Ralph W. Moss

Biographical Statement

Ralph W. Moss, Ph.D. is a science writer who has spent more than twenty years investigating
and writing about cancer issues. In 1984 he completed a documentary film titled, A Special Gift
about Albert Szent-Gybrgyi's work, and in 1988 he published a full-length biography of Szent-
Gyorgyi, Free Radical: Albert Szent-Gyiirgyi and the Battle over Vitamin C. Dr. Moss also has
written several other books, including Cancer Therapy, Questioning Chemotherapy, and The
Cancer Industry; an award-winning PBS documentary, The Cancer War; and the 1994 Yearbook
article on alternative medicine for The Encyclopedia Britannica.

Formerly the assistant director of public affairs at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center,
Dr. Moss currently is director of The Moss Reports for cancer patients. He was a founding
advisor to the National Institutes of Health's Office of Alternative Medicine, and is presently
scientific advisor to the Rosenthal Center of Columbia University and the University of Texas
School of Public Health. He is also a member of the advisory board of the medical journal
Alternative Therapies in Health and Medicine. In 1997, he was chosen as scientific advisor and
honorary member of the German Oncology Society, the first American so honored in over 20
years.

Interview Synopsis

Dr. Moss recounts the circumstances of his first meeting with Albert Szent-Gyorgyi in 1980,
which stemmed from their shared interest in cancer research. This interest led to Dr. Moss's
production of a film documentary, A Special Gif (Pacific Street Films), and a biography of the
Nobel prize-winner, Szent-Gyorgyi. As Szent-Gyorgyi's biographer, Dr. Moss traveled to
locations in Europe and the United States to interview his subject's relatives and colleagues.
This interview recapitulates Dr. Moss's unfolding insights into Szent-Gyiirgyi's life and work,
including some of the controversies surrounding the discovery of Vitamin C. Dr. Moss also
describes his own and Szent-Gyorgyi's involvement with the National Foundation for Cancer
Research [NFCR], as well as the novel approaches to research that were the essence of Szent-
Gyiirgyi's "special gift." Lastly, Dr. Moss offers an assessment of Szent-Gyorgyi's
contributions during a long and very active life, not only to cancer research but also to biological
science.


     National Library of Medicine
    Interview with Ralph W. Moss
Conducted on November 4,2004, by Adrian Kinnane

AK:  I'm speaking with Dr. Ralph W. Moss, who completed a documentary film on Albert

   Szent-Gybrgyi titled "A Special Gift," which premiered in Washington, DC in 1984 and

   who then wrote a biography of Dr. Szent-Gyorgyi titled, "Free Radical, Albert Szent-

   Gyorgyi and the Battle Over Vitamin C," which was published in 1988. Dr. Moss has

   written extensively on the subject of cancer research and cancer treatments. Now, Dr.

   Moss, the subject of a relationship between a biographer and his subject is always an

   interesting one and in this case I think it's even more so because you actually knew and

   interviewed your subject. In other words, you weren't just relying on letters, documents

    and interviews with others.

RM: That's true.

AK:  You had a first-hand experience with your subject. Could you tell me a bit about your

   first interest in Szent-Gydrgyi?

RM:  I had an interest in the cancer field and I wrote a book called "The Cancer Syndrome"

   which came out in 1980. It's still in print. The title was changed at some point to "The

   Cancer Industry" and it dealt with unusual types of cancer treatments and how they had

   been greeted over the years.


Interview with Ralph W. Moss, November 4,2004

AK:  Laetrile, for example?

2

RM:  Laetrile and Vitamin C, but in the terms of Doctor Linus Paulings's theories about

  Vitamin C and Dr. Virginia Livingston and a few others. And it also dealt with what I

  saw as the neglect of less conventional methods, sometimes because they didn't fit in with

  a dominant paradigm of developing drugs based upon their patentability and profitability.

  And I can't say that I hadn't heard of Albert Szent-Gyorgyi; actually I had bought a book

  of his in about 1975 or `76 at a scientific meeting but I didn't include him in my book,

   "The Cancer Syndrome." And then in 1980, when the book came out, I was invited to go

  on Larry Ring's show which was at that time a radio show. I think they wanted to get

  somebody to debate me or oppose me or counter my argument and they contacted the

   National Foundation for Cancer Research.

I always suspected that they thought that they were contacting the National Cancer

Institute because they were both based in Bethesda, Maryland, and this may have been

some clerk's error. But in any case, they got Frank Salisbury, who was then the Director

of this small foundation, to come on and be the other guest on the show. So when I was

on that show, I would talk about different aspects of cancer and he would talk about

Albert Szent-Gyorgyi and I would talk about some historical development and he would

talk about Albert Szent-Gyorgyi and it was like a repetitive mantra. And he was very

much insistent that I go visit Dr. Szent-Gybrgyi in Woods Hole and I guess the more he


Interview with Ralph W. Moss, November 4,2004

3

pushed, the less inclined I was to do that. He offered to pay for my trip to go and so forth

but I wasn't inclined to do that.

