treatment. This type of study allowed Southam to measure the effects of the cancer transplants as the patients underwent various forms of immunosuppression, [28] instead of having to rely on patients who were already immunosuppressed due to their cancer.
The “Ethical Wilderness” of Chester Southam’s Experiments
It was determined after much of this type of human cancer transplant experimentation had been completed that Southam and his colleagues had conducted many of his experiments on cancer patients at Sloan-Kettering and the Jewish Chronic Disease Hospital in Brooklyn without their consent. The prestigious journal Science published a scathing review of the controversy which ensued (along with an inset of the Nuremberg Code) in which it was revealed that many of the patients involved in the cancer transplant experiments were told only that they would be involved in “skin tests” or that they were to receive “some cells.”[29] (Some of these patients were senile and some didn’t even speak English.[30]) Southam ridiculed those who saw his experiments as dangerous or unethical (in spite of the fact that he refused to inject the cancer cells in himself) and callously told Science that “[W]e stopped telling them they were getting living cancer cells when it was well established that there was no risk” and “I do not see why I should be obliged to confront the patients with the word ‘cancer.’”
Despite Southam’s self-serving claim that there was no danger to the patients he used in his cancer transplant studies, his own experiments involving homotransplants (transplants of cancer cells between members of the same species) and the previous history of cancer autotransplantation (transplants of cancer cells from one part of a patient’s body to another part) indicate otherwise. In fact, both of the practices used by Southam—homotransplants and autotransplants—were dangerous. For example, cancer autotransplants had a long history of growing uncontrollably in cancer patients. Often these tumor cell transplants from one part of a subject’s body to another part had to be surgically removed or destroyed with radiation because they grew so aggressively (often after a relatively long latency period).[31] Experiments with cancer homotransplants, injections of live cells from one person to another, also demonstrated that the implanted cancer cells could grow out of control. In Southam’s own experiments, for example, four cancer patients had tumors grow back in the region of the implant after the original induced tumor had been surgically removed. In one case, the implanted cells had “metastasized” or spread to other parts of the patient’s body.[32] The authors of one technical paper, published in the Annals of Surgery, described this phenomenon as follows:
Southam et. al. showed that human cancer cells carried
serially in tissue cultures or conditioned heterologous hosts exhibited growth
when inoculated into advanced cancer patients. Further, local excisions of the
resulting tumor nodules were followed by recurrences in several instances. In
one case metastasis to a regional lymph node occurred.[33]
As alarming as these examples are, others are even more unsettling. In 1965 a medical case was published in which a healthy patient died as a result of a cancer homotransplant experiment similar to those conducted by Southam. This experiment was conducted, as were Southam’s, “in the hope of gaining a little better understanding of cancer immunity and in the hope that the production of tumor antibodies might be helpful in the treatment of the cancer patient.”[34] In this particular case, a mother agreed to have part of a tumor which killed her daughter implanted in her own body. The tumor transplant grew (it was determined to be histologically indistinguishable from the daughter’s tumor) and despite surgery and a brief period of remission eventually killed the woman.
