In the eighteen-fifties evolution was in the air. Spencer expressed the idea, long before Darwin, in an essay on “The Development Hypothesis” (1852), and in his Principles of Psychology (1855). In 1858 Darwin and Wallace read their famous papers before the Linnaean Society; and in 1859 the Old World, as the good bishops thought, crashed to pieces with the publication of the Origin of Species. Here was no mere vague notion of evolution, of higher species evolving somehow from lower ones; but a detailed and richly documented theory of the actual mode and process of evolution “by means of natural selection, or preservation of favored races in the struggle for life.” In one decade all the world was talking about evolution. What lifted Spencer to the crest of this wave of thought was the clarity of mind which suggested the application of the evolution idea to every field of study, and the range of mind which brought almost all knowledge to pay tribute to his theory.
As mathematics had dominated philosophy in the seventeenth century, giving to the world Descartes, Hobbes, Spinoza, Leibnitz and Pascal; and as psychology had written philosophy in Berkely and Hume and Condillac and Kant; so in the nineteenth century, in Schelling and Schopenhauer, in Spencer and Nietzsche and Bergson, biology was the background of philosophic thought. In each case the epochal ideas were the piece-meal production of separate men, more ore less obscure; but the ideas are attached to the men who coordinated and clarified them, as the New World took the name of Amerigo Vespucci because he drew a map. Herbert Spencer was the Vespucci of the age of Darwin, and something of its Columbus too.
—Will Durant
The Story of Philosophy:
The Lives and Opinions of the World’s Great Philosophers
Wallach went back to Rhodesia three times for a month each to set up and monitor Operation Elephant. Initially adult male elephants were immobilized and “cold branded” to determine migration routes and territories. Two foot by one foot copper bar numbers were created and attached to two-foot long iron handles in the classical branding iron configuration. They would pick up liquid nitrogen at a rail head that had been delivered to out in the bush. The elephant was selected and immobilized and then the numbered end of the “branding iron” was placed in the ten-inch deep insulated bucket of liquid nitrogen for ten minutes, dropping the iron’s temperature to minus 400 degrees.
After the appropriate surfaces were cleaned of dust and mud, the super-cooled branding iron was then pressed against the front surface of the elephant’s ear and its hip for about two minutes. The purpose of the entire procedure was to kill the pigment cells in the elephant’s skin, and the resulting “brand” would develop in about four weeks as the pigmented skin was lost in the natural cycle of skin maintenance. In the meantime the elephant’s number was painted on the elephant’s ear, shoulder, side, and hip with a waterproof marine epoxy. To track the elephant’s movements, tourists to Wankie National Park were given a survey and asked to help with the project “Operation Elephant” by recording where the elephant was spotted. Its identification number was recorded as well as what it was doing. The public loved the participation in the project and always turned in their surveys and observation at the gate when they exited the park.
By Wallach’s third visit to Rhodesia for the continuation and expansion of Operation Elephant, the immobilization and branding process became so routine that only one ranger, Jeremy Anderson, would accompany Wallach with a shot gun just to scare off the herd if they were slow in moving away from the downed elephant.
On one particular day the now two-man team, Wallach and Anderson, immobilized a six-thousand-pound cow out of a small herd, branded her, and applied the white epoxy marine paint. After about fifteen minutes of taking measurements, blood samples, and collecting a bottle full of ticks, the antidote was administered intravenously, and the two men walked fifty yards away, squatted down, and waited for the cow to jump up and run back to the comfort of her herd.
The antidote typically took effect in thirty seconds to two minutes, but on this day thirty minutes went by. The elephant’s respiration returned to normal, but the cow just laid there giving no indication that she was remotely interested in getting up.
Wallach crossed the fifty yards, and flipped her giant African elephant ear back off her face (the ear had been left in the unnatural position covering the eye after the antidote was injected into an ear vein) and into its normal position against her neck. Immediately her dilated pupil constricted and she focused her left eye on Wallach. She lurched up on her chest, now staring at Wallach with both eyes in a squinted “death stare.”
Wallach now began to run backwards through the loose sand as fast as he could. After he had covered twenty yards, the cow got to her feet, put her head down, curled her trunk under her chin, and charged as fast as she could at Wallach.
Suddenly there was a shotgun blast! Wallach’s uniform shirt was ripped off and he felt like he had been shot with rock salt in his back. The enraged cow came to a full stop, looked at her right foot, shook her foot, then turned and ran to meet up with her herd.
Ranger Anderson had saved Wallach’s life that day by shooting the cow in the foot with number-six bird shot—the equivalent of shooting a human in the bare foot with a BB-gun—enough to get her attention, but not enough to severely injure her. Wallach’s shirt had been ripped off by the shotgun blast as he was only two yards in front of the ranger when he pulled the trigger!
While still at The Center for the Biology of Natural Systems and the St. Louis Zoo, Wallach interacted almost daily with the zoos long-time clinical veterinarian, Dr. Alfred Moller, who was in private practice in St. Louis and was on call whenever the zoo needed him. Wallach had a lot of experience in large animal immobilization and anesthesia from his Africa experience, so Dr. Moller would ask him to do the anesthesia on the larger zoo animals whenever he needed to do any procedure or surgery.
Opportunity to Write a “A National Treasure”
Dr. Moller was also the clinical veterinarian for Anheiser Busch’s famous Clydesdale beer-wagon team, and he began to take Wallach along to consult on horse problems. Moller had convinced the W.B. Saunders Publishing Company that a scientific reference book covering data of every normal physiological value and the data about disease conditions for every known animal needed to be written. W.B. Saunders is the largest and most well-respected publisher of medical, nursing, dental, and veterinary textbooks in the world, and it was considered a great victory and asset to have them as the publisher of a great book.
Originally, the book was to contain twenty-eight chapters written by twenty-eight experts from zoos and universities. It was estimated that the project would take five to eight years to complete. Each chapter of the book was to focus on a specific group or classification of animals. Everything known about each group was to be assembled in the appropriate chapter. If important data was not available, the individual assigned to that chapter was supposed to design and pursue the studies necessary to collect the necessary information.
The completed tome would be the equivalent of a modern day Noah’s Ark of health information, the most complete reference ever compiled on exotic animals, both wild free-ranging individuals and captive zoo species. All of the normal blood, urine and spinal fluid values, gestation periods, recorded longevities, known diseases, and reported causes of death (including bacterial, viral, parasites, degenerative diseases and nutritional requirements and deficiency diseases), and dietary requirements would be featured in the book. Every known anesthesia, surgical procedure, and vaccine and pharmaceutical treatment was to be included in each of the appropriate chapters. It was going to be a huge undertaking.
As Wallach was considered to be the junior member of the project, he was originally given the three chapters on insects (bees, fruit flies, and mealworms) so he immediately set to work to collect information and complete his responsibility as quickly as possible. He only knew what he had learned about the insects in zoology and entomology in agricultural school. Undaunted, he immediately did a library search for everything known about them. Within a month, Wallach was an expert on the nutrition, diseases, DNA, genetics, and the life cycles of bees, fruit flies, and meal worms. He then dutifully set about to write his assigned chapters.
In 1965 word processors and personal computers didn’t exist, so Wallach started with the standard black Underwood upright typewriter, a ream of 81/2 by 11 white bond paper, and a bottle of “White-out.” Many paragraphs and tables were typed, whited-out, cut, pasted, and repasted. Quarts of correction whiteout were employed. The mechanics of writing in those days were slow and tedious, but he was on a mission and his cup was half full, not half empty.
All of the anointed authors were invited and assembled in the Philadelphia penthouse belonging to W. B. Saunders to officially kick off the book project, and to give direction and deadlines to the contributing authors. The publisher provided a project editor, Carroll Cann, who was to be assigned to guide the project forward and keep it on the rails. Editor Cann chaired the meeting, and the assembled would-be contributors were appropriately wined and dined and given the VIP tour of the publishing facility.
Cann warned the assembled contributors that over the years some of the assembled would fall short and never finish their part of the project. Some would fall ill, some would die, some would get divorces, and some would simply quit because of the mental fatigue related to the enormity of the book project before it was completed. But Cann stated, “Finish it, we will!” They entire assemblage cheered and applauded.
Six months into the project, Wallach received a call from Moller, saying that one of the original contributors had already quit, and would Wallach please take over the project of the chapter on fish. Saying a yes, Wallach did the necessary literature research in various libraries. Within a month he was an expert on the diseases, parasites, anesthesia, environmental requirements, nutritional requirements, and the reproductive cycles of tropical fish and farmed food fish.
Every flat surface in Wallach’s house was covered with paper, reprints, journals, monographs, reference books, along with Wallach’s personal pathology data from the Center for the Biology of Natural Systems and the early drafts of chapters. Finishing his assigned chapters became an obsession that drove him day and night seven days each week.
By then there were three small Wallachs (Jessica, Jennifer, and Steve) running gleefully through the house negotiating the now six-foot tall stacks of paper that had created a rat’s warren–like maze.
Some months later, the scenario repeated itself, and Wallach was asked to write the chapter on waterfowl. The tried and true process was again repeated. Wallach did the research and collected what was known and published on the normal laboratory values, diseases, parasites, nutritional requirements, and reproduction of domestic and wild waterfowl, plus he added his own pathology and nutritional data on waterfowl. The creation of each chapter for the book was attacked in the same manner that course work was attacked in agricultural school, veterinary school, and graduate school: “If the system ain’t broke, don’t fix it!”
Curing the Arctic Foxes’ “Genetic” Birth Defects at Chicago Brookfield Zoo
About halfway through the development and production of the book, Wallach was offered the position of pathologist of the Brookfield Zoo in Chicago. It would be a jump from a fifty-acre zoo with an animal population of 2,500 animals to a 200-acre zoo with an animal population of 4,500 animals. The pay was double at the Brookfield Zoo, and the hospital and research facilities were considerably larger and more advanced. So with Perkins’ and the Center’s blessing Wallach accepted the position and moved his part of The Center for the Biology of Natural Systems to Chicago.
The real factor in Wallach’s decision to move his efforts to Chicago was the presence of five trained bottle-nosed dolphins that were displayed and performed in the 250,000 gallon salt water tank at the Brookfield zoo. Just down the road was the Lincoln Park Zoo (the zoo where Perkins had gotten his start as a zoo director and a TV icon on Zoo Parade) and the Shedd Aquarium, which displayed fresh water dolphins, a world-class fish and marine animal collection, and a complete reference library on marine mammal and fish nutrition and diseases.
Wallach arrived at the Brookfield Zoo to learn that the full-time clinical veterinarian, Weaver Williamson, had been severely mauled by a large male chimpanzee. From his first day, Wallach had to double as a clinical veterinarian as well as the pathologist.
Wallach wasn’t even totally unpacked and moved into his new hospital office yet when he was confronted by the two PhD biologists sharing the office. They asked, “Do you know anything about genetics?” With a knowing smile, Wallach responded, “I know the basics of genetics; however, I wouldn’t consider myself an expert.” In reality, Wallach was quite the expert in genetics as a result of his training in agricultural school, veterinary school, and his postdoctoral studies in comparative medicine and comparative pathology.