A month or two later, I had an invitation to go to a meeting in London, the Third

International Congress on Cancer Prevention and Detection, and I didn't have the money

to go. I remembered this invitation that he had made to pay for my trip up to Woods

Hole, so I called him up and I told him my dilemma and I said if they would help me to

get over to London for this rather important meeting, on the way back I would stop in

Woods Hole and I would visit Szent-Gybrgyi and, of course, I'd give them a write-up on

the trip and so forth. And they very generously did that and they gave me some money-

I forget how much-to help defray the expenses of the trip, which was very, very

beneficial for me. And then on the way back, I stopped in to see Szent-Gyorgyi.

Well, as I wrote in my biography of him, it was one of those turning point moments in

my life. He came walking across this big, old-fashioned laboratory and he had an

amazing charm about him; charisma, really, and brilliant blue eyes and a very loving

expression and very interested, seemingly very interested in whatever person he was

engaging with. He was charming and he came over and gave me a big handshake or

embrace and that's where it started. As I said, it was like love at first sight. He was a

hard person to resist and, of course, for me it was an amazing thing because he agreed

with me philosophically about the poor state of the war on cancer and how badly things

were going and the need for rethinking and for really new, radically new thinking in the


Interview with RalDh W. Moss. November 4.2004                          4

cancer war and, of course, I knew a lot of people who felt that way, but not many of them

were Nobel Laureates. Pauling, of course, was and he interestingly also was involved

with Vitamin C. But by and large, some of the people in the Laetrile movement had zero

credibility in scientific circles, so whatever they said didn't matter from the point of view

of the medical establishment, but here was a man who was still active. He was elderly

but he was still active, scientifically.

He had made great discoveries that no one could gainsay and he was more or less saying

the same things that I was saying, so I saw him as a very important and powerful ally in

the battle that I was engaged in at that time. And I wrote an article about him at that time

for the Saturday Evening Post, which was kind of inclined towards some non-

conventional thinking in medical matters and it was well received. After that, I did some

other articles about Foundation scientists. I went up to Boston to visit Harold Dvorak

who I guess is credited with being one of the discoverers of apoptosis and a very

important cancer researcher at Harvard and Beth Israel Deaconess hospital. So this

connection gave me, as a science writer, access to a great many interesting people in the

field. In `82 I spent some time in Paris with other scientists who were affiliated with

NFCR so it became a closer and closer relationship. So it was only a logical step that at a

certain point, with Pacific Street Films, I would undertake to do this film on Szent-

Gyorgyi and then to do the biography.

FW:  How did Szent-Gybrgyi himself feel about your writing his biography?


Interview with Ralph W. Moss, November 4,2004                        5

RM:  Well, he basically felt good about it but I think his hesitation was that I needed to get

   financial support from the Foundation in order to do this because I didn't have any money

   and it was not a book that was likely to make much money, and in fact it never did. I

   think he felt a little bit resentful at times of the fact that I was asking for money to do it.

   He felt that it should be done purely out of love and interest and devotion, which would

   have been nice, but in the real world, you know, that couldn't happen. There was just no

   way that I could do that. That only came up once and I think he sort of got over it but it

   put a little bit of a strain, you know, because he was very idealistic, although he managed

   always to take care of his own financial needs. But, in general, his thinking very much

   tended towards idealism, and I think that he would have liked somebody whose sole

   motivation for this was just the love of his work and the love of what he was doing. And

    I had that. I had a strong feeling of love for him and of interest in his work but I also had

   a family to support and I needed to be funded in order to do the study.

AK:  Did he have some notion that if the biography were funded, it would a different work

    than if it were not?

RM:  I don't know if that was it. In retrospect, there were tensions between him and the

   Foundation that I wasn't aware of and that only emerged in the last year or two of his

    life.

AK: I see.


Interview with Ralph W. Moss, November 4,2004                        6

RM:  He may have felt, and I'm speculating, that the fact that the Foundation was paying for it,

   it might have distorted things.

AK: I see.

FM:  As it turned out, that didn't happen. Quite the opposite. But that may have been part of

   his thinking.

AK:  He died in October of 1986 shortly before the biography was printed.

RM: Right.

AK:  Had he ever seen the manuscript?

RM:  He did. He saw it, He saw an earlier draft and he approved of it. And then he was sent a

   copy of the finished book, but by that time . . .

AK:  And this would, of course, been absent the sections that were written after his death.

RM:  Yes, of course. It was a draft, but I then added in the other sections about his death.

  Everything fell apart at the end in terms of his relationship with the Foundation, but he

  did see it. He did express his thanks and his praise to me, especially after I took my trip


Interview with Ralph W. Moss, November 4,2004                         7

to Hungary in `84. He was quite amazed at the amount of material that I had managed to

dig up and the fact that I had contacted some of the key people and so forth. I also

managed to do some work in the National Archives which was very amazing because it

really did confirm some of the more outlandish statements that he had made to me.

