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

Nowicky Leaves the Country of His Birth

When I first met Jaroslaw Nowicky, he had already been in Vienna for nine years. He not only had a turbulent past behind him but also his first experiences of the life of an outsider scientist.

He was born on 15 October 1937 in a small village in Galicia. It was not the best time to grow up. He was just seven as he and his parents were deported west to a concentration camp. He spent most time behind barbed wire at the Neumarkt camp near Nuremberg. His father had hidden a Jewish friend, a capital crime under Nazi rule, which had extended over Poland and Ukraine since the beginning of the war.

At the end of the war, they returned to their ‘liberated’ home country but Stalinist Russia was also not the safest of places. At first, Nowicky’s family lived apart to avoid deportation to Siberia. Whoever had spent too long in the West, even as a prisoner, had to be ideologically ‘cleansed’ and polished up in accordance with communism. The gulags were full of such people. Thanks to the family’s separation, young Jaroslaw was able to graduate from high school in Broschniv-Osada and subsequently studied at the radio technology faculty of the Technical Academy in Lvov. Because he was the only one who was not a member of the Comsomol - also highly suspicious in the period following Stalinism – he was sent to work in a factory in Petropavlovsk in Kazakhstan. Since under dictatorships it is often the case that one office does not know what the other is doing, the grotesque situation arose in which Nowicky was sent to a top-secret military factory where he was refused permission to pass even the first perimeter fence. The politically suspect were not allowed even to set foot inside a restricted area. Because nobody knew what to do with him, he was just sent away. No other camp, no forced labor, simply free - but thousands of miles away from Lvov. He had to find work somewhere in order to survive. This intermezzo lasted four months until he arrived back at his starting point of Lvov.

In 1961, as a qualified engineer, he began work in a television factory, which he left just one year later as chief engineer. He then taught in Lvov at a technical high school where he lectured both in Russian and Ukrainian – which promptly led to his suspension. Illegally – for although Russian was the language used in all schools throughout the Soviet Union, it was not expressly forbidden to speak Ukrainian. Nowicky often used Ukrainian so that students from less educated backgrounds, who knew little Russian, could follow his lessons. But now politics gave him a four-year break.

Not for the first time, Nowicky proved his incredible endurance. Once he got his teeth into something, he never let go. As he was turned down for every other teaching job on the grounds that he was no longer to be trusted to speak in front of young people he quoted the law which said that the Ukrainian language was indeed allowed in the Soviet Union and that he therefore had the right to teach in that language. Ukrainians were secretly longing to become independent and, despite all obstacles, would not give up their language.

Nowicky began to be a thorn in the side of the authorities. And this time, also the KGB. At first his efforts were in vain. However, because he did not give up, the KGB began to harass his father. For Nowicky this was too much.

He traveled to Moscow to inform the head of the KGB, Yuri Andropov, of these injustices personally. After checking in to a small hotel in the capital, he went to the headquarters of the KGB close to the notorious Lubyanka. He told the guards that he had to speak to Andropov personally.

‘On what business?’

‘I will tell Andropov myself,’ said Nowicky.

‘If we don’t know what it’s about, you can’t make an appointment with him.’

‘When a Soviet citizen has something very important to say to the head of the KGB he ought to be allowed to say it,’ answered Nowicky.

He was accompanied to the door. He left his name and the address of the hotel.

Next day he appeared again.

The boss was not there.

Nowicky would wait.

‘What’s it about?’

‘I will tell him personally.’

Next day he was there again.

The boss is away on business.

Nowicky would wait.

This scene was repeated for twenty-seven days. On the twenty-eighth day a letter was waiting for him at his hotel. He should make himself ready to be picked up at ten o'clock. On the dot of ten a big black KGB car arrived in front of the door and took him to the Lubyanka.

And then he was standing in front of Andropov to say something ‘very important’ to him - that his subordinates were not obeying the law, that they had suspended Nowicky without good reason. His father had even been threatened, without any justification, by Andropov's own people.

Suddenly Andropov stood up, his face red, and banged on the table with his fist. Nowicky was also overcome with anger and banged on the table. He protested against being punished without reason. ‘I'm a human being, just like you are!’

The head of the KGB calmed down. Glancing at his watch, Nowicky got up to go.

‘Stay here,’ Andropov barked at him.

‘I asked you for three minutes and the three minutes are up. I had to wait twenty-eight days for these three minutes.’ Nowicky turned to the door and went out. Andropov called him back but he continued on his way. In the outer office Andropov's staff were talking excitedly but Nowicky remained unflustered and left the building in which he had stood up to the most powerful man in the Soviet Union.

Back in Lvov, he was told that after four years he had been rehabilitated and even that some people who had reported him, including fellow teachers, had b een punished.