As the conversation progressed, they shared that they were getting ready to go to Alaska to capture several wild Arctic foxes so as to bring back “wild genes” to introduce into their pair of Arctic foxes that had bad genes. For the last five years in a row the zoo’s captive pair of zoo-born Arctic foxes had produced five smaller than normal litters with 100 percent fatal birth defects.
Arctic foxes typically produce litters of ten to fifteen kits. This pair bore litters with only three to five kits. Some of the litters were born dead, and some were born alive, but some that were alive had hydrocephalus, others were born eyeless, and some were born with devastating diaphragmatic hernias. The last litter only had three kits and they all had cleft palates.
The biologists believed that the parent foxes were from incompatible gene pools, and that the only way to solve the problem was to organize a major expedition to the Arctic to catch wild Arctic foxes and introduce “wild genes” back into the zoo’s breeding pair of foxes.
After an hour of listening to the biologist’s theories, Wallach knew that that the foxes’ problems were the result of congenital nutritional deficiencies rather than a genetic problem. Naively, Wallach finally offered, “You’re in luck: your fox problem is not a gene problem.” Looking like they had just been slapped in the face with a decomposed fish, the two biologist fired right back, “How do you know? You’re admittedly not an expert in genetics. You’ve just arrived, and you haven’t even looked at the foxes, nor have you done any tests!”
Wallach’s response was, “If there was a genetic problem the birth defects in the kits in each litter would be the same litter after litter and year after year. In your foxes’ case, each litter had different birth defects than the other litters. It is very obvious that the problem was a nutritional deficiency in the mother during early pregnancy. These are congenital birth defects, not genetic defects!” Of course, they chuckled and responded, “That’s the most absurd thing we have ever heard.”
Wallach’s next comment was to ask for the “defective” foxes to be moved to the zoo hospital for tests and observation. After all, “They wouldn’t want these poor, pitiful, genetically-defective specimens on display, would they?” They immediately ran out of the hospital, boxed up the foxes and brought them up the hill to the hospital, and officially signed them over to Wallach.
Investigating the diets of the foxes, Wallach learned that their basic diet for the last five years had been ground horse heart “sprinkled daily” with a powdered vitamin mineral mix at the discretion of the keeper. The exact amounts of vitamins and minerals delivered to the foxes were highly variable; sometimes they were given too much, and sometimes they were given too little, and sometimes they were not given any. Each day’s dose depended on how the keeper’s football team fared or whether or not he had a “bad hair day.”
Wallach went to the grocery store, bought some off-the-shelf dog food formulated for toy dogs and began to feed the pair of foxes. Four months later, they produced a normal litter of eleven kits. Within the year, Wallach inbred the mother to her sons, the father to a daughter, and brothers to sisters. If there was a genetic defect and a defective gene pool, the intense inbreeding would bring it out into the open. All of the resultant litters were healthy and normal and each had ten to fifteen kits.
There were so many Arctic foxes from two years of inbreeding that they were being shifted to every zoo building. The zoo curators developed a special display of Artic foxes that featured the various color phases, and they begged Wallach not to pull the same stunt with elephants, but the two biologists that started the whole adventure in science said nothing.
Saving Freshwater Dolphins and Solving Nutrition-Deficiency Diseases for Many Zoo Species
On day one of Wallach’s arrival, he received a call from the Shedd Aquarium, from a curator who asked if he could please come over and look at a dead freshwater dolphin. When he looked at the dolphin it was surprisingly small when compared with the bottlenosed dolphins he dealt with at the Brookfield Zoo. As soon as he opened the dolphin up he knew immediately what the problem was—the animal’s heart was enlarged. Instead of its being the size of a navel orange, it was the size of a basketball, and its thoracic and abdominal cavities were filled with gallons of a clear fluid.
On questioning the aquarium staff, Wallach learned that the dolphin hadn’t felt well for months, and they had given it antibiotic capsules in some of its food fish. Wallach learned that the aquarium procured three to five freshwater dolphins each year for the previous ten years. By the end of the year, they had all died, and they would get a new group each spring.
The dolphins were fed exclusively whole-frozen lake smelt, and as they were being fed whole fish no vitamins or minerals were being added to their diets.
Wallach determined that each year the freshwater dolphins had all died of congestive heart failure from a classic deficiency of thiamine (vitamin B1). It turns out that the flesh of lake smelt contains an enzyme called thiaminase that destroys all thiamine, and as there was no supplementation to replace the loss the congestive heart failure was inevitable. It was a perfect storm for the production of congestive heart failure.
The solution to the Shedd Aquarium’s freshwater dolphin problem was to replace the whole-frozen lake smelt diet with another thiaminase-free whole fish, and stuff the fish’s belly cavities with a multiple vitamin and mega doses of vitamin B1. The aquarium followed Wallach’s recommendations and the annual death-watch of the freshwater dolphins ended.
The work on the book continued. If there were no normal blood values available for Siberian Ibex, a type of wild goat, Wallach would enlist the help of the zoo’s curators and catch the zoo’s flock of twenty-one animals. Using his round-up skills learned on Angus, Hereford, and shorthorn calves, Wallach caught them one by one using a lariat. They were weighed, identified, and tagged for the curators, and then blood samples were taken and the results added to the book’s database. An original article was produced that was published in a peer-review journal; the data and reference was used in the book and the Brookfield Zoo got a feather in its cap for the original study that would benefit all zoos and wild animal parks that exhibited ibex.
The ibex adventure was repeated with Dahl sheep, havalinas, monkeys of all types, bears, kangaroos, wallabies, pheasants, parrots, ostrich, snakes, turtles, and even fish. Wallach felt like he was the veterinarian for Noah and the animals on his Ark.
The autopsies continued to show the same pattern of nutritional-deficiency diseases that Wallach had observed in the St. Louis Zoo, and which was also evident at the Brookfield zoo, the Lincoln Park Zoo, and the Shedd Aquarium. All animals dying of what would be considered by most to be genetic or natural causes actually died of nutritional-deficiency diseases. For example, kidney stones in tortoises and iguanas were universal problems. The standard zoo diets for tortoises and iguanas were based on fruit, eggs, raw meat or fish, and lettuce with no addition of vitamins or minerals—certainly no calcium was added.
Where did the calcium come from that was in the tortoise and iguana kidney stones? It came from the bones of the iguana and the skeleton and shell of the tortoise when they didn’t enough calcium in their diet and they had raging osteoporosis! The fact that kidney stones developed as the result of too little calcium in the diet was well documented in domestic animals, so it was easy to find appropriate refereed references for another journal article and for the book.
By this time Wallach was on a roll. He rarely was confronted with a disease he hadn’t seen before; however, he saw lots of familiar diseases in different animal species he hadn’t seen before. Selenium deficiency, calcium deficiency, copper deficiency, zinc deficiency, magnesium deficiency, and iodine deficiencies were common. Vitamin and protein deficiencies were less common, although birth defects resulting from a myriad of nutritional deficiencies were quite common. The clinical symptoms, and the gross and the microscopic-autopsy signs, and the biochemical fingerprints of nutritional deficiencies in snakes, fish, alligators, ostrich, wombat, yak, African lion, wolf, ibex, Dahl sheep, llama, dolphin, and humans were the same!
The completeness and value of any theory depends on the number and accuracy of the facts one assembles to arrive at those conclusions. Darwin, the naturalist, arrived at his controversial theories of evolution and natural selection while on an unprecedented five-year continuous world journey, as he was island and continent hopping on the H.M.S. Beagle. No one before him had personally observed the contiguous stream of facts necessary to see the truth of the concept of natural selection.
Prior to Wallach’s nutrition and comparative pathology studies in thousands of captive and free-ranging wild species and humans, no single individual trained in comparative pathology and comparative medicine had studied the degenerative diseases from so many different species of animals from all over the world and compared the results with information on diseases of human beings with the single directive: “find the useful life-saving common threads.”
Wallach found the “useful life-saving common threads” and wove them into the tight fabric of an unimpeachable truth. This truth is that every animal and every human being that dies of natural causes and what are thought to be genetically-transmitted diseases, dies of nutritional-deficiency diseases! The scientific and religious communities of the time didn’t embrace Darwin’s theory because they didn’t have the world vision that he had, and the medical system didn’t accept Wallach’s truth because they didn’t have the $7.5 million worth of training (which over time actually grew to $25 million) that he had benefited from. Doctors and scientists in general are not stupid, and Wallach was not any smarter than they were. They were, however, ignorant of all of the facts and therefore they were universally unable to see the truth—it was simply impossible for them to read or speak the language!
Work on “The Book” Escalates
Work on now what was being called “the book” continued. Wallach took a leave of absence from the Brookfield Zoo and spent three weeks of isolation in Hawaii entering four years of accumulated data into the book. The project was beginning to take shape; by this time all but two chapters of the book had wound up in Wallach’s lap. What he didn’t know from personal experience and research, Wallach gleaned from published articles in veterinary journals, wildlife journals, zoo records, and laboratory animal journals.
The two co-authors still left in the book project were responsible for the chapters on caged birds and reptiles. The one who was asked to write the chapter on caged birds had a busy private practice specializing in caged birds, and he promised the material but never completed it. The other remaining co-author was a veterinarian and an MD who taught public health at Harvard Medical School. His claim to fame of his knowledge of exotic animals was that he had once written an article on “An Ameobic Infection in a Komodo Dragon.” The article wasn’t exactly about Komodo Dragon Dysentery, but you get the picture.
The MD, being extremely arrogant, wanted half of the book royalties “to lend his name to the project,” even though he would contribute only one chapter out of twenty eight. When the doctor threatened to quit the project if he didn’t get fifty percent of the royalties, Carroll Cann, the project editor at W.B. Saunders told him to “jump in the lake!” The contract he had signed only entitled him to royalties based on his percentage of contributions to the book. Obviously Wallach wound up with the chapters on caged birds and reptiles, and now “the book” became an obsession.
Working with Primates at Yerkes Primate Research Center: Proof of the Cause of Cystic Fibrosis in Humans and Primates
After four years at the Brookfield Zoo, Wallach moved on to the Yerkes Regional Primate Research Center in Atlanta, Georgia. The primate center was administered by Emory University and funded by private donations and a variety of agencies including the NIH and NASA. Physically the center was located across the street from the Centers for Disease Control (the federal agency that tracks human disease and deaths), a dream location for a comparative pathologist.
The researchers, that Wallach supported, used a variety of New World and Old World monkeys, chimpanzees, gorillas, and orangutans for their studies and research animals for projects in nutrition, pharmacology, breeding colonies, and behavioral studies. Sometimes the animals were killed at the end of the project, and sometimes they died from the effects of the drugs or nutritional deficiencies, and sometimes they died of natural causes.
Wallach’s responsibility was to help the investigator to know everything possible about their primates and their diet—and if necessary—determine the animal’s cause of death. Nutritional deficiencies in monkeys, and great apes were of special interest because of their close relationship to humans.
The basic diet of the Yerkes primates was a complete, commercially-prepared “monkey biscuit.” The monkey biscuits contained what was thought to be optimum levels of vitamins, minerals, trace minerals, amino acids, and essential fatty acids known to be required by monkeys and apes. This information had been gathered by literally thousands of basic nutrition studies in laboratory primates.