In general, I must say that I did some very good detective work in the course of the book

and a lot of it was based upon things he had said, and also a desire to please him. I think

that was a big motivation for me, almost a paternal grandfatherly thing that I wanted to

please him and there were a couple of points that he was quite interested in making in the

book. One of them was that he wanted me to go into this question of the priority in the

discovery of Vitamin C and to be able to substantiate his contention, which of course

many people agreed with and history agreed with, that he had priority in terms of the

discovery. But there were doubters about that and there always was kind of a shadow

hanging over him about his relationship with Dr. King in the United States and whether

or not Dr. King had, in fact, a better claim on priority of discovery than Szent-Gy6rgyi

did. And this remained a live issue, believe it or not, for a very long time for reasons we

could go into.

The other point that he wanted me to get into was the priority of discovery for actin and

myosin. He had formed a kind of obsession almost with trying to deny Bruno Straub

priority for that discovery. There was no question that it took place in Szent-Gyiirgyi's

laboratory. It was considered, and I'm sure most people would agree, that it was enough


Interview with Ralph W. Moss, November 4,2004                         8

of a great discovery that Szent-Gyorgyi might have won a second Nobel Prize for that

discovery if he didn't already have one in Physiology and Medicine. But late in life,

Szent-Gyorgyi wanted to deny credit for that to Bruno Straub. He had another candidate

in mind, a woman who had worked in the laboratory, and I went over there and

interviewed her and I spent quite a bit of time with Straub.

AK:  This is Ilona Banga?

RM: Exactly. I spoke, of course, to many, many other people, many Hungarian scientists and
  people who were there at the time and so forth. But I came to the conclusion that this
  was entirely wrong. Banga was basically the only one who supported that view, but
  nobody else who was present or involved shared that view, and Straub made a very
  convincing case in terms of facts and chronology for the discovery. What was behind
  this was that Straub had stayed in Hungary when Szent-Gyorgyi had left. Straub's wife
  was a Communist and though he was not, as far as I know, an open Communist or
  Communist party member, he was very close with the regime as a kind of fellow traveler
  and had profited from that and benefited and had become the Vice-Chairman of the
  Hungarian Academy of Sciences with the possibility of becoming the Chairman of this

   Academy.

When I got to Hungary, Straub sort of took me in hand and we traveled down to Szeged
together to visit the laboratory where Szent-Gyorgyi had discovered Vitamin C, so I had


Interview with Ralph W. Moss, November 4,2004                         9

a lot of opportunities to talk to Straub. Just as a footnote, when I got to the states, Straub

was going to help me to get the book translated into Hungarian. He called me. He was

in New Jersey in about, oh, it must have been `89 and we had a nice chat. I was living in

Manhattan and I invited him to come over to my house and he said he couldn't; he was

with his daughter in New Jersey. His daughter I think taught at Columbia and lived in

Jersey, and so we had a very pleasant chat and that was it. Straub told me "They made

me the President." And I said, "That's wonderful," thinking that he had finally been

made President of the Academy of Sciences. Finally, I said "Well, I'll see you the next

time I'm in Hungary" which, in fact, I did.

But about a couple of weeks later, I got a call from the Second Secretary in the Hungarian

Embassy and I mentioned to him that I had gotten a call from Bruno Straub and he said

"You got a call from Bruno Straub ?" I said, "That's right," and he said, "How'd that

happen?" I said "Well, he was in town and he called me." And he said, "Well, you

know, he's the President." I said, "Yes, the President of the Academy." But my friend at

the Embassy said, "No he's not the President of the Academy; he's the President of the

country." He was the last President of Hungary under the Communist regime. He'd been

elected based upon the fact that he wasn't a Communist and as things began to fall apart,

they had chosen him to be the President of the country.

AK: My goodness.


Interview with Ralph W. Moss, November 4,2004                        10

RM:  So, you know, it was a funny thing. And that was the basis of Szent-Gyijrgyi's dislike of

him. . .

AK: I see.

RM:  He saw him as a kind of a political operator and so forth, and he was a clever guy who

   had stayed when Szent-Gyijrgyi had, with great difficulty and inconvenience, had left the

   country based on his principled stand against the Communists.

AK:  Well, Szent-Gyiirgyi himself, as you described so well throughout the biography, was a

    man of some contradictions . . .

RM: Yes.

AK:    . . . let's take a look at the idealism that you've already touched upon in several contexts.

   I'll go to the National Foundation for Cancer Research and Franklin and Tamara

   Salisbury just as a context for that. On page 221 of your biography, you said "From the

   start, this peculiar partnership of Salisbury and Szent-Gy&gyi was a combination of high

   idealism and hard-nosed practicality." I think you were referring there to the idealism of

   Szent-Gy6rgyi and the practicality of Salisbury.