In yet another case of this type, a medical student died from cancer which developed at the sight of a syringe puncture wound he incurred while examining a female patient with breast cancer. Two years after being accidentally exposed to serum from the cancer victim, the student died from metastatic tumors which suddenly began to grow in his unintentionally “inoculated” palm.[35]
This latter example dramatically illustrated the danger involved with human cancer transplants. As cancer virus expert Ludwig Gross pointed out, cancer transplant experiments in animals frequently resulted in cases where the infected animals did not develop cancer until some time after the initial injection. In some cases, after the cancer transplants belatedly grew and then regressed, tumors spontaneously reappeared.[36] In other cases, the originally infected animals did not develop cancer at all; however, their offspring did. These alarming experimental results with animals, along with the case of the medical student cited above, prompted Gross to issue a stern warning about the dangers of injecting cancer cells in human beings:
Should these observations also apply to humans, it would then
follow that inoculation of cancer extracts into healthy humans may occasionally
result in a delayed development of a malignant tumor, perhaps after several
years or even after one or two decades, or it may possibly cause the
development of tumors in some of the children or grandchildren of the
inoculated hosts.[37]
[emphasis added]
Jay Katz published a statement by Mendel Jacobi, who similarly noted, “The fact that cancer, even when completely clinically eradicated by adequate and even intensive treatment, is known to recur after long periods of latency free of all evidence of cancer. It is precisely for this reason that, in the field of cancer, one speaks not of cure but of 5-year, 10-year, 15-year, 20-year, etc. cure, meaning only that the cancer has not reappeared during such intervals.”[38]
It should be obvious that if indeed similar mechanisms were at work in humans as were at work in animal cancer growth due to transplants, Southam’s experiments with cancer injections in healthy human recipients represented a profound danger, not only to the injected subjects themselves, but to their offspring.[39]
In addition to human studies, there is additional evidence which underscores the long-term dangers of implanting human cancer cells into human subjects. This evidence came from animal experiments conducted during the same period when Southam was conducting his human studies. In this set of experiments, researchers were readily able to induce an array of cancers in mice (including breast tumors, pulmonary tumors, soft-tissue sarcomas, reticulum-cell sarcomas, thymomas, and plasmacytomas) simply by injecting human tumor cells into the experimental animals.[40] Alarmingly some of the induced cancers took up to nine months to form in the mice. In one case, a breast tumor regressed, “only to reappear and grow at a greatly accelerated rate.” The researchers who conducted this experiment expected delayed cancers to develop continually as they observed the inoculated animals. (They noted that “[t]he tumor age and incidence will doubtless change as more animals are observed for longer periods of time.”)
These results with human cancer cell injections in animals were consistent with Ludwick Gross’s warnings regarding the possibility of such delayed effects with human cancer cell injections into humans. Unfortunately whether Southam’s human guinea pigs (or their offspring) experienced similar catastrophic delayed reactions has not been determined since the records of the patients on whom Southam experimented were sealed by the hospital where many of these experiments were conducted. This happened despite the attempts of one of the directors of a hospital where Southam performed his Nazi-like experiments[41] to obtain the sealed records by taking the case to the Brooklyn Supreme Court.[42]
Southam himself later recommended that long-term followup studies be conducted on the healthy prisoners he injected with cancer as controls in his tumor transplant experiments, but he wasn’t concerned about any ill effects from his experimentation. He wanted to determine whether they had developed long-term, induced immunity to natural forms of cancer in addition to the demonstrated immunity to his controlled cancer injections. Southam made his recommendation for the further study of his victims following a brief description of his cancer injection study,
in which nearly 300 volunteers in the Ohio Penitentiary
received homografts of living tissue culture cells of various human cancer
lines. The primary objective was to study homograft rejection mechanisms and
tumor-specific antigens, but long-lasting homograft immunity, which might
include some immunity directed toward tumor-specific antigens, was demonstrated
in these men. It is therefore appropriate
that they be followed to determine whether the procedure had any influence on
the frequency of spontaneously developing cancer.[43]
[emphasis added]
It is unknown whether such followup attempts were made (Southam had made the same recommendations much earlier in his career),[44] and if so, what the results were.
Although the injection of transmissible cancer cells—the contagiousness and long-term consequences of which have not been determined—is frightening enough, the situation is actually much worse than this. In addition to injecting cancer into hundreds of experimental subjects, Southam began using his cancer cell injection technique as a “routine” diagnostic procedure to probe the immune responses of women undergoing gynecological surgery in the hospital where he worked! Presumably, based on the results of his extensive human experiments with cancer transplants, the rate at which the cancer cell-induced nodules were rejected in the unsuspecting patients would indicate the health of their immune systems. Southam admitted that he had used this procedure for at least two years “on all postoperative patients on our gynecology service as a measure of immunologic status.” It is highly doubtful that these women were informed of the potentially deadly nature of the procedure being used on them or that any long-term follow-up was completed to determine whether the cancer injections had any harmful effects on them or their families. (Another researcher, inspired by Southam, was planning on using the same procedure to screen patients routinely for asymptomatic cancer.) [45] Medical ethics demand that these patients be contacted to inform them of the biohazards they were intentionally exposed to and to determine whether they or their offspring developed abnormally high cancer rates due to these appalling procedures.