The basic diet of monkey biscuits was supplemented with cabbage, citrus fruit, bananas, alfalfa hay, spinach, ground meat, onions, beets, nuts, carrots, eggs, and rolled oats, not necessarily for extra nutrition, but rather from anthropomorphism. The keepers couldn’t imagine themselves eating the same boring biscuits for every meal, so they gave the primates these human foods for “variety” and to keep the caged primates busy browsing. The add-on treats were often times sprayed with salt water or a trace mineral salt block was wired to the outside of the cage where it could be licked.
Nutritional studies in primates were done by creating special pelleted diets that had one or more nutrients missing so as to be able to map out the various signs, symptoms, and diseases that were produced from the deficient diet. In the early days of zoos and primate laboratories, bone pathology such as osteomalacia in young primates and osteoporosis in adult primates, was commonplace as their diets were almost exclusively grains, vegetables, and fruit with little or no regard for their need for vitamins, minerals, amino acids, and essential fatty acids. The advent of commercial “monkey biscuits” pretty much eliminated the bone and joint problems in modern zoos and primate colonies unless deficiency diseases were being purposely created for research purposes.
There were as many as ten to twenty-five pathology cases per day at the Yerkes facility. We looked for viruses, bacteria, parasites, degenerative diseases, nutritional deficiencies, and complications of surgical interventions and side effects of drug studies. Microscopic slides were made of all tissues and organs, chemical analysis was performed on all blood, urine, and spinal fluids, and samples were collected for viral, bacterial, fungal cultures, and parasite studies.
The ultimate goal at Yerkes was to find and develop an animal model for the study of some human disease in hopes of producing a prevention or cure. A real advantage of Yerkes proximity to the Centers for Disease Control was the opportunity to attend their weekly pathology study programs for human diseases. The world’s experts on these diseases provided “unknown” cases that came with histories, microscopic slides, and sometimes lab results. In many of the cases the slides were made with standard stains, and each participant was given a week to figure out what the disease was.
At the presentation, the attendees, including Wallach, played the game of “pin the label on the disease.” Presenters would produce a review of the clinical history and the pathology results, and special stains were employed for histopathological slides to make the specific diagnosis of the unknown mystery disease. It was a unique opportunity for Wallach to advance his knowledge of human disease and hone his techniques on how to diagnose them.
Those pathologists who had made the correct diagnosis became all excited and pumped. They made victory signs and performed victory dances like football players who had scored a touchdown, claiming “I knew it, I knew it!” The rest, dejected, would responded with, “I was going to say that but I changed my mind,” or “it had me baffled from the beginning.” What the exercise did for everyone, of course, was to hone their diagnostic skills, so that regardless of their exhilaration or disappointment, all emerged winners at the end of the day. This weekly challenge went on for several years, and at each successive meeting Wallach’s Sherlockian deduction skills became sharper and sharper. The truth was getting clearer. “It was elementary, my dear Watson”: When an animal or human dies of natural causes, they die of a nutritional-deficiency disease.
Wallach Makes a Stunning Medical Discovery
Parasites were the specialty of Dr. Harold McClure, the chief pathologist at the Yerkes Regional Primate Research Center. He was Wallach’s immediate supervisor and he’d been at Yerkes for fifteen years. To keep things fair between two published scientists, they had an agreement. Whoever made an unusual or exciting discovery would be the primary author of a resulting mutual effort. That understanding would soon be tested.
After Wallach had gotten into the swing of his responsibilities and the Yerkes activities, Dr. McClure went on vacation for two weeks in November of 1977. That in of itself should have been sufficient warning. Back at the University of Missouri, when Dr. Kintner, Wallach’s pathology professor, went on vacation, the dead and dying appeared in droves from every direction. Dr. McClure was not gone three days when a six-month-old rhesus monkey was presented for autopsy.
On the first look, the baby rhesus had snow-white hair color instead of the normal gray-green, and it was half the normal size for its age and suffered from a severe anemia. It was not part of any particular experiment, but rather was part of a breeding colony that was used to produce monkeys for NASA space projects. Wallach checked the monkey into the system and began to go through the standard routine. The infant monkey was weighed, measured, and identified by its tattoo number. Blood and urine samples were collected for cultures and biochemical analysis. Every organ and tissue was examined for color, texture, weight, size and location, and tissue samples were taken and preserved for histopathology examination. Stomach and intestinal contents were collected for cultures of bacteria and viruses and were chemically analyzed for toxins.
Anemia made the tissues and organs small and pale. The gross physical changes of the monkey’s pancreas were immediately notable, which made it more interesting than the other internal organs. Not only was the pancreas small and pale—it was round and knobby in cross section instead of flat, and it was as hard as a rock instead of having the expected normal consistency of raw chicken.
As the knife was used to cut through the pancreas, it produced a noise like you would expect from running a knife through packed dry sand, and also the procedure created a gritty resistance. More samples of the pancreas were taken for microscopic examination and special stains. Twenty-four hours later the trays with the prepared and stained slides were on Wallach’s desk ready to be read. The pancreas, liver, heart, and lungs showed changes he had never seen before.
Wallach made notes and ran to the library and had the computer pull all of the articles that could be related in any way to such changes in animals. He was literally swamped with hundreds of articles that described a trace-mineral deficiency. All of the tissue changes in the monkey were compatible with a global selenium deficiency!
The next was habit. Since the days of working with The Center for the Biology of Natural Systems in St. Louis, Wallach would always cross reference diseases from two points of view: animal pathology and human pathology. We would be looking at the same diseases but talking in different languages!
Veterinary pathology terms for a disease were typically descriptions of the tissue changes themselves. Human pathology terms for a disease tended to be the name of the first person to describe and publish the observations, or they might be related to the clinical manifestations of the disease. Wallach entered the question of selenium deficiency into the human computer software and came up with a big fat zero—no matter how he asked the question the answer was still a zero. It was like not having the correct password to get into the program.
Before working at Yerkes, Wallach had unearthed all of his references and had previously performed basic research by hand. The process was time consuming, but very accurate and effective, so he went back to the basics he understood and went to work. He went to the medical libraries at the Grady Memorial teaching hospital and the CDC and began to look up all of the human diseases of the pancreas, liver, heart, and lungs. The results, as expected, were concise and predictable in each of the texts: cancer, emphysema, cirrhosis, pancreatitis, cystic fibrosis, and heart failure.
Wallach scanned through a dozen different texts before he just thought of giving up. He was frustrated and tired of seeing the same short paragraph written almost word for word in every text under the bold heading “cystic fibrosis of the pancreas.” The text went on to describe it as “the most common genetic disease, the genes for which were found in one out of four Americans.” According to the literature, this disease was transmitted by a “simple Mendelian genetic defect.” The child born with cystic fibrosis failed to thrive and produced a positive “sweat test,” a test the reference books referred to as a “genetic marker.” If the child survived for a few years they would typically develop lung disease, and they usually died before the age of twelve.
Within the veterinary literature, the remarks describing cystic fibrosis were terse and taken from the same exact medical reference source that said “cystic fibrosis did not occur in animals and that an animal model did not yet exist.” Wallach’s investigation began to pick up speed and intensity—he smelled blood! He knew he had a winner, and that at the very least he had found an animal model. However, deep in his heart he knew he had stumbled onto the first recorded non-human case of cystic fibrosis in an animal—and not too surprisingly, the animal was a primate.
Wallach asked the computer for every reference on cystic fibrosis and received thousands of articles and book references. There were photographs of whole organs and photomicrographs of the specific diagnostic features of the cellular changes of cystic fibrosis in the pancreas, liver, and heart. And then there were the typical terminal changes in the lungs of the children. The changes in all of the organs and tissues of the rhesus monkey were identical to the cystic fibrosis changes in humans—in fact they were dead ringers!
The next logical step was to take a deep breath, sit down quietly, and go through sets of information and log the matches to cross match the microscopic features and tissue chemistry of cystic fibrosis against the microscopic features and tissue chemistry of a laboratory induced selenium deficiency. Houston, we have a match—Bingo!
Time stood still; Wallach had no idea how long he had been there. All he could remember was being so immersed in what he was doing that an express train could have passed two feet away from him and through the library at eighty miles per hour and he would not have noticed. He just sat there, his mind racing crazily, papers and slides all around him with some on the table, some on the floor, and they all added up to the same conclusion: the rhesus monkey did in fact have a selenium deficiency and did in fact have cystic fibrosis—they were the same disease!
Great moments in which scientific truths are first uncovered and recognized are difficult to describe for two reasons. First they occur so rarely that few get much practice at such lonely but certainly exciting events. Secondly, it is not always possible to isolate the precise moment of discovery when the mind achieves lucidity, the “eureka” or the “ah-ha” moment! Sometimes, discovery just flows gradually like water filling a tank. Other times discovery strikes suddenly but still takes a while to assume coherence and blossom into awareness, making the precise moment of realization tricky to define.
The more he looked, the more Wallach saw the same pattern—congenital and neonatal selenium deficiency in animals equaled cystic fibrosis in humans. Now he had a great dilemma: what to do. First he had to pinch himself to make sure he hadn’t made a mistake out of eagerness, and go through the whole thing again and again just to make sure.
It didn’t take long for Wallach to realize that his biggest problem would be to prove the accuracy of his discovery to the holders of the genetic theory. After all, their entire life and future was vested in cystic fibrosis being genetic. What would be the most successful approach to engage and convince people who were considered experts in the clinical, pathology, chemistry, and “genetics” of cystic fibrosis that there was now an answer that could totally prevent and save many thousands of children who were currently suffering from cystic fibrosis. How could he get them to grasp that cystic fibrosis was a congenital deficiency of selenium and not a genetic disease? How could Wallach get them to listen and not tersely respond with, “No, that is not possible, everyone knows that cystic fibrosis is a genetic disease that is only found in humans” before he got five words out of his mouth? His first major hurdle would be to get a serious hearing in front of informed but objective listeners who had no axe to grind.
Keeping a low profile and feigning ignorance, Wallach made quiet, discrete inquiries. He contacted the surgical pathology board at the Grady Memorial Hospital, the teaching hospital for Emory University. He told them that he wanted to present a set of slides to them with the tissues from a six-month-old, anemic, failure to thrive infant. Wallach didn’t dare mention the word monkey.
Dressed in surgical scrubs and armed with the appropriate slides of the pancreas in question in the generic unlabeled cardboard slide holder, Wallach presented himself at the appointed hour to the board’s conference room the following day. He had twelve sets and made sure that the slides presented all had the classical identifying features of cystic fibrosis, which he hoped would save time and avoid the types of debate that he had witnessed at the CDC Thursday night sessions.
The twelve members of the surgical pathology board view frozen slides collected during surgery and determine whether the pancreas, lung, breast, prostate, colon, testicle, etc. is cancerous—“Yes, that’s cancerous, take it out” or “No, the tissue is non-malignant.” Wallach asked the board if they would please keep their findings confidential, and they agreed. Wallach handed the twelve sets of slides over to the head of the committee. Eleven out of twelve wrote their opinions on a small form, and they all agreed, “Cancer of an unknown origin.” Wallach was dumbstruck! These expert pathologist should have at least gotten the tissue identified, as he had made doubly sure that each slide had an Islet of Langerhans, the identifying feature of a pancreas, the cells in the pancreas that produce insulin.