RM: Yes.


Interview with RaiDh W. Moss. November 4.2004                        11

AK:  To continue, "Albert's friends worried that he was being used. If so, then Frank's friends

   might have worried as well." Tell me a bit more about that, because we have Albert's

   notion of idealism but there's also an idea that Albert himself is not above a certain

   amount of manipulation.

FUM:  Right. I mean, Albert had to be concerned about money and I'm not saying Frank was the

   devil-but Albert would have dealt with the devil if it meant getting funding for his

   research. At the core of it was idealism in that he would do anything to do research and

   to continue to do his research but he had to know that his days of getting NIH grants were

   over-NC1 [National Cancer Institute] grants, especially. And even Nobel Laureates,

   once they get past a certain age, they're no longer so marketable, and there was a limit to

   what he could expect from society but he wanted to go on working. So they set up this

   operation and it was based upon a kind of sweepstakes or, you know, a direct mail

   campaign.

People were offered some sort of monetary prize if they joined. I guess they were

sweepstakes-I'm not sure exactly if that's the correct term, but some people saw this as

kind of a sleazy thing and they were going up directly against the NCI. It was a kind of

privatization in a very early form. The war on cancer had barely come into existence and

already people were attacking it as a big government bureaucracy. Going into the private

sector is funny because, you know, Albert was always very left-wing in his views, and

Frank was, I would say, probably the opposite. Frank was very much the business-the


Interview with Ralph W. Moss, November 4,2004                       12

   Republican type-and Albert was anti-war and sort of a Social Democrat in his attitudes.

   So it was an odd couple, an odd combination.

And then again, Albert's theories were very hard to understand. It wasn't clear exactly

what he was saying or promising or what he was up to, really, and I don't think Frank

ever really understood them. But he saw the opportunity and he marketed Albert quite

successfully. At one point, the Foundation really was booming at a time when there was

mass disaffection from the official "War on Cancer." Money was just rolling in.

AK: Yes.

RM:  It was all done in Albert's name but they couldn't control Albert, and as it turned out, it

   led to a big blow up between them. But Albert was a clever guy and he always managed

   somehow, whether it was with the NIH or with Armour or with the Salisburys, to land on

  his feet and to get the funding that he needed. And he had, as I say, this incredible charm

   and once he had the Nobel Prize, of course, that made him a very valuable commodity for

   a lot of people. There were a lot of Hungarian scientists who were kind of left over from

   the old days, and that formed the core [at the Foundation]. Maybe I'm being unkind, but,

   you know, there were still people whose reputations were formed by the fact that they

    were students of this famous Nobel Laureate at a time when Nobel Laureates were

   scarcer than they are today. And of course his achievements were considerable.


Interview with Ralph W. Moss, November 4,2004                       13

AK:  Yes. Again, not to go into the NFCR for its own sake, but to use that as a context for

   some of these other issues, in your biography, Free Radical, you mentioned Constance

   Holden's February 9, 1979, article in Science titled "Albert Szent-Gyorgyi: Electrons and

   Cancer." This article described a variety of approaches that various NFCR-funded

laboratories around the world were taking towards cancer research.

RM: Right,

AK:  And people should know that the NFCR was an institute without walls. It set up the

   laboratories-funded laboratories around the world, but these NFCR-funded labs were

  not necessarily following Szent-Gyiirgyi's bio-electronic ideas and furthermore, by and

   large, they were run by traditionally trained mainstream scientists and by no means an

   eccentric brotherhood devoted to a guru.

RM: Right.

AK:  And the difference, said Holden, was one of style-the Americans' cautious data-

  grounded approach versus the more intuitive approaches of Europeans.

RM: Yes.


Interview with Ralph W. Moss, November 4,2004                        14

AK:  And I suppose that might have been true of this earlier group that you're talking about,

mostly European trained scientists who were familiar with Szent-GyOrgyi and his work.

RM: Yes.

AK:  So, okay, so there's this problem of style, one that Szent-Gyargyi himself referred to as a

   dichotomy of Apollonian versus Dionysian.

RM: Yes.

AK:  But you mentioned another point in your book, and that is competition for funding.

RM:  Right, and I think Holden brought that up in her article. And the ACS, American Cancer

   Society, had explicitly said they're competing with us for funds. So there was some

   strong antagonism there just based on that. But what happened was that the NFCR

   became more and more respectable because they felt they couldn't survive, given some of

   the antagonistic press reports that had come out about them. There was a famous

   instance where they sued . . .

AK: Newsweek?

RM:  . . . Newsweek.


Interview with Ralph W. Moss, November 4,2004                        15

AK:  Yes, the Jane Bryant Quinn article.

RM: Which was devastating to them. Mrs. Salisbury is still alive, I believe, and the son runs

  the Foundation. But I think that that experience--they were the sort of people who

  wanted to be perceived as very respectable, as most of us do, and they were pretty

  horrified at having their friends see them paraded in this way.

