Eleonore Thun-Hohenstein WHO’S AFRAID OF A CURE FOR CANCER?

Our First Meeting

Our first meeting was brief and disappointing.

I was sitting in my office with my desk overflowing with paper. It was just before six o’clock. I had urgent work on hand and another appointment in the evening. There was a knock at the door and a shy, almost frightened-looking man came in. He introduced himself as Jaroslaw Nowicky. In excruciatingly bad, grammatically almost unintelligible German, he tried to explain to me what he wanted. He was working on the development of a substance that could revolutionize the treatment of cancer. Since I was the newspaper’s science correspondent, I should be interested.

Another fantasist, I thought, used to the most incredible ‘scientists’ turning up at my office. On top of that, I was becoming increasingly irritated by his adventurous German. It came at me like machine gun fire, made no useful sense and, in view of being pressed for time, induced in me a paralyzing mixture of desperation and impatience.

To get a moment’s air, I asked my uninvited guest to leave me the most important papers from his full-to-bursting briefcase. I would look at them in peace and then call him. After giving me his address and telephone number, he said goodbye.

Later he told me of his bitter disappointment. He had been advised to come to me because I was the only one who would listen to him and write the article he so hoped for. He had already made unsuccessful approaches to other newspapers and now he expected that I too would somehow file his documents and forget about them.

I almost did.

But a few weeks later I had finished what I had to do earlier than expected and began a sporadic inspection of the mountains of paper on my desk – which mostly meant throwing away out of date news reports, invitations, notes, magazines and so on. I eventually worked my way down to a ‘potentially usable’ pile in which Nowicky’s documents awaited their exhumation. Out of fairness to him, I was just going to look through them quickly and let him know. I did not really expect to find anything newsworthy. However, I knew from experience that from time to time you strike lucky.

And I did here.

The papers were clear and comprehensible and, as far as I was able to judge on a quick first reading, did in fact contain sensational material in the field of cancer research – if it would all stand up to thorough investigation.

Many people are interested in reading news about medicine – especially articles about cancer – so a journalist can count on receiving special attention. Maybe I had a scoop. I called the number Nowicky had left me and arranged a meeting.

He came. Once again loaded with piles of paper. I had armed myself with patience – a scarce commodity in my case – and with the necessary stern expression, requested him simply to answer my questions at first without expanding on them too much since an information overflow would only lead to confusion.

Of course, I had to interrupt him repeatedly because I was having a problem understanding his grammar. He submitted himself to my questioning with great patience. After almost two hours, I had discovered the essentials.

And that was sensational enough. Jaroslaw Wassil Nowicky had developed a substance from the plant greater celandine which, when intravenously injected, accumulated in tumours. Due to its auto-fluorescence, it could make tumours visible under ultraviolet light. The same phenomenon could be observed with metastases.

This demarcation of the tumour would be a great help to surgeons who must cut deep into healthy tissue. Furthermore, veterinary surgeons had reported that tumours were easy to remove when animals had been injected with this preparation.

The fact that oxygen consumption in cancer cells is increased for fifteen minutes and then leads to the death of the cells while the oxygen consumption of healthy cells is increased for five minutes and then returns to normal was a most remarkable discovery.

If this phenomenon had been given attention in 1980 and this process observed under the microscope, we would have discovered what, seventeen years later, under the name ‘angiogenesis’, was to bring new findings about cancer to international cancer research. And it could have been realised at that time how Nowicky’s substance Ukrain can prevent the formation of metastases.

In view of the fact that cancer is still the number two cause of death worldwide, one might have thought that medical science would have at least taken an intensive interest in the phenomenon of the increased oxygen consumption and subsequent death of tumour cells. In addition, there were indications that in some cases even tumour regression had been observed. In any case, Nowicky’s substance was the first and only one which attacked cancer cells without destroying healthy cells.

However, there can be no talk of any interest from the authorities responsible. On the contrary. In the course of subsequent years, I was witness to not only indirect but sometimes criminal persecution of this outsider who had had the audacity to discover something that others, with enormous funds at their disposal, had been searching for in vain. He would now be punished by having his research findings consistently ignored.

He was chased out of one university laboratory only to suffer the same fate at the next, as though he should be made a living example of the proverbial fate of inventors.

After I had observed these perfidies for a few years, though I must admit that initially I even secretly believed that Nowicky was paranoid, I decided to document this persecution until I had concrete evidence.

In the meantime, eighteen years have passed since my first article appeared in the now defunct Austrian news magazine ‘Wochenpresse’. Since then, medical reports of cures brought about by Ukrain have been piling up but there is still no end to the suppression of this invention. No clinical study has been carried out in Austria, foreign studies are not recognized and conspiratorial vested interests, both inside and outside the Ministry of Health, are still directed against the registration of this drug which has been tested worldwide and presented at well over two hundred international congresses by researchers from all over the world. Wherever possible, obstacles have been put in the inventor’s way and the authorities have even used illegal means to threaten his livelihood. As persistently as this persecution has been continued, the inventor has steadfastly continued his work.

Until recently, I thought that my articles and all the others in various newspapers had achieved absolutely nothing. However, now I know that these publications were the impetus for the fact that since 1984, whenever the need was the greatest, crucial assistance was at hand – certainly not from the Ministry of Health, which was responsible - but from the Ministry of Science.

What follows, is a documentation of this assistance and the methods used by the opponents of Nowicky’s drug, Ukrain.