The last of the twelve pathologist sat quietly pondering for a moment (he had recognized Wallach from the Thursday night CDC pathology meetings), then he offered, “I think I know what you’re getting at! You think this is cystic fibrosis don’t you?” Wallach, now excited, nodded his head in the affirmative. The pathologist asked if the tissue was animal or human, and Wallach reminded them that they had agreed on confidentiality. After they all reaffirmed their agreement, Wallach then revealed that in fact the tissues were those of an infant rhesus monkey that he believed had cystic fibrosis.
The sympathetic pathologist pulled a pathology book off of a shelf and flipped through it to the section on cystic fibrosis. There were only five or six paragraphs under the heading of cystic fibrosis that ended with, “No animal model is known.” The pathology committee all agreed that Wallach was going to have a hard row to hoe to get confirmation of the diagnosis by the appropriate people. Wallach replied, “There has to be a first someday, and I believe this is it.” The helpful pathologist replied by telling him that, “There is a cystic fibrosis expert, Dr. Victor Nasar, in the pediatric department here at Grady who has the capacity and ability to confirm your suspicion. If you like, I’ll send a set of your slides down to him.”
The slides were delivered as promised, and the next day Wallach received the call, “Dr. Wallach, this is Dr. Nasar. I had a good look at those slides that you sent me yesterday.” Naturally Wallach asked what he thought. “Oh, no doubt about it! Cystic fibrosis if I ever saw it!” Wallach responded with, “Are you sure?”
Dr. Nasar came back with, “Absolutely positive.” When Wallach asked, “would he put that in writing, he responded, “Absolutely! And seeing as your just learning about cystic fibrosis I’ll bring over a lot of CF material that I have here: slides, wet tissue, current journal articles, that sort of thing so you can have a look, say about noon?” Wallach replied, “Noon it is—and please don’t forget your confirmation letter.”
Dr. Nasar arrived at the appointed hour, and Wallach had to fight his emotions to stay calm. As soon as Wallach had Dr. Nasar’s letter in his hand he read it even before the pleasantries of saying hello. They sat down at the microscope and Nasar looked at the lungs, liver, heart, and more slides of the pancreas. He was obviously curious and then asked Wallach, a veterinarian, where he had gotten the CF tissues; he wondered how a veterinary pathologist had gotten ahold of human cystic fibrosis tissue for an evaluation.
Again Wallach asked for confidentiality, which Nasar agreed to, before Wallach revealed the staggering truth. “Dr. Nasar, you’re looking at the first non-human case of cystic fibrosis.” Probably not too many people have heard the expression, “A stunned mullet.” The mullet is not a very excitable or exciting fish to begin with. A mullet that has been thumped on the head is pretty dull. Dr. Nasar’s first reaction was to lean back in his chair, with his mouth open and beads of sweat beginning to breakout on his forehead, and it seemed like forever before he spoke.
“You’re kidding me?” Dr. Nasar blurted out with a gasp. Wallach assured him that he was dead serious and that he had done his due diligence. He said, “Here let me see those slides again!”
Wallach had Nasar’s letter of confirmation in his hand and he was now under extreme pressure. Even with the revelation that the tissues were those of a rhesus monkey, the second look resulted in the same conclusion: cystic fibrosis. Tissue doesn’t lie. Tissue doesn’t have a political agenda. “There’s no doubt about it!” he confirmed, “Nothing else in the world looks like cystic fibrosis! This is cystic fibrosis! I’ll stake my career, my life on it!” Then his tone changed, he looked into Wallach’s eyes and asked, “What animal is it?” Then when Wallach revealed that it was the tissues of a rhesus monkey. “Man! You’ve just identified the first non-human case of cystic fibrosis! This is exciting! Where is your phone?”
Wallach asked whom they were calling and Nasar responded, “The Cystic Fibrosis Foundation! It’s just down the street!” The next day the Yerkes lab was crawling with CF experts from the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation. They even called the executive director who was fishing in Canada. He cut his vacation short and he was on his way back. They all marveled at the miracle beneath the lenses. They never asked the ultimate question, so Wallach never offered the answer. The experts were all unanimous in their opinion: “the tissues they looked at were in fact classical examples of cystic fibrosis!”
To make sure, the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation sent a set of the monkey tissue slides to Dr. E.H. Oppenheimer, considered the world’s expert on cystic fibrosis pathology at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in Baltimore, Maryland. For good measure a second set was sent to Dr. J.R. Esterly, one of her former pathology PhD students, who was now a pathologist at the Chicago Lying-in Hospital. Not a word was mentioned that the origin of the tissue was a rhesus monkey. The only information sent with the tissue was that the material was from,“ a six-month-old, anemic, failure to thrive infant,” and a note that said, “We think these tissues are cystic fibrosis, what do you think?”
As sure as God made little green apples, the proclamation from on high was: “Without a doubt—cystic fibrosis!” It was all there in black and white on their department letterhead. The world’s experts had reviewed the slides and confirmed that the tissues were without a doubt cystic fibrosis. Wallach reread the communications looking for any hint of waffling or weakness, but there was none. The journey had begun. The authorities had agreed and signed their agreement with the diagnosis .
History had just been made; however, as of yet the knowledge of “the Discovery” was confined to a few people. It was a totally strange, surreal situation for Wallach and still fraught with danger . . . what should have been the high energy locker-room fanfare, the high-fiving and press-release hysteria was in reality a muffled acknowledgment. This demeanor signaled to Wallach that there were still more hurdles and that the process was still in the beginning stages. He could not appear to be moving too fast, ruffle feathers, or seem too cocky. Great egos of professors of state, national, and international fame were involved, and everyone was already positioning themselves.
It was as if Wallach had started at the end rather than at the beginning. In reality all he had was a naked fact. He had identified the first non-human case of cystic fibrosis; however, it stood in total isolation. Wallach was carrying a piece of dynamite around in his head. He dared not move too fast, drop it, or allow it to pass into the wrong hands, at least until he was ready. That was the key, not until he was ready. There was no accompanying information, no documented history, no source of reference, not anything. Before Wallach moved forward he would have to fill in all of the blanks.
Why did this particular monkey get cystic fibrosis? That was the million-dollar question that no one had asked. Everybody “knew” that cystic fibrosis was a genetic disease and classically only described in humans. How then did a non-human primate “develop” cystic fibrosis? Where did the monkey come from? How did it get to Yerkes? Wallach didn’t have far to travel. The monkey had been part of a group of virus-free laboratory raised rhesus monkeys being raised for the NASA space program. Dr. Nelly Golarz de Bourne, a behaviorist, was supervising the colony. She was also the wife of Dr. Geoffrey H. Bourne, an anatomist and the director of the Yerkes Primate Center.
There were fifteen pairs of adult rhesus monkeys kept in small cages. The idea was to have a steady supply of normal, virus-free, captive-reared rhesus monkeys for the space program. When the babies reached six months of age they were weaned from their mother and raised in a large gang cage with other “teen-aged” monkeys. When they reached maturity they would be paired up to produce additional captive-reared, virus-free normal monkeys.
The ideal was rarely achieved in a primate colony. In addition to having the advantage of being able to demand sexual favors in the confines of a small cage, the males pulled the hair off of the females, gnawed on them, beat them up, and generally inflicted mayhem upon them. In the wild setting there would typically a troop of ten to fifty females and six or so males of different ages and levels of dominance. In the wild setting only the dominant males were allowed to breed the females, and if the female wanted to resist she could object to the males advances and escape the unwanted courtship. In the tight cage, containing only a pair put together by an arranged marriage was another matter.
Dr. Nelly de Bourne noted the hair loss and baldness of the females. She misinterpreted the phenomenon as an essential fatty-acid deficiency and decided that each of the monkeys should be given the daily dose of one teaspoon of corn oil in addition to their standard free-choice monkey biscuits. Why, she should have asked, if they were all on the same diet, did the males sport a grand hair coat and mane while the females looked ratty and bald? Shouldn’t the same deficiency of essential fatty acids afflict both the males and the females? There was no questioning her actions here, but Nelly was the director’s wife and whatever she said was law.
The new directive gave the animal technicians who fed and cared for the colony a major increase in responsibility. Overloaded already, there was no way that these technicians could have implemented this new policy. There was no way they could go from cage to cage, squeezing each monkey’s mouth open to deliver a measured dose of corn oil into the mouth of a resisting, squirming adult monkey. It sounds simple enough to just manhandle the monkeys or train them and just get it done. However, in reality, to implement this new policy would require many hours of effort added to the technician’s rounds each day, increase the risk of bites, and would create the extra mess of cleaning up the oil the monkeys would sling everywhere, and the process amounted to trying to “force feed” a gang of angry, super-strength teen-agers with ADHD and long teeth! They’d rather spit the corn oil in your face than swallow it!
Necessity being the mother of invention, the colony technicians came up with the idea of filling five-gallon buckets half full of corn oil, and then packing the bucket full to the top with monkey biscuits and then leaving them to soak up the oil overnight. The next morning each monkey was first fed several of the oil soaked biscuits, each biscuit like a handful of buttered popcorn, before they were given the remainder of the days ration.
Several problems were immediately created. The more biscuits the monkey ate the more the oil they got. Number two, the extra oil threw the nutrient balance of the commercially prepared ration completely off. In this case, corn oil was notorious for increasing the need for selenium. Even if there was selenium in the pellets, the added oil created a relative deficiency. It never crossed anyone’s mind to increase the selenium level of the diet to compensate for the addition of the extra corn oil. As a result, the pregnant females were all selenium deficient, which then affected the developing embryos. Likewise, the lactating females were selenium deficient and passed on selenium deficient milk to the infant monkeys.
At this point Wallach went back into the colony and examined the rest of them. The hair of the adults and infants had lost the normal gray-green color and the babies were universally small for their age and were anemic.
Wallach applied for and got permission to gather liver and pancreatic biopsies from several of the worst-looking infants. Again, the classic changes for cystic fibrosis were there for all to see; However, he said nothing, and nobody asked. The time was not right yet. As a matter of standard practice, blood samples were collected from all of the Yerkes monkeys and apes on a monthly basis, and identified and saved in a freezer in case they were needed at a later date. Wallach requested that the blood of the of the CF monkey’s parents and the infants themselves be tested for selenium levels and to look for deficiency states. Bingo! It was a heady moment, but still Wallach could not share the information with anyone. Swollen scientific egos at a national and international level were involved, and it could mean danger if they moved to discredit Wallach’s work at this early stage.
Nevertheless, it was now generally recognized that Dr. Joel D. Wallach, veterinary pathologist at the Yerkes Regional Primate Research Center, Emory University of Atlanta, Georgia, had discovered the first non-human case of cystic fibrosis.
The new darling of the primate center, Wallach was an overnight celebrity. He presented a featured paper at an international pathology conference held in Atlanta. Emory University put out a major news release, and the story was featured on the front section of the Sunday edition of the Atlanta Constitution Journal. Wallach initiated the process of writing a major scientific paper on the cystic fibrosis monkey.
To top things off, Wallach was given a $1,000 per year wage increase and received letters of congratulations and commendation. NASA was excited that one of their low-budget projects had produced a major scientific breakthrough in human health research. Mail poured into Yerkes, and there were the requests for radio and television interviews. Reporters from journals, magazines, tabloids, radio stations, and television networks called in for “the story.”