AK: Sure.

RM:

And they started to restructure things for the maximum amount of respectability and
acceptability. Their niche turned out to be basic research. They would support basic
research, which was one of Albert's beliefs also. But with every year that went by, it

became less and less concerned with his core concepts, the electronic dimension of
cancer and so forth, and got watered down increasingly. They did attract some very
eminent people and I look occasionally at their website and I've actually spoken to Frank,
Jr., the son who runs the Foundation, within the last year and there's no question that this
is all, you know, important research. It's now going on in a lot of very fine laboratories.

They've chosen well and I'm sure that these laboratories all appreciate the financial
support for basic research, which is the hardest thing to get public support for. People
don't really understand what it is and you can almost never draw a line between it and


Interview with Ralph W. Moss, November 4,2004                        16

practical results, which is what the public usually wants to fund, something that's going

to mean something now or at least tomorrow. So, I think that when they came with

money to fund fairly well-known and important scientists, people decided to go ahead

and take the money even though there was a risk involved because at one point it had

looked like it was a very kind of disreputable thing and had the anger of the media and

the ACS which is so influential. But as each year went by, it became less and less to do

with Szent-Gy8rgyi until finally he was almost pushed out of the picture, I would say.

AK: Yes.

RM:  And I don't see, by the way, I may be wrong, but the last time I looked, I didn't see any-

   maybe there was a passing mention of him at the website, but I'm not even sure of that. I

   think they may have completely severed any public identification with him.

AK:  Well to a layman, of course, these intramural research disputes are often quite confusing

   because all of the ideas appear to have at least some surface credibility, while the experts

   are denouncing each other in the strongest terms.

RM:  Right. And often it's just a mask for financial interests.


Interview with Ralph W. Moss, November 4,2004                        17

AK:  Now I had the impression Albert Szent-Gyorgyi became something of a polarizing figure

   in this intramural scientific debate. He sort of lined people up very much against him or

   very much for him.

RM:  Yes, I think, if I'm not mistaken, that the core group, the Europeans if you want to call it

  that, plus some of the Woods Hole people, owed their careers and livelihood and

  everything else to him and they were personally loyal to him. The other group were the

  people who would have been just as happy if he slowly, quietly disappeared off the scene

  or if he just let himself become a figurehead. They didn't want him putting forward his

   ideas anymore. They felt that he was way over the hill and that if they could use him as

  sort of a fundraising tool, that was fine but that he really represented a kind of science

   that was just of historical interest.

AK: Yes.

RM: Nothing to do with modern science at all. And of course, I think in his heart of hearts, he

  really wanted to be in on finding a cure for cancer, the Holy Grail, you know? And he

  took it seriously in a way that people used to take such things seriously. The other people

  were more modern in the sense that they worked on a little piece of the pile. Nobody

  works on the whole pile. To do so makes you almost defacto a crank or a quack, you

    know?


Interview with Ralph W. Moss, November 4,2004

AK: Yes.

18

RM:  Everybody works on their little area, their little piece, and nobody seems to have the

   overview of how the whole puzzle could be solved.

AK:  Which is what he was developing.

RM:  Right. As many people in alternative medicine do. I mean, that's sort of the hallmark of

   [Otto] Warburg, who was a great hero in some ways, not personally, but scientifically, for

   Szent-Gyorgyi. That's a very 1930ish, 1940ish kind of way of thinking and of working.

AK:  This is a tough thing to tease out, but I'd like to get your thoughts on it. How much of his

   motivation to get involved in cancer research had to do with the death of his wife, Marta,

   and his daughter, too, of cancer?

RM:  Oh, I have no doubt. I mean, I wrote this in my article for the Saturday Evening Post

   where I compared him to St. George, which is what his name means, slaying the dragon

   of cancer. Oh, I think it was a very big part of his motivation, was to get even with the

   dragon that had killed his wife and his daughter.

AK:  Did he ever say that to you?


Interview with Ralph W. Moss, November 4,2004

RiVl:  Yes. Not in so many words.

19

AK:  Right, but you knew that that's how he felt?

RM:  Oh, yeah. Oh, definitely. It was a personal, kind of a Moby Dick thing with him, you

   know. It was partially that. It also was partially the fact that he felt that he really had

   something to contribute. He had been intrigued by this electronic dimension back in

   1940 because I think he felt he had no where to go scientifically once he had plumbed the

   depths of biochemistry. Everything kept moving to a lower and lower dimension, so it

   was almost this quixotic quest for finding the secret of life, the true-where things really

   were happening. And he just intuitively felt that it was at this electronic dimension,

   although, it never was quite clear to me exactly what he meant by that, but it certainly

   was prophetic in the sense that he was way ahead of the pack in terms of looking at free

   radicals, which is the reason for the punning title of my biography, and anticipated a lot

   of other developments in cancer.