MKULTRA and Southam’s Cancer Experiments
It is possible that the “anticancer viruses” tested on humans in Southam’s early experiments may have been the anticancer compounds which congressional investigators discovered were systematically tested on cancer patients during the CIA’s controversial MKULTRA testing program.[46] If so, Chester Southam’s cancer transplant research may well have been covertly funded by the CIA through civilian research agencies in the same manner in which the bulk of the MKULTRA research was funded.[47] Such a scenario seems increasingly plausible since recent investigations into the U.S. government’s unethical radiation testing on civilians have revealed that the institute where Southam was employed during his cancer transplantation research—the Sloan-Kettering Institute—was actively involved in conducting unethical research for the Department of Defense (specifically whole-body radiation experiments on cancer patients). The period during which these experiments were conducted—1954 to 1964—coincides with the time Southam and his colleagues were publishing papers on their barbaric cancer transplant research.[48] As discussed in other works by the author, CIA funding of these initial experiments would have great significance due to the type of cancer experimentation with immunosuppressive agents which followed Southam’s cancer transplant studies.
Should it be proven true, CIA or military involvement in Southam’s cancer transplant experimentation should not come as too great a shock. The goals and methods of Southam’s type of cancer research would have overlapped those of the military and intelligence agencies interested in chemical/biological warfare research. For example, Southam’s research provided a pretext for determining the capabilities and weaknesses of the human immune system—knowledge critical to both defensive and offensive biological warfare programs. Southam’s research also provided a pretext for performing various unethical experiments on human beings to determine their susceptibility to diseases including cancer and deadly tropical viruses.
Later research, which involved developing agents which could actively induce immune system destruction or immunosuppression for this type of cancer experimentation, would be even more applicable to biowarfare. (Researchers developed mouse and monkey AIDS viruses designed to knock out components of the immune system to assist in cancer transplants.) This is true since, if such immunosuppressive techniques could be controlled in humans and covertly applied on a large scale, they would effectively provide the ability to control the world’s immune system—thus allowing medical scientists to turn what might normally be relatively harmless human infections into fatal diseases and therefore biological warfare weapons.
Summary
The course of Chester Southam’s research set a dangerous precedent for the systematic use of healthy human beings in cancer experiments allegedly conducted for the purpose of developing a cancer cure or vaccine. Initially human subjects were injected with tropical viruses to monitor their immune systems and to test potential anticancer treatments. Subsequently both diseased and healthy humans alike were repeatedly injected with cancer cells in dangerous experiments of dubious merit designed to test the “immune deficiency” theory of cancer susceptibility. Healthy patients injected in these experiments consistently demonstrated the ability to reject cancer implants (at least in the short run) while the cancer patients had a more difficult time rejecting the implants.
The results of this experimentation tended to confirm the theory that an immune system dysfunction was indeed required for cancer to grow in humans and that a natural immunity to cancer existed in healthy patients. It remained to be determined whether the immune dysfunction in cancer patients was a factor in their original susceptibility to the disease or whether it was merely a result of the disease. Moreover, the exact nature of this immune system dysfunction—and the degree to which it could be compensated for through a cancer vaccine—was still to be determined. These latter issues would occupy Chester Southam and other researchers for many years in attempts to find a vaccination procedure that could prevent human cancer.
Conclusions
It is undeniable that Southam’s insidious “tumor transplant” experiments with cancer cell injections into healthy and immunosuppressed human subjects set a very ugly example for cancer researchers to follow. As has been documented elsewhere by the author,[49] researchers followed up on Southam’s hazardous research with even more dangerous research which involved systematically injecting human subjects with animal cancer and tumor viruses in attempts to measure cancer susceptibility as a function of immune system health. The theory that the international epidemic of AIDS and the associated cancer epidemic are the result of a sophisticated version[50] of these types of experiments being covertly conducted on a very large and unsuspecting international population has also been discussed extensively in these works.
If this scenario regarding the origin of AIDS is accurate, it would appear that the author of the Science magazine article summarizing Southam’s sinister cancer transplant experiments was prophetic when he commented that “the situation at present appears rather perilous for everyone.”