The National Institutes of Health began to show serious interest as they were being besieged with inquiries. Wallach was notified that that they were going to host an animal model workshop (May 25–26, 1978) at the main NIH campus in Bethesda, Maryland, and they wanted him to be one of the featured speakers. Wallach was supposed to present the cystic fibrosis case so others could be on the lookout for similar monkeys.
Wallach accepted the invitation and was promptly sent his air tickets, hotel reservations, and a $500 stipend for expenses. The NIH also requested a brief abstract for inclusion into the printed program proceedings. Wallach began the task of compiling the abstract that would formally introduce his cystic fibrosis monkey to the national and international scientific world. Over the years, Wallach had done this sort of thing literally hundreds of times. He had submitted abstracts and had given similar presentations to his scientific colleagues, including physicians, veterinarians, and PhDs, so the task was neither foreign nor formidable. It appeared that the time had come to “show his hand.” After all, they had essentially asked the question: “Please, will you tell us!”
Wallach had done his due diligence. He had made the diagnosis and had it confirmed by the world’s experts, he had backtracked and had identified the environmental and causative factors and deficiencies, and he could repeat the process. He could in fact create an unlimited supply of laboratory animal models for the study of and elimination of cystic fibrosis!
Wallach felt as if the concept of The Center for the Biology of Natural Systems had produced a result far beyond anyone’s hopes and dreams!
Wallach viewed these events as a “twofer,” one hurrah for The Center for the Biology of Natural Systems and the second for the Yerkes Regional Primate Research Center. Wallach enclosed the appropriate photomicrographs of the CF monkey tissues for the printed program, put the abstract into the envelope, sealed it, addressed it, stamped it, and sent it. He then went about his daily responsibilities and never gave the matter a second thought.
Shortly thereafter, Dr. McClure returned from his vacation. It was immediately obvious that instead of being excited about the cystic fibrosis discovery, catching the “CF fever,” and asking what he could do to support the new and wondrous project, he was miffed that the cystic fibrosis discovery had occurred while he was off on vacation.
Of course, by his own rules that McClure had dictated to Wallach upon his arrival, he would be, without question, the second investigator of any studies generated by the project and second author of any publications. He had spent fifteen years in the trenches looking through monkey intestines for parasites (worms), and the new guy on the block uncovered the biggest discovery ever at Yerkes—the cause, prevention, and cure of cystic fibrosis!
McClure was not a happy camper. In the hallway his jaw muscles were clenched and worked overtime, and he ground his teeth loudly whenever they passed each other. His office door was closed, a completely new behavior. It was now obvious to Wallach that there was going to be “Big trouble in River City,” trouble with a capital T—little did he realize how much trouble!
At the same time, Wallach’s wife Josephine had died from “complications of the use of a new form of chemotherapy for Hodgkin’s Disease that was marketed as being free of negative side effects.” Wallach was now a widower with four small children ages one and a half years to eight years of age.
Forces of Ignorance and Corruption Throw Wallach’s Life and Career Into Turmoil
Less than two weeks later, a terse-sounding Dr. Geoffrey Bourne summoned Wallach to his office. A week earlier, Wallach was making history. Now, inside Dr. Bourne’s office, with Bourne’s face as red as a tomato and with neck and forehead veins bulging, he blurted out: “You’re fired!” Flabbergasted, Wallach responded with, “What do you mean I’m fired? I haven’t stolen anything. I haven’t done anything wrong!” Dr. Bourne angrily responded, “You listen here, Wallach! Everyone knows you can’t create cystic fibrosis—it’s a genetic disease.”
Wallach quickly responded, “Dr. Bourne, I didn’t say that I could create cystic fibrosis. If you read the abstract that I have sent to the NIH, I only stated that I could create animal models for the study of cystic fibrosis. I was very careful to make that point clear. All animals for the study of genetic diseases are created by one manner or another. I would like to request a critical review of my material by a committee of appropriate scholars, much like a PhD candidate submits to, to defend his research.”
Bourne retorted, “Don’t you understand, Wallach, they won’t allow me to let you say that cystic fibrosis could be ‘created’! All of the world’s experts have built their careers and their lives on cystic fibrosis being a classic genetically-transmitted disease! They won’t hear of some young upstart coming along and jamming it down their throats that cystic fibrosis could be created! It’s out of the question! There is no way that I can keep you, Wallach! You’re gone!”
Recovering sufficiently to speak, Wallach added, “With all due respect, Dr. Bourne, when I say that I can create an animal model for the advanced study of cystic fibrosis, I mean it! I can do it! That’s the truth!”
Then Bourne blurted out, “The truth doesn’t matter! No buts, Wallach! You’re fired, and that’s final!”
To add insult to injury, Dr. Bourne called in two armed security guards to have Wallach escorted from the building immediately to prevent Wallach from gathering up all of his cystic fibrosis material. However, he decided he was not going to leave without it! He told the guards, “Look you guys, I have to get my books, I’ll meet you at the door.” Wallach went first to his office and then to the lab and put all of his cystic fibrosis records, pertinent references, glass slides with the original CF tissue, and the 2x2 presentation transparencies into the bottom of a large box and covered them with his personal books. The guards dutifully checked through some of the books at the exit door, but when they saw Wallach’s personal stamp on the inside cover of each book, they waved him out the door.
Wallach left Yerkes forever, with a box full of books and the cystic fibrosis material clutched in his arms. He had lost a battle with the forces of ignorance and ego, but he swore that the war over the cause of cystic fibrosis was not over yet!
That day, Wallach swore a silent oath to himself: “They won’t win. I won’t let them! I simply won’t let them!” Wallach had the materials he needed to “fire a shot across their bow.” Although the National Institute of Health invitation had been withdrawn, he set to work writing a paper on cystic fibrosis before they wrote it using his data. He had to beat them to the punch. Throwing all caution to the wind at this point, Wallach decided to bring up all his findings into the open in the form of a scientific paper—a monograph—the sort of thing that Darwin, Mendel, Pasteur, and Lind had done. Why not Wallach!
Wallach added a summary of his entire thoughts on cystic fibrosis into the work. He entitled the monograph The Pathogenesis and Etiology of Cystic Fibrosis. To be sure, it was bold if not brash to claim that he knew “the” cause of cystic fibrosis. In the face of a calcified scientific community unwilling to hear the truth, this was no time for equivocation, a weak heart, or timidity! Wallach felt obligated to make sure that the truth that CF could be prevented and cured got out to the families of cystic fibrosis children. He also felt he must also do it for the memory of his late wife, who had known about the discovery before her passing. (Even as she was dying she supported his effort to get the truth about cystic fibrosis out to the public. Her last words were “Don’t let them win!”).
Wallach dotted his “I’s” crossed his “T’s” and added one hundred unimpeachable key references and the telling photomicrographs to complete and support the premise of the monograph. He attached copies of the confirming letters by Nasar, Oppenheimer, and Esterly on their letterhead that they had confirmed Wallach’s diagnosis of cystic fibrosis, and then he had one hundred copies of the entire package printed and copyrighted.
A day before the NIH Animal Model Conference convened, Wallach flew from Atlanta to Baltimore, Maryland. He checked into a hotel and read the CF monograph twenty times so he could give the presentation in his sleep. The next morning, he took a cab to the NIH campus and arrived at the animal model conference an hour early, taking a position at the entrance of the seminar hall where he had originally been invited to speak.
The attendees passing through the great NIH portals were each given a copy of the monograph and a smile. It wasn’t long before the chairman of the animal model seminar came outside and grabbed Wallach by the arm, “For God’s sake, Wallach, what are you doing? We can’t have you passing out unsanctioned papers. You’ll simply have to leave!”
Wallach responded with, “Well, I guess you have a problem. It’s a free country, isn’t it?” “Dammit, Wallach, you don’t understand! You’re disrupting the whole conference!” Demanding to be arrested or allowed to speak, Wallach kept passing out the papers, and the NIH chairman responded with, “I will have you arrested, dammit!” Then he disappeared into the meeting.
Their problem was that they had printed the title and the abstract of the cystic fibrosis paper and Wallach’s name in the early announcements of the animal model meeting, and many of the attendees had come specifically to hear Wallach’s presentation. The NIH finally capitulated. ”Okay! Wallach, listen here!” Wallach listened. “We’re going to give you fifteen minutes to make your presentation. After that, we never want to see your face again! Is that clear, Wallach?”
That was all that Wallach needed. He presented the cystic fibrosis paper, showed his slides, and saved five minutes for questions. He left the podium with loud applause ringing in his ears. On one hand, revenge was sweet. On the other hand, Wallach learned all too quickly though that the immediate victory would only last a fleeting moment.
Wallach had given a brief, but stunning presentation and felt vindicated, but he knew he had stepped on some pretty serious toes—maybe, even some land-mines! There were bound to be some serious repercussions. Naively believing that the truth would prevail, Wallach underestimated the viciousness he would quickly encounter.
NIH was not amused by Wallach’s behavior. In fact it was the first time in their twenty-five years that the proceedings of an NIH-sponsored conference was not published. The proceedings of the 1978 conference are still missing from the written history of the NIH. In their spiteful move to kill the publication of Wallach’s paper, the NIH had, unfortunately, also doomed the papers of the other presenters. The publication of many world experts’ papers were derailed for 1978. Many scientists were outraged by the NIH decision. But the spite didn’t end there.
From the moment that Wallach appeared on the NIH steps he was on the “hit list.” He didn’t realize it at first, but his career in basic research was over. He attended veterinary pathology seminars looking for job announcements. He had four little kids to feed. He visited veterinary schools and medical schools applying for jobs as a service pathologist. He wasn’t greedy—he just needed to go back to work. Wallach soon learned that his work and his life would take on a whole new direction.
Jobless and widowed, Wallach packed up his kids and moved back to Missouri, where he worked for his father loading trucks so he could feed his kids and pay bills. Wallach applied for the laboratory colony directorship at the St. Louis University, and again with Marlin Perkins’ recommendation, to Wallach’s surprise, he landed the job. He began putting things together, arranging schedules, clarifying responsibilities, and preparing to be employed again.
This time Wallach was going to be responsible for making the administrative decisions as well as directing the science. Wallach moved his boxes of books and reference materials and files into his new office, but before he had completed his unpacking, the dean of the medical school came down to the lab and handed him a letter withdrawing their offer of employment.
The St. Louis University had sent out an announcement of Wallach’s appointment as the new director of the animal research colony in their newsletter, which drew a response from Emory University, the Yerkes Regional Primate Research Center and the NIH, all of which convinced St. Louis University that he was a nut and inferred that their federal funding would be pulled if Wallach was hired. Yerkes and the NIH had caught up with him again.
Wallach set out again to the veterinary seminars in hopes of finding a job. He knew he was not the smartest guy around, but nobody could ever accuse him of ever giving up. Persistence paid off. He ran into one of his old veterinary school chums, Dr. John Troxel. John had graduated from the University of Missouri, School of Veterinary Medicine, one year before Wallach had and then spent some time in the army doing research. He then opened up a small animal practice in Chicago. John had built a very successful private practice and was very experienced in veterinary clinical medicine and clinical research.