AK:  Well, let me ask you a little bit about that because you mentioned that there were these

  mixed views about the quality of his research or the ultimate productivity or usefulness of

   his line of thinking about it, with people lining up on one side and sort of saying, "Well,

   look, you're very, very old. You did a great thing. Now, please, either be a figurehead or

    stand aside."


Interview with RalDh W. Moss. November 4.2004                        20

RM: Uh huh.

AK:  In fact, you know, one reviewer of the biography that you summarized Albert's thinking

   as science-fiction, this business of alpha and beta [states] and the transformations from

   one to the other. On the other hand, there's this sort of intuitive, to a layperson anyway,

   this intuitive reality of bio-electronic theory. Well, of course things are made up of

   molecules and atoms. Of course there are electrons involved, you know?

RM: Right.

AK:  From the perspective of 2004, how would you sum up his contribution? How is it

   currently seen ? How do you see it?

RM:  Well, I'm going to be reviewing all this for a lecture that I'm intending to give next year,

   so I think I'll have a better chance to say then, I haven't seen that it has really borne proof

  or gone very far since his death even in non-conventional circles. But on the other hand,

  I was very surprised at the Cancer Control Society Meeting which is a big meeting of

   alternative practitioners, a doctor got up and gave a lecture this year on Albert Szent-

  Gyiirgyi's theories and treatments for cancer. Extraordinary. He knew nothing about my

   book, which should say something about him, but he was dealing entirely with Szent-

   Gyorgyi's earlier writings, like from the 1960s.


Interview with Ralph W. Moss, November 4,2004

AK: Right.

21

RM:  And sort of proposing and almost, you could say, marketing, some of these concepts and

  I learned a lot by listening to this because I hadn't realized that at one point this had

   actually gotten to the point of almost proposing a cancer treatment based on the idea.

  Albert himself never did so, but one could derive a belief from his writings that

   methylglyoxal is an effective treatment for cancer.

So a lot of this goes back to . . . it's a very strange story really, that he had come upon this

molecule, methylglyoxal and decided that it was "retine," I think he called it the force

that restrains the growth of cancer cells, and it turned out that another doctor in the

United States named William Koch, had proposed the same thing in the 1920s and the

1930s and it had been a very big fight along the lines of Krebiozin or Laetrile with the

AMA, which had more or less denounced him as a quack even though he was a M.D.,

Ph.D. who had a professorship at a university in Michigan and eventually was forced out

of the country and it was a big scandal.

And Szent-Gybrgyi had sort of wandered into this same field and same substance and

actually it's still kicking around in alternative medicine circles because there was a small,

not very good, paper published about two years ago in an Indian medical journal,

basically, again, rediscovering methylglyoxal. I don't think that that paper was derived

from either Szent-Gydrgyi's work or Koch's work. So there may be, in that sense, that


Interview with Ralph W. Moss, November 4,2004                        22

something derived from his treatment may still be alive, for better or worse, in the world,

and there is sort of a center, I think, that's been set up in India to treat people with this

especially non-toxic substance. But on the deeper level, I don't know what the practical

import is to say that cancer is a disease on the electronic level unless you can influence

that some how and use that.

AK: Okay.

RM:  Cancel1 is another alternative treatment whose theories were very similar to some of

   Szent-Gyiirgyi's theories, although it didn't ever attribute him directly. But I'm not sure.

   I mean, what does it mean? Would electrical treatments fall into the same category? I

   think not because I think most of the electrical treatments are based upon basically

   electrocuting the tumor. They're non-ionizing radiation treatments, and that's alive and

   kicking in China, very much so, but that's just basically frying the cancer. It's not

   influencing cancer on the, you know, atomic level.

AK:  Well, perhaps when establishment science, if we can use that term without explaining it is

   struggling with an issue and hasn't come up with answers, there's a romantic appeal, if not

   a very strong emotional appeal in the idea of the genius who has been denounced as a

   quack but who is eventually vindicated. That's a great story.


Interview with Ralph W. Moss, November 4,2004                        23

RM:  It is. Stories and myths, that's how we make sense of the world whether we're scientists

  or artists. I think that the story is always a very compelling part of anything and that's

  whether it's Judah Folkman's story, or Steve Rosenberg's story or anybody's story. It's the

  story that is so important and Szent-Gyorgyi had a great story. And not only are there

  many stories of the persecuted lone genius, but his was especially compelling because he

  had the bona fides, you know. He had already won the Nobel Prize so he was struggling

  against the prejudice against a foreigner, the prejudice against old age, and he was a kind

  of a Promethean figure in some ways. But unless it turns out that methylglyoxal actually

  had some validity to it, I don't really see that the cancer work resulted in very much in the

  way of permanent effect. Peter Gascoyne might have some thoughts on this question.

AK: Right.

RM:  He's at M. D. Anderson now and he still does some work that-just looking at his

  abstracts-it looks to me like it's still Szent-Gyorgyi influenced work.

AK:  Uh huh. Is he still there at M. D. Anderson?

RM:  I believe he is-the last I looked, he was there. But, you know, in the end, you have to

  come up with a treatment. Theory is not going to matter. What matters is the treatment,

  so what is the treatment? Szent-Gyiirgyi backed away from methylglyoxal. In fact, I

  would say I only heard the term methylglyoxal from him once or twice. He never, as


Interview with Ralph W. Moss, November 4,2004                        24

clearly as this fellow did at this Cancer Control meeting, never quite said, "That was my

treatment; that's what I believe is going to do it." And maybe he had decided that it

wasn't. In the book I do have a couple of pages on methylglyoxal. He postulated an

important biological role for methylglyoxal, but I don't think I ever did say that he

thought this was going to be a useful treatment for cancer. He seemed to have backed

away from that.

AK: Okay.

RM:  Maybe he sensed that that would really put everything to the test and also put him into a

  different category. He was just sort of a pain in the neck, you know, to the ACS and the

  other forces, but once you step up and say, "I've got an effective treatment for cancer

   outside of the norm," then, of course, you're in a different ball game entirely.

AK: Right.

RM:  And he never was in that.

AK:  In the introduction to your bio, you wrote "No man is a hero to his valet or his

   biographer, I suspect." You went through some changes in your voyage through the life

   of Albert Szent-Gyorgyi.


Interview with Ralph W. Moss, November 4,2004

RM: Yes.

25

AK:  What did you discover about the man that caused you to say that?

RIM:  Of course, it was a long time ago, but I think some of the things were related to the fact

   that he was sort of vindictive with Bruno Straub. That was one of the issues. Not that I

  had such a strong personal bond to Straub, but I became convinced that this was a very

  petty, vindictive attempt to rewrite history and take away-and here, Szent-Gyorgyi had

  so much in the way of scientific credibility and Straub's one claim to fame in life was his

  discovery of actin and myosin, which was a major thing. But at the last moment to try to

   change history like that was kind of small-minded, I thought.

AK:  Because he disagreed with his politics?

RM:  Right. And was jealous of him.

AK:  Because he had become President of Hungary?

RM:  Well, he hadn't at that point become President, but he had a nice, comfortable life and

  was well regarded in Hungary. So I think that was part of what led me to say that.


Interview with Ralph W. Moss, November 4,2004                       26

AK:  Dr. Moss, let me ask you one more question here because we're getting pretty close to the

   end. In your analysis, in your description of Szent-Gyorgyi, there's a strong theme of

   dichotomies, the artist versus the scientist, intuition versus reason, ivory tower

   detachment in the laboratory versus manning the barricades with many of his political

   views. A complex character, and you conclude, "if something of Albert Szent-Gyorgyi is

   remembered, it will probably be his intuitive, artistic approach to science."

RM: Right.

AK:  So that it's really his style, would you stand by that still?

RM:  Yes. Oh, definitely. Definitely . I think you can get good laboratory procedures out of a

   lot of people. He once said to me, and I don't remember even if I put this in the book-1

   may have, but he said "You know, I never really had a scientific education. I cheated my

   way through medical school," which I don't believe, but he said that. He said "I shot

   myself in the arm to get out of the Army." He said, "I got a Ph.D. from Cambridge, but I

   hardly ever saw Professor Hopkins. It really wasn't a real Ph.D. I didn't really have the

   right classes. I just wrote the dissertation and I can hardly add a column of figures." He

   said "And yet I made some of the greatest discoveries in medicine in the twentieth

   century. Why do you think that is?"


Interview with Ralph W. Moss, November 4,2004                        27

  And he gives back a twinkle in his eye, you know. And that was a wonderful thing to

  hear because, you know, it was the intuition, to ask the right question, to hear the voice

of nature, which is a romantic notion and very few scientists would ever dare say

anything like that today, but I still think it's true that just like with a great artist, there has

to be something at the subconscious level or the unconscious taking place that leads to

asking the right question and being able to hear the answer-within all the background

noise. And he had that gift. I'm sure other people have the gift too, but it's become

probably a career killer to admit to it until you're old and nobody can hurt you. But I

imagine it's still the case.

AK:  Hence, the title of the film, "A Special Gift."

RM:  Yes. And he could hear the voice of nature, very low, he said. It's like hunting. You go

  out and you wait for something to jump up, and this whole business of cutting the apple

  and seeing it turning brown and thinking "That's interesting. Why did that happen?" You      *

know, things we took for granted. We take for granted, every day, what we're looking at,

and to be able to look at that with a fresh eye. He would take the earliest experiments,

and he'd rework his way through the entire history of the scientific question. He would

take the earliest experiment that was done and he'd reproduce that experiment. And there

might be a gap of a second or two between adding something and the reaction. Well,

what causes that gap of time ? And he would be able to identify something. So it's a


Interview with Ralph W. Moss, November 4,2004                        28

great sensitivity, an awareness, which I think is almost like-1 don't want to say mystical

state, but it's a state of hyperawareness that's similar to what artists have.