However, what sounds like a success story, nevertheless cost several years and very much in energy and effort. Even today, when Nowicky talks about these times, there are almost tears in his eyes, so strong are the memories.

The minor government officials in Lvov had not reckoned with his tenacity. They were later also to discover that they should not underestimate his perseverance.

Nowicky did of course use these apparently lost years for other purposes. With a group of scientists from the medical faculty in Lvov, he began working on the development of a treatment for cancer. This was triggered by his brother being diagnosed with testicular cancer. Nowicky recalled that in his country, herb women had always used greater celandine against cancer and had reported cases in which skin cancer had been cured through the long and repeated application of the milk of Chelidonium majus L. (greater celandine), whose popular name in his language was ‘wart herb’.

Nowicky discovered that a young assistant doctor in Ivano-Frankivsk (previously called Stanislav) was working with greater celandine and had achieved some interesting results with some patients and also with animals. The doctor, Anatoli Ivanovich Potopalsky was producing an injection solution from greater celandine and Thiotepa, which he called ‘Amitosin’.

At first, the doctor denied having such a drug but Nowicky was not willing to leave empty-handed.

‘I know that you have a drug. If you don't give it to me, I'll break into the institute,’ he threatened. ‘I only need the extract.’

‘Who will inject it?’ asked the doctor.

‘I will,’ said Nowicky emphatically.

‘Can you do it?’

‘I'll learn.’

He then learnt how to give injections by practicing on apples. However, it was not so easy to give his brother intramuscular injections. He was in a hospital ward surrounded by other patients. With the help of a friend who stood guard, Nowicky gave his brother injections in the toilet.

The patient went into a high fever, up to forty degrees. However, his condition improved. Nowicky took his brother home and continued the series of injections for two months. When it then appeared that the tumour had disappeared, he took his brother to Lvov and from then on dedicated himself to the yellow milk of Chelidonium majus L., greater celandine, an ordinary plant with yellow flowers which grows on walls and wherever it is not weeded out.

Nowicky was by no means the first person to investigate the milk of this plant. It had been known for a long time that it was made up mainly of alkaloids, basic nitrogen compounds from which 32 different alkaloids have so far been isolated. Some have been found to be cytotoxic, which means that they damage cells. Cancer researchers were very interested in these, and with good reason, but of course without coming up with any special results. Other alkaloids in the plant were ignored.

Nowicky studied case reports from natural medicine. He noticed that whenever cures were reported it was always when the milk of greater celandine was used from plants which had been picked in winter. The proportions of the individual alkaloids, their quantity and quality, depends on the seasons. In winter the plant contains some alkaloids which almost disappear in summer. Nowicky concentrated his research on a group of eight of these winter alkaloids.

However, it would not be possible for him to carry out this research in Lvov and at this time he decided to emigrate to Vienna.

As a Ulan, his father had fought in the army of the former Hapsburg monarchy and had told stories painting Austria and Vienna in glowing colours, so that without any idea about what really awaited him the son staked everything on being allowed to emigrate. In the former Soviet Union this was an almost hopeless cause. Nowicky's thick skin and tenacity were required once again.

In 1956, Nowicky had worked as an interpreter for Polish at an international youth festival in Moscow. There he had met a woman from Vienna named Anna who worked at the Atlas publishing house. They had become friends and had later kept in touch. Nowicky suggested that they went on holiday together to the Black Sea resort of Soshi. There he asked her to help him emigrate. The only possible way to do this was by getting married. Anna agreed and it was then left to Nowicky to fight for permission to leave the country in order to get married.

Not unexpectedly, this was at first refused. He wrote a total of 380 complaints to various authorities. Once again the KGB became interested and summoned him for questioning - even with his mother. The official wanted to force her to use her influence over her son.

‘Do you have children?’ she asked him.

‘Yes, three.’

‘And do they do what you tell them to do?’ she asked.

A shrug of the shoulders was the answer.

Finally, the military became involved and Nowicky had to submit to questioning by a general.

‘Why can't you marry in Lvov?’ he asked.

Nowicky insisted that he must get married in Vienna and asked the general how his wedding had been.

Completely normal, he said. He had met his wife-to-be in Siberia during the war and later gone back to her home village and married her there in Siberia.

‘Exactly,’ said Nowicky, ‘Cows may be brought to a bull but a man goes to the bride's village for their wedding.’

However, all this inventiveness would have been useless if Anna had not at the same time set all wheels in motion in Vienna. She did what many people did at that time in cases which appeared hopeless, she turned to the Chancellor of Austria, Bruno Kreisky. His help was decisive and in 1974 Nowicky was finally allowed to emigrate to Vienna, the city from which he expected so much and which was later to disappoint him so bitterly.