Wallach brought John up to date on all of his successes, great victories and discoveries, and his more recent termination and run-in with the NIH. “John to make a long story short, I’m looking for a job, I need to feed my four kids. With all of your contacts, do you know of anybody who needs a good veterinary or comparative pathologist?”
“Listen to me, Joel! You’re wasting your time! Absolutely wasting your time! They’ll never let you back into the system! Believe me! I know! I’ve seen the mix of ego, power, and bureaucracy in the Army! Take my advice and go retrain for something else” John replied.
“But John, the cystic fibrosis story is too big to let go. Surely someone would be interested in helping these CF kids,” countered Wallach.
“Don’t get me wrong, Joel. I’ll help you. But right now you don’t believe me. So, try your luck, and when you’re totally disillusioned, give me a call. We’ll take up the situation from there.”
John’s statements and assessments of the situation made no sense to Wallach at the time. He still believed that the promise of help for the cystic fibrosis families and children would be so interesting and compelling to someone out there that the seemingly never ending witch hunt by the NIH, Emory University, and the Yerkes Primate Center would be neutralized.
In between meetings and seminars, raising four kids, and the hunt for a job, Wallach chopped wood and broke up cast iron bath tubs with a sledge hammer for scrap metal. He had to vent his anger and frustration on something. It was the best time of his life and at the same time the worst time of his life. Until that low point, Wallach had been so engrossed in doing his science and working on the book, that it never occurred to him that the truth could be suppressed and that personalities controlled science rather than truth! Wallach finally gave in; he knew he had been “black-balled” forever—it was over, and he had to move on. The egos in the NIH, Emory University and the Yerkes Primate Center had cinched the noose tight around his neck. It was as if the days of witch hunts, torture, hangings, and being burnt at the stake had returned.
It was time to call John Troxel. John, of course had been correct in his assessment of the reality of Wallach’s plight, but he wanted Wallach to figure it out for himself. John was not surprised when Wallach called. He only asked, “What took you so long?”
Wallach confessed to John that he had been correct all along, “I didn’t believe you at first, but I do now.”
John came back with, “I understand, Joel. It doesn’t make sense to you that I’m right, but unfortunately I am. Anyway, that’s neither here nor there right now. The important thing is to do something about it. I have a plan up my sleeve that I think will work. Give me a couple of days, and I’ll get back to you.”
What John did was to hire the services of the most prestigious public relations firm in Illinois that he could find. The “chosen ones” had been involved with the political campaigns of every senatorial and presidential candidate to come out of the state of Illinois. John explained the history, circumstances, and the current status of Wallach’s situation, and asked them to come up with a plan of action that would bring the matter to the largest possible public audience. In return, John would write a check for $20,000.
When Wallach learned of how much money John was investing in him, he asked, “John, $20,000, are you mad? Twenty thousand dollars is one year’s salary! I’ll never be able to repay you!” “Don’t worry Joel, I’ll get my money’s worth. You and I are going to have some fun together,” he said with an impish chuckle. Wallach was dumbfounded. Why would John spend $20,000 just to have some fun?
“Listen, Joel. The money is my problem,” John said. “Your job is to get your act together. Have every detail at your fingertips. Be prepared to answer every question, counter every accusation. Know your facts, figures, dates, people, places, and put your story into the best possible format. You do that and I’ll do the rest!”
Wallach again asked John if he thought the plan would really accomplish anything. “Even if it doesn’t work 100 percent it will accomplish something dramatic and spectacular, so get your act together and be fully ready when I call you.”
A Blitz of Attention: Wallach Tries to Convince Others of the Truth of His Findings
In August of 1978, Wallach found himself in the middle of a media blitz that would have made any presidential candidate envious. The cyclone started at the legendary New York City Waldorf Astoria Hotel. Every TV network was there. Every news wire service was represented including the UPI and the AP. Medical reporters and writers from every newspaper and magazine had been invited. Media kits which included a three-page rendition of the basic cystic fibrosis story of the discovery with a picture of Wallach with one of the cystic fibrosis monkeys, and a copy of the original Emory University news release from March of 1978 was handed to each attendee. Wallach gave a stellar half-hour presentation with slides explaining the value of being able to create an animal model for the study of cystic fibrosis, and why it was a necessary step towards solving the unsolved mystery of the terrible childhood disease.
The next day was spent in the 21 Club for lunch with the medical writer for the UPI news wire service and answering phone calls that had been generated by the TV network’s airing of the cystic fibrosis story the night before. The story as Wallach and the public relations firm had written it appeared in 1,700 newspapers around the world as a result of being picked up by the UPI news wire service.
The new TV magazine 20/20 contacted Wallach and wanted to arrange a segment for an upcoming program. A lecture circuit was set up and scheduled. Wallach lectured around the country at the invitation of the individual state chapters of the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation and cystic fibrosis support groups. The meetings took place in hospital auditoriums, hotels, and civic centers. Wallach lived with families that had had one or more cystic fibrosis children. He ate with the cystic fibrosis families and patients, interviewed the parents, looked at their bowel movements, their blood laboratory test results, their chest X-rays, and examined them. After a few weeks into his schedule, he knew everything he needed to know to prevent and cure cystic fibrosis—the rhesus monkey findings were correct!
TV 20/20 sent out a production crew to follow Wallach’s lecture circuit. They filmed his lectures in VA hospitals, university hospitals, and to support groups in home living rooms. They interviewed CF families. The 20/20crew was friendly, but it was obvious they were just going through the motions. Wallach felt that they were actually hoping for protests by doctors and they were extremely disappointed when nothing negative really happened. It was almost like screaming into the wind.
The 20/20 experience was Wallach’s first adventure with the investigative TV news media; he wore his heart on his sleeve and was very open and honest with them. When the 20/20 cystic fibrosis story was finally aired, he was surprised to see that more than fifty percent of the story and air time was devoted to the orthodox view of CF being a genetic disease . . . a view that Wallach had completely discredited.
The anti-selenium view on the 20/20 airing was presented by the director of the National Poison Control Center in Denver, an MD/PhD toxicologist. It was 1978, and the fact that selenium had been declared an essential nutrient had been known in academic and scientific circles since 1957, twenty-one years earlier. The medical director of the National Toxicology Center actually declared on national television that the trace mineral selenium was toxic, so toxic in fact that “he wouldn’t give it to a pregnant woman or healthy baby, let alone a sick child with CF.”
Even though the net presentation of the 20/20 program was south of neutral, Wallach received thousands of inquiring calls and thousands of inquiring letters. The people wanted to know! The general public and CF families were thirsty for information that might help their children. They were all ears! It was immediately obvious that Troxel was correct something was going to happen!
The scientific community and the established dogma had actually been a roadblock to progress—certainly the practices of banning, torturing, hanging, burning at the stake, and being drawn and quartered by four lunging horses was nothing new in the world of science and medicine.
Wallach lectured in twenty American states, and he was invited to Zurich, Switzerland, and Rome, Italy, to lecture to cystic fibrosis families. Cystic fibrosis was the same disease in Zurich, Rome, and in all of the American cities he visited. By the end of August 1978, Wallach had accumulated all of the published material ever written on CF and had become the holder of all of the known information (right or wrong) about CF. He knew cystic fibrosis!
The dilemma for the proponents of the genetic theory of disease transmission for CF was that the clinical presentation of CF, even with CF patients in the same family, will rarely exhibit the same form of the disease. In a family with three CF children, one might exhibit major pancreatic symptoms, one might have liver disease, and the third’s major complaint might be severe lung disease and might die of a cardiomyopathy heart attack. The cystic fibrosis story had the same problem as the Arctic fox story at the Brookfield Zoo: when you have several different birth defects occurring in the progeny of the same male and female they cannot be a genetically-transmitted disease. They can only be caused by a congenital nutritional deficiency of the embryo.
Additionally, cystic fibrosis was theorized to be transmitted by “the most classic form of a simple Mendelian recessive gene” in white Europeans. It was further theorized that one in four humans had the recessive gene lurking in them. In what Wallach regarded as a fourth-grade biology test of the theory he looked for and found were the statistics for CF babies who were born to a mother and father couple who were both CF patients themselves.
If the simple recessive gene theory for the transmission of CF was in fact correct, then one hundred percent of babies born to CF couples would, by all of the known facts of classic Mendelian genetics, be born with cystic fibrosis.
The outcome of this simple fourth grade study was astounding! Out of all of the thousands of babies born to such couples only one had been born with CF! Another problem the geneticists had was when couples were made up of one CF patient when the numbers of CF babies born should statistically come out to one out of four. But the results didn’t match the theory. It was impossible for CF to be genetic!
Wallach’s experience and training he accumulated at The Center for the Biology of Natural Systems put his experience and thinking way ahead of the accepted knowledge of the day that the established cystic fibrosis experts “knew” cystic fibrosis was genetically transmitted because that’s what they were taught; supposedly they knew how to “read the language of cystic fibrosis.”
Wallach, on the other hand came to the table as an empty slate and untainted by dogma. As a result, he “knew” that CF was not a genetically-transmitted disease, and “epigenetics” was born! Sir William Bragg said quite accurately, “The important thing in science is not so much to obtain new facts as to discover new ways of thinking about them.”
Wallach knew that cystic fibrosis was not a genetically-transmitted disease, but rather it was a congenital or perinatal defect caused by a deficiency of the trace mineral selenium in the mother. The deficiency of selenium caused a disruption of the metabolic activities in high-production and high-energy tissues such as pancreas, liver, heart, and lungs.
There were three other pieces that were put into the puzzle over time: (1) as people moved around the country the levels of nutrients in food, including selenium, varied and resulted in the “spontaneous” reversal of a positive sweat test; (2) varying degrees of rate of appearance of symptoms and severity of the clinical disease; (3) gluten intolerance affects percentages of absorption of various nutrients, so those mothers and CF children who also had a gluten intolerance would have a different presentation of clinical CF than those who didn’t have a gluten intolerance (you are not what you eat—you are what you absorb).
The excitement over the CF discovery was growing, although Wallach was still out of a job. Telephone bills, traveling, airfares, restaurants, baby sitters, and feeding four kids soon depleted Wallach’s meager financial reserves and he was dead in the water, so to speak. He returned to Missouri and again worked for his father loading trucks while he figured what to do.
Game Change: Wallach Discovers Naturopathic Medicine at the National Health Federation Annual Convention
The media campaign generated a phone call from Clinton Miller of the National Health Federation. The NHF was a consumer advocacy group that supported alternative views on health that encouraged the use of vitamins and minerals to prevent and reverse disease.
Miller spoke up and said, “We’re having a convention in Chicago. There will be thousands of people in attendance who will want to hear your story and message. We’d like you to be a featured speaker. The NHF supports people like you, people who have been downgraded for finding and revealing the truth.”
Miller continued with, “The convention is going to take place at the newly opened McCormick Center where the facilities are fabulous, and we’re expecting a record crowd!”
Wallach was very honest as he lamented, “I would be very honored Mr. Miller, except that I’m broke. I couldn’t afford the trip.” “Don’t worry about the money,” Clinton chirped, “We’ll take care of your expenses and pay you a $500 honorarium.”