AK:  Yes. Well, I can't imagine a life more suited to exemplifying this tension that you're

   describing between the caution necessary for successful scientific work and the creative

   insights that lie behind that work.

RM: Right.

AK:  And you did a wonderful job of bringing it out in your biography, I must say.

RM: Thank you.

AK:  That was a very, very entertaining book and thoroughly researched, well written. I

   enjoyed it-every bit.

RM:  Thank you so much. It's in print in Hungary, by the way, now.

AK:  In Hungarian? That's great.

RM:  It just went through the first printing and they're doing a second printing.

AK: Wonderful.


Interview with Ralph W. Moss, November 4,2004

RM: Yes.

29

AK:  Well, thank you so much for your time this morning. It's been a very interesting

    interview.

RM: Thank you. My pleasure.

[End of Interview]


Interview with Ralph W. Moss, November 4,2004                       30

Index

"Albert Szent-Gyorgyi Electrons and Cancer," article ................................................................. 13
A Special Gift, documentary ................................................................................................. 1,4,27
Academy of Sciences .................................................................................................................. 899
Actin .......................................................................................................................................... 7,25
American Cancer Society ................................................................................................. 14, 16,24
American Medical Association ..................................................................................................... 21
Anderson ....................................................................................................................................... 23
Banga, Ilona .................................................................................................................................... 8
Bruno Straub ............................................................................................................................. 7,25
Cancel1 .......................................................................................................................................... 22
Cancer Control Society ................................................................................................................. 20
Columbia ......................................................................................................................................... 9
Dvorak, Harold ............................................................................................................................... 4
Folkman, Judah ............................................................................................................................. 23
Free Radical, Albert Szent-Gyiirgyi and the battle over Vitamin C, biography.. ....................... 1, 4
Gascoyne, Peter ............................................................................................................................. 23
Harvard Deaconess ......................................................................................................................... 4
Holden, Constance .................................................................................................................. 13,14
Hungarian Academy of Sciences .................................................................................................... 8
Hungarian Embassy ........................................................................................................................ 9
Hungary ........................................................................................................................... 7,8,25,28
King, Larry ...................................................................................................................................... 2
Koch, William ............................................................................................................................... 21
krebiozin ....................................................................................................................................... 21
Laetrile .................................................................................................................................. 2,4,21
Livingston, Dr. Virginia .................................................................................................................. 2
methylglyoxal ......................................................................................................................... 21,23
Moss, Dr. Ralph W., Ph.D.
and biography .......................................................................................... 1, 4, 5, 6, 10, 13, 20, 28
and initial meeting with Szent-Gyiirgyi ...................................................................................... 3
and relationship with Szent-Gyorgyi .......................................................................................... 7
and view of Szent-Gyorgyi ....................................................................................................... 26
and visits to Paris ........................................................................................................................ 4
National Archives ........................................................................................................................... 7
National Cancer Institute .......................................................................................................... 2,11
National Foundation for Cancer Research .................................... 2,5,6, 10, 12, 13, 14, 15, lo-16
National Institute of Health ..................................................................................................... 11,12
Newsweek ..................................................................................................................................... 14
Nobel Prize ................................................................................................................ 4, 8, 11, 12, 23
Quinn, Jane Bryant ........................................................................................................................ 15
Rosenberg ..................................................................................................................................... 23


Interview with Ralph W. Moss, November 4,2004                        31

Salisbury, Franklin and Tamara ............................................................................. .2, 10, 11, 12, 15
Saturday Evening Post .............................................................................................................. 4, 18
Straub, Bruno .................................................................................................................... 8,9,7-10
Szeged ............................................................................................................................................. 8
Szent-Gyorgyi, Albert
and Communism ....................................................................................................................... 10
and death ..................................................................................................................................... 6
and idealism .............................................................................................................. 5, 10, 11, 17
and National Foundation for Cancer Research ............................................................. 13, lo-16
and public conceptions of research ..................................................................................... 19,20
and relationship with Bruno Straub ...................................................................................... 7-10
and relationship with Franklin Tamaritus Salisbury ........................................................... lo-16
and relationship with National Cancer Institute ........................................................................ 12
as a polarizing figure ................................................................................................................. 17
Szent-Gyorgyi, Marta ................................................................................................................... 18
The Cancer Industry, book, See "The Cancer Syndrome" "
The Cancer Syndrome, book ....................................................................................................... 192
The Third International Congress on Cancer Prevention and Detection ........................................ 3
Vitamin C ........................................................................................................................ 1,2,4,7,8
Warburg, [Otto] ............................................................................................................................. 18
Woods Hole, Massachusetts ................................................................................................. 2, 3, 17