Jewish Invention Myths: Chemotherapy
Getting back into jewish invention myths we have the claim that jews invented chemotherapy.
This is best demonstrated in the ‘MNews’ article which claims as follows:
‘Paul Ehrlich – Chemotherapy
Scientist, who worked intensively in the fields of immunology, bacteriology, chemistry, and went down in history as the founder of chemotherapy.’ (1)
This claim is supported by ‘Boulder Jewish News’. (2)
However, it suffers from the common problem with claimed jewish inventions in that whoever originated the claim didn’t properly check the background of what they were claiming.
As Vincent DeVita Jr. and Edward Chu have pointed out Paul Ehrlich didn’t actually develop ‘Chemotherapy’ as we’d understand it today – especially as related to cancer – but rather coined the term ‘Chemotherapy’ meaning the use of chemicals to treat any disease. (3) What he was describing is today termed ‘Pharmacotherapy’ not ‘Chemotherapy’ as even the ‘National Cancer Institute’ implies. (4)
The first person to come up with the idea of ‘Chemotherapy’ and test its application as we’d understand it today was George Clowes of Roswell Park Memorial Institute in Buffalo, New York in the 1910s. (5)
This was subsequently supported by Murray Shear – who was jewish – (6) at ‘the Office of Cancer Investigations of the USPHS - a program that was later combined in 1937 with the NIH Laboratory of Pharmacology to become the National Cancer Institute’, which became the first truly organized drug screening process for cancer based upon Clowes’ work. (7)
However, radiation treatment for cancer – what we’d think of today as chemotherapy - was already in use by the time two jewish doctors at Yale University Alfred Gilman and Louis Goodman realised that nitrogen mustard compounds could be used to treat cancer and worked with non-jewish surgeon Gustaf Lindskog to trial these on a consenting Polish immigrant referred to as ‘J.D.’ in August 1942. (8) Their results were not published till 1946 due to the close link between their work and illegal gas weapons development during World War II. (9)
It is however also worth mentioning that in 1943 a non-jewish US army chemical warfare expert – Lt. Colonel Stewart Francis Alexander - independently reached the same conclusion as Gilman and Goodman had after a German air raid in Bari, Italy led to the exposure of more than 1000 people to the US transport ship John Harvey's secret cargo composed of mustard gas bombs. Dr. Stewart Francis Alexander, a lieutenant colonel who was an expert in chemical warfare, was subsequently deployed to investigate the aftermath. Autopsies of the victims suggested that profound lymphoid and myeloid suppression had occurred after exposure. In his report, Alexander theorized that since mustard gas all but ceased the division of certain types of somatic cells whose nature was to divide fast, it could also potentially be put to use in helping to suppress the division of certain types of cancerous cells. (10)
In summary then George Clowes invented ‘Chemotherapy’ not Paul Ehrlich, but Paul Ehrlich did coin the term ‘Chemotherapy’. Yet jews did play a significant role in developing modern chemotherapy but non-jews played a similarly significant and important role.
References
(1) https://mnews.world/en/news/the-great-jews-and-their-inventions
(2) https://boulderjewishnews.org/2009/an-informal-list-of-jewish-inventions-innovations-and-radical-ideas/
(3) Vincent DeVita Jr., Edward Chu, 2008, ‘A History of Cancer Chemotherapy’, Cancer Research, Vol. 68, No. 21, p. 8643
(4) https://dtp.cancer.gov/timeline/noflash/milestones/M1_earlydrugdev.htm
(5) DeVita Jr., Chu, Op. Cit., p. 8644
(6) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murray_Shear
(7) DeVita Jr., Chu, Op. Cit., pp. 8644-8645
(8) https://www.yalealumnimagazine.com/articles/3173-pioneers-in-chemotherapy
(9) DeVita Jr., Chu, Op. Cit., pp. 8645-8646
(10) Paraphrased from Jie Jack Li, 2006, ‘Laughing Gas, Viagra, and Lipitor: The Human Stories behind the Drugs We Use’, 1st Edition, Oxford University Press: New York, p. 8