The NHF annual convention in Chicago was like nothing that Wallach had ever seen. There was an exhibit hall with hundreds of exhibitors. They were a motley crew that included purveyors of water filters, rebounders, vitamins, minerals, herbs, algae, crystals, books, videos, and beads. There were belly dancers, drummers, singers, Tibetan monks “Ohming,” massage therapists, chiropractors, and iridologists. There were vegetarian, vegan, and organic food booths of every description: tofu, rice, spices, carrot juice, and blue corn chips. The scene was right out of an ancient Persian bazaar. The only thing missing was the sword swallower.
The lectures took place in various ball rooms. Typically there were as many as eight to ten lectures going on simultaneously. As a featured speaker, Wallach gave his presentation in the main ballroom when there were no other competing lectures. At the appointed hour the room was packed with literally thousands of excited people!
Wallach’s presentation lasted about an hour, and he received a standing ovation at the end of his lecture. He felt like the “ugly duckling” who had found a home full of like people. They wanted to hear and know what he had to say! It was a wonderfully positive experience. Wallach, the ugly duckling of science, had been transmuted into a swan!
There was a refreshing reasonableness about these people. They came to the event with a sincere desire to listen and learn. There were no egos, biases, or preconceived notions bogging them down. That NHF lecture turned out to be a milestone and a turning point in Wallach’s career.
Prior to the NHF convention, Wallach had never before addressed a large, receptive public audience. Previously, his audiences had been groups of ten to one hundred professionals, who were scientific people, veterinarians, and medical people or pathologists who had come together for some high-level nutrition or pathology seminar or workshop on nutrition that was given at the DNA, biochemical, and mitochondrial levels.
Meeting with Dr. Gerhard Schrauzer and Other Illustrious Scientists
A few days after returning to Missouri, Wallach received a phone call from Dr. Gerhard Schrauzer, Chairman of the Department of Chemistry at UCSD. Through reviewing the selenium research, Wallach had become very familiar with Dr. Schrauzer’s work with selenium and his association with Dr. Klaus Schwarz, the scientist who in 1957 had shown that selenium was an essential nutrient. These two men were Wallach’s heroes.
Dr. Schrauzer is to selenium what Linus Pauling is to vitamin C. Dr. Schrauzer had read the UPI story about the discovery of the CF monkey and Wallach’s subsequent termination when he connected cystic fibrosis to a selenium deficiency. Initially, Schrauzer was not totally familiar with all of the relationships between cystic fibrosis and a selenium deficiency, but he was angry when he learned Wallach was treated badly and had been summarily terminated without the opportunity to defend his research.
Schrauzer invited Wallach to come to La Jolla, California, and speak to a small but illustrious international group including several Nobel laureates that was scheduled for the following week. Dr. Schrauzer, as program chairman, would guarantee Wallach the opportunity to defend his findings and his theory despite the last-minute arrangements—and all expenses would be paid in advance by UCSD!
Wallach went to California, and at the University of California, La Jolla Campus gave a thirty-minute presentation to the most educated and the most critical scientific audience with expertise in the fields of chemistry, genetics, and nutrition he had yet encountered. The cystic fibrosis information was well received and he was encouraged by all to pursue the work “because the truth needed to be exposed to the light of day.”
Dr. Schrauzer stated that if Wallach didn’t pursue the cystic fibrosis information himself it could be as long as one hundred years or more before the concept of a congenital selenium deficiency as the cause of CF surfaced again. Wallach felt as though he had been handed a mission, and that his observations had been vindicated and recognized as a valid concept by some of the top scientific thinkers in the world. After all, if Wallach’s thinking was totally out of the realm of reasonable certainty, Dr. Schrauzer would have been honest enough to tell him that he was wasting his time.
The National College of Naturopathic Medicine Portland, Oregon: Understanding Naturopathic Physicians and What They Do
Another opportunity arose out of the Chicago NHF conference. As it happened, there were several members of the board of directors (Jim Sensenig, ND, Bruce Canvasser, ND, Jerry Schlesser, ND) of the National College of Naturopathic Medicine from Portland, Oregon, in attendance. The school had a booth at the expo and the board members were there to recruit students and faculty members.
Wallach had never heard of a naturopathic physician or ND. He didn’t know who they were or what they did, so he visited their booth, asked questions, and picked up their literature. Wallach became interested because the naturopathic physicians were fully licensed as primary care physicians in the state of Oregon.
Naturopathic physicians in the state of Oregon could deliver babies, do surgery, write prescriptions, and practice acupuncture. They primarily differed from the MD community because of their strict adherence to the philosophy: “First, do no harm.”
While American medical doctors claim to believe in this same philosophy according to their Hippocratic Oath, many patients are harmed by their often unnecessary surgical practices and dangerous experimental prescriptions for illness. In contrast to this, patients under the care of naturopathic physicians first offer choices of therapies that have a very low risk of injuring people, and perform surgery and prescribe medicines only when absolutely necessary.
The NCNM board members were very excited about Wallach’s background in pathology, nutrition, and teaching so they struck up a conversation. They attended Wallach’s one-hour lecture, where he showed slides that featured a known nutritional-deficiency disease in animals and then showed slides of the same disease in humans, making the connection between nutritional-deficiency diseases in animals and humans. The board members took Wallach out to dinner, where the conversation became more animated when they learned that he was looking for a job.
Wallach was invited to give a lecture on nutrition at the October 1978 annual meeting of the Oregon Association of Naturopathic Physicians (OANP), a learning event where the NDs could get some of their continuing medical education (CME) credits for licensure. He was to recount the cystic fibrosis story and cover as much general nutrition as possible in a two-hour presentation. This request was not a problem as Wallach had slides of hundreds of deficiency diseases. Again, expenses were to be paid and an honorarium was to be given. Wallach still didn’t quite know what a naturopathic physician was exactly, but they wanted to listen to what he had to say, so two months later he was off to Oregon.
Wallach was given a tour of the NCNM campus, including clinics by the dean, board members, and licensed naturopathic physicians. NCNM, established in 1957, was the oldest functioning naturopathic medical college. The classrooms and clinics were housed in the historic Postal Building in downtown Portland. The NCNM campus was small in terms of infrastructure, minimally equipped, and was hardly what Wallach was used to at the large university campuses where he had been a student and taught and did research for the NIH and the National Science Foundation.
Wallach was shown an architect’s rendering for a new campus and had lunch with board members and members the teaching faculty. The faculty included PhDs, pharmacologists, MDs, cardiologists, NDs, and administrative types. The entire group seemed to be genuinely interested and supportive of Wallach’s views of nutrition and the ability of supplements to prevent, treat, and reverse disease. Wallach was treated as a celebrity, which endeared them to him.
An ND is a primary care physician who is regulated by a state medical board, in the states that allow them to be licensed physician, much the same as an MD is. A naturopathic physician can examine patients, diagnose, and treat all diseases; deliver babies; perform surgery; get a DEA number; write prescriptions for pharmaceuticals; perform acupuncture; prescribe herbs; practice homeopathy; perform manipulation, physical therapy, and counseling; and by Oregon law must be reimbursed by health insurance for their services.
In Oregon the “orthodox” allopathic medical profession looked upon naturopathic physicians as strange offshoots of old-time medicine bordering on quackery. In turn naturopathic physicians look upon the “orthodox” medical community as uncaring, arrogant, heavy-handed upstarts who over-prescribe pharmaceuticals with harmful side effects, perform unnecessary and dangerous surgery out of greed, and deliver unnecessary and dangerous chemotherapy and radiation out of ignorance and greed.
In 1978 five states licensed naturopathic physicians as primary care physicians. In 1999, Oregon, Washington, Alaska, Montana, Arizona, Massachusetts, Connecticut, Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, and the District of Columbia licensed NDs as primary care physicians.
The naturopathic physician had a reduced scope of practice in many other states because of powerful medical lobbies, and in the state of Tennessee by constitutional amendment NDs can’t practice health care in any form.
Naturopathic physicians were often prevented from delivering babies in states where midwives were allowed to deliver babies. In some states NDs were not allowed to puncture the skin to draw blood or deliver acupuncture therapy, where any eighteen-year-old off the street with three hours of training could be a phlebotomist and draw blood for any clinic or hospital.
The naturopathic audience was an eclectic collection of students at various levels of their studies, academic staff from the college, and practicing naturopathic physicians. They were fascinated by the presentation approach of showing slides of the known nutritional-deficiency diseases in animals paralleled with the same diseases in humans. It was an enraptured audience—they were very interested in nutritional-deficiency diseases in humans. They demonstrated their approval of Wallach with a standing ovation at the end of the presentation. Wallach was in a groove and seemingly among kindred souls; the ugly duckling was starting to look more like a swan again!
Dr. Joel Wallach Finds His Groove and Vigorously Pursues a New Profession
After the presentation, Wallach was approached by the chairman of the board of directors of NCNM, the dean of students, and the school president. This time the offer was for a job as an instructor in nutrition. They wanted Wallach to teach nutrition at the college and create a series of four courses that covered nutrition for each of the four years of the naturopathic medical curriculum.
Wallach had reached a professional juncture. Should he totally give up on twenty years of orthodox university-level research and associations with the main stream of science and join this maverick band of healthcare professionals and tarnish his background previously steeped in publication of basic research and credible university connections? Then he remembered what Dr. John Troxel had said, “Joel, they will never let you back in.”
Wallach accepted the offer of a teaching position at NCNM with one proviso: Wallach wanted to be able to take courses towards completing an ND degree at the same time that he was teaching. He didn’t see any problem since he had done it before at the University of Missouri, Iowa State University, and Washington University.
The task of setting up a series of four sequential nutrition courses of increasing detail and difficulty would be second nature. By no means would it be the first time that Wallach had lectured to a group of highly educated and motivated professional students.
Wallach’s ultimate goal was to be able to treat cystic fibrosis patients as soon as possible and get the message out to the cystic fibrosis community that Wallach had cutting-edge information to help them reverse their disease and prevent the occurrence of additional cystic fibrosis patients by employing a gluten-free diet and the supplementation of a complete nutritional supplement program spiked with additional selenium to young women still in their child-bearing years (particularly those that had already produced a cystic fibrosis child).
After a brief closed meeting, the board approved Wallach’s request and asked that he be in place and ready to teach by January 1979. They projected that by taking courses part time that Wallach would be able to complete his ND degree in six to eight years. The process seemed too long for Wallach as he was already thirty-eight, a widower, and the single father of four small children. He didn’t say anything out loud, but he knew he would have to speed up the process.
Wallach showed up for work on the 26th of December 1978. The weather was bad. “Black ice” had ravaged Portland for a week; he let some air out of his tires and arrived safely at the office to find that he was the only one there except for a secretary manning the main office phone and the school president, Dr. Jim Sensenig. There was no hubbub of students yet, and in the quiet he went to work. Wallach asked for and got advice and guidance on how to pursue courses with the goal of becoming a licensed ND as soon as possible.
By December 31st, Wallach had completed the outline of the necessary courses, ordered the required textbooks, and was ready to go, even though the classes didn’t begin until January 4th, 1979.
Wallach dug in and began to prepare course outlines for naturopathic nutrition 101, 102, 103, and 104. He put together the lectures, presentation slides, hand-out materials, and ordered a small supply of textbooks for the students in each of the course levels.
Wallach remained in the Missouri Air National Guard; however, he transferred his unit drill location to the Oregon Air Guard in Portland for convenience. He was promoted to the rank of major and was eventually promoted to Lt. Colonel and transferred to the Alaska Air Guard to fill their need for an environmental health officer to deal with chemical warfare and NBC (Nuclear, Biological and Chemical) warfare response.
Next step was for Wallach to formally apply to be a student, fill out the forms for the curriculum committee, transfer all relevant transcripts for the various universities and completed course work, and request an advanced student status so he could also begin his residency immediately and concurrently. The goal was to begin treating cystic fibrosis kids as quickly as possible.
Two weeks later the curriculum committee had approved Wallach’s advanced-standing status. His years of clinical work with animals, his international acclaim as a comparative pathologist, his previous university course work in the basic sciences of both human and veterinary medicine, and his publications in peer-reviewed journals all contributed to the committee’s justification of accepting his transcripts, transfer credits, and granting his advanced student standing concurrently with his residency.
He attacked the massive load of triple-academic projects and family responsibilities with the same military approach that had been so successful in getting him through the University of Missouri agricultural school, veterinary school, and comparative pathology simultaneously.
Wallach immediately began to see patients in the NCNM clinic under the supervision of staff clinicians and senior and graduate students. He visited and toured several private clinics until he found two practicing naturopathic physicians who were willing to take him under their wings and allow him to sit in on their patient visits. One practitioner was a woman (Dr. Lori Marzel), the other a man (Dr. Brian MacCoy) affording him the different gender perspectives.
Within weeks, Wallach was delivering babies under supervision, performing office surgery, and preparing and connecting IV drips under the watchful eyes of his mentors. During his fourteen years as a veterinarian, Wallach had already mastered most of the common clinical and laboratory diagnostic skills. The exciting part was that he was observing the treatment of human diseases with nutritional and herbal formulas. After a short period of time, the supervising doctors began to ask for Wallach’s opinion and even employed some of his veterinary nutritional formulas for their patients.
“Compressing and Condensing” were Wallach’s watch words for negotiating through and finishing his naturopathic training as quickly as possible—nothing was left out or cut short; he simply had to the same amount of study and work as any other student in a shorter period of time. At 38 years old, he simply couldn’t spend another eight years as a student!
In order to compress and condense his requirements, he commonly would be taking classes on one subject while an examiner for another subject would sit beside him with sets of a hundred microscopic slides for identification of normal tissue for the human histology class, or slides on human diseases for basic pathology courses.
Wallach would successfully identify 100 percent of the normal and disease tissues while taking notes and passing tests for the lecture being attended. Having been a comparative pathologist for over fourteen years, and having reviewed literally millions of normal and diseased tissues for both animals and humans through the microscope over the years, rendering the exercise was a simple feat. Employing this method Wallach was able to successfully get equivalent and/or transfer credits for veterinary and human graduate classes in physiology, public health, microbiology, parasitology, animal and human neuroanatomy, basic surgical technique, medical biochemistry, pharmacology, toxicology, basic courses in clinical laboratory and history of medicine, and was allowed to test-out of gross anatomy, histology, basic and advanced pathology, and all four courses in nutrition.
In addition to the whirlwind schedule of testing-out out of some courses and pursuing advanced clinical study, Wallach had to physically attend and take courses in the history of naturopathic medicine, internal medicine, cardiology, pharmacognosy (the understanding of herbs and methods of extracting the active principals of herbs for medicinal use), herbal medicine, basic and advanced obstetrics, surgery (which Wallach helped to teach), Chinese medicine, acupuncture, homeopathy, orthopedics, pediatrics, EENT, advanced clinical diagnosis, physical therapy, residency, and internships.
The result of this intense program of intellectual warfare was a halving of the projected time-frame for Wallach’s graduation as a naturopathic physician, cutting eight years down to three and one half. The academic naturopathic community was in shock. Wallach had passed by the academic level of other instructors who had been on the same track of teaching and studying to be a naturopathic physician who’d started several years before him.
The academic naturopathic community was typically laid back. Most were ten to fifteen years younger than Wallach, were vegetarians, and weren’t as motivated to just get on with the program. Not only was Wallach ten years older; he was connected to the military and a habitual hamburger eater. His colleagues saw him as being less “spiritually elevated” than they. Soon they gave Wallach the nick name of “Conan the Veterinarian.”
Wallach always had clinical duties on the weekend because no one else would take it. If they were assigned the weekend clinic duty, they would just skip out! As a result Wallach probably saw ten times the number of patients as the other residents. Once each month Wallach, also had his weekend National Guard drill, which ended early in the afternoon just when his clinic responsibilities started. He would get permission to leave twenty minutes early, go through the McDonalds’ drive-through and get a quarter pounder. Arriving at the student conference room in military fatigues, eating a hamburger, and reviewing patient charts simply confirmed their view that Wallach was in fact “Conan the Veterinarian.”
Wallach Sets Up His Own Clinic of Licensed Naturopathic Physicians
In 1981 Wallach purchased a small clinic in Canon Beach, Oregon. He paid licensed naturopathic physicians to operate the clinic on his behalf and to supervise his activities as an advanced standing student (which also sped up the completion of his residency requirements).
Wallach adapted many of the veterinary nutritional formulas that he had learned at the University of Missouri to employ on his human patients. It was no surprise to him that the veterinary nutritional formulas did in fact work on humans just as they did in animals. Perhaps the most popular of these formulas was “Dr. Wallach’s Pig Arthritis Formula.” There were no pigs in the Pig Arthritis Formula, but the formula came from a nutritional program that was designed to prevent and reverse arthritis in pigs (the original Pig Arthritis Formula has been updated and improved as the “Healthy Bone and Joint Pak”).
Seventy-five percent of all Americans over the age of fifty get one type of arthritis or another to some degree. According to the Centers for Disease Control, somewhere between 35 million and 50 million “Baby Boomers” had arthritis in the year 2010, and there is not a single medical treatment designed to prevent or cure arthritis; in fact many doctors will tell their patients that arthritis is a genetically-transmitted disease, there is no way that cartilage can be regrown, and that the only medical answer is the use of pain-relief medication, injections of genetically engineered stem cells that will relieve pain, and ultimately, in the end, joint replacement.
Aspirin doesn’t fix arthritis, and it can cause gastric bleeding and death. Tylenol doesn’t fix arthritis, and it causes 40,000 cases of kidney failure in the United States each year, 5,000 of which are so severe that the patient is given a kidney transplant. Advil, Ibuprofen, and Aleve don’t fix arthritis and their use can cause liver disease in five to ten percent of the users. Methotrexate and gold shots don’t fix rheumatoid arthritis and they can subdue your bone marrow to the point where it can’t produce red blood cells, white blood cells, and platelets. Prednisone and cortisone don’t fix arthritis either, and they can cause the patient to get type 2 diabetes and precipitate diseases far more horrible than arthritis—these steroids actually speed up the bone-loss process and will produce osteoporosis and fractures and type 2 diabetes.
When these over the counter and prescription drugs fail to relieve pain and inflammation any more, the orthopedic surgeon will say, “The only treatment left for you medically is joint replacement surgery.”
In July of 2002, the New England Journal of Medicine published an article, the title of which was “Knee Replacement Surgery for Arthritis is Worthless.” In November of 20006, the Journal of the American Medical Associationpublished an article, the title of which was “Back Surgery for Sciatica is Unnecessary.”
Elizabeth Taylor had three hip replacement surgeries. How many hips did Elizabeth Taylor have? Despite being attended to by “the best orthopedic surgeon in Hollywood,” she still developed compression fractures. Elizabeth Taylor needed Dr. Wallach’s Pig Arthritis Formula or the Healthy Bone and Joint Pak!
Wallach researched various veterinary nutritional formulas that were designed to prevent and cure arthritis in pigeons, turkeys, dogs, cats, horses, cows, pigs, sheep, lions, tigers, and bears and adapted several of them to human use. Cartilage, ligaments, tendons, connective tissue, and bone itself were predictably regrown regardless of the person’s age.
Wallach has seen cartilage and bones regrown in thousands of human patients. In the 70s and 80s, Dr. Wallach’s Pig Arthritis Formula was a mix of twenty to thirty pills and capsules containing gelatin (collagen), minerals, trace minerals, amino acids, and vitamins. The pig arthritis formula worked like a charm. It was as predictable as gravity; however many people felt that the formula was too inconvenient to take twenty to thirty capsules and tablets two to three times per day.
In 2010 Wallach produced the Healthy Bone and Joint Pak, which contains 245 nutrients (including 115 fruits and vegetables) and the 90 essential nutrients. This program is primarily liquid and contains only three omega-3 soft gel capsules per dose. Cartilage can be regrown by supplying the nutrients (i.e., the raw materials) necessary to turn on the genetic script and support and promote maintenance and repair—that’s epigenetics!
Dr. Wallach Graduates and Fights to Save Naturopathic Medicine in Oregon
In 1982 Wallach graduated as a naturopathic physician from the National College of Naturopathic Medicine. This was also the year for the “sunset review” process for naturopathic medicine, a review that took place every eight years for all healing professions in the state of Oregon. It was a constitutional process that allowed the state legislature to examine not only naturopathic medicine, but also allopathic medicine, osteopathic medicine, pharmacists, chiropractic medicine, traditional Chinese medicine, dentistry, nursing, physician assistants, midwifes, veterinarians, etc.
The sunset review process was originally instituted to reaffirm the proper training, professionalism, proper skill level, and licensing process in an effort to protect the citizens of the state of Oregon. The sunset review process had been going on for almost seventy-five years following the1914 Flexner Report; however, in 1982 the political environment in the healing arts in Oregon was such that all of the licensing boards banded together and recommended the “sun setting” or de-licensing the naturopathic physicians.
The week before the state of Oregon’s sunset committee’s up or down vote on the very survival of naturopathic medicine in America, it was learned that the results of the review had already been decided: it was to be “thumbs down,” and would be the death of a profession that had offered an alternative to allopathic medicine since the Declaration of Independence was signed in 1776! It appeared that the prediction of Dr. Benjamin Rush (a signer of the Declaration of Independence), in the form of his worst nightmare, was about to come true:
“The Constitution of this Republic should make special provisions for medical freedom as well as religious freedom. To restrict the art of healing to one class of men and deny equal privileges to others will constitute the Bastille of medical science. All such laws are un-American and despotic.”
A team of naturopathic physicians was formed to visit the state legislature and lobby the members of the sunset committee to inform them on the usefulness of NDs for the people of Oregon and, in effect, remind them that the naturopathic profession provided a high-quality health service for the people of Oregon for more than seventy-five years, and that as the oldest of the Naturopathic colleges, NCNM, the Harvard of Naturopathic medicine, was accredited by the U.S. Department of Education, and over the years had graduated more naturopathic physicians than all of the naturopathic colleges and universities in America combined.
The naturopathic physician’s team that was sent to beg the sunset committee for a reconsideration of their decision and preserve naturopathic medicine for the people of Oregon was made up of practitioners, members of the board for licensing naturopathic physicians, professors from NCNM (including Wallach), and fourth-year naturopathic students.
As Wallach and the other members of the team visited the offices of the members of the sunset committee it was obvious that there was a serious problem. Every member of the sunset committee gave a brief audience to the team, but they all gave the same response: “naturopathic medicine in Oregon was going