Emanuel Revici, MD: efforts to publish the clinical findings of a pioneer in lipid-based cancer therapy—Part 2

Townsend Letter for Doctors and Patients, Oct, 2004 by Marcus A. Cohen

"The experience with this paper indicates beyond any question that the problem of publishing our work on cancer is not a simple one. Why this invisible form of censorship is permited to exist in scientific and medical publications and how it operates are questions that I am not able to answer. But I do believe we are justified in saying on the basis of such experiences that the normal channels of publication have been closed to us and that we are therefore forced to take any other way that may be open, to get our findings before the medical and scientific public."

Then Ravich added a postscript, dredging up a wider, deeper history of attempts by Revici and the IAB to publish in the peer-reviewed literature: "Every paper we have submitted on subjects outside the field of cancer has been accepted; every one concerned with cancer has been rejected. When four articles were submitted by Dr. Revici by title alone, for presentation at the International Cancer Congress in Paris in 1950, all of them were rejected. Only seven papers in all were rejected, and almost a thousand read. I learned from Dr. Oberling that they had been rejected because of the intervention of Dr. Rhoades [sic] and others in this country on the program committee." (19)

Dr. Charles Oberling, a French academic physician who relocated in the US after WWII, was highly regarded by American oncologists. He would have known the circumstances behind the rejection of Revici's papers. Dr. Cornelius Rhodes, the first major postwar director of Memorial Hospital in New York City (later, Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center), had headed the Chemical Warfare division of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the predecessor of the CIA. Rhodes had used his wartime post to experiment with mustard gas--a chemical agent used in WWI--on human cancer. The Congress Ravich referred to was the International Union Against Cancer, whose president and editor on different occasions was Prof. Joseph Maisin of Belgium.

Through the 1950s and early 1960s, IAB papers slipped into medical journals, (20) and The New York Times covered a few of the IAB's research advances--where the papers or research didn't concern Revici's theories and therapeutic applications in cancer. (21) From time to time, research on lipids and cancer not originating at the IAB appeared in the scientific literature, focused on abnormal lipid metabolism--a prime Revici area of study. (22)

Publications, 1960s: In 1961, D Van Nostrand and Co. decided to distribute a text by Revici under its imprint. Titled, Research in Physiopathology as Basis of Guided Chemotherapy, With Special Application to Cancer, the book had been in various draft stages for several years: IAB newsletters voiced news of its progress in the late 1950s. Close to 800 pages in print, Revici's monograph summed up his prolific findings from the mid-1920s through the 1950s.

When it undertook to bring out Revici's monograph, D. Van Nostrand had been publishing scientific volumes from its main office in Princeton, New Jersey, since 1848. It had earned a solid reputation for quality. A letter from the president, Edward M. Crane, on June 8, 1961, spoke of the publishing firm's "keen interest" in an "important and valuable book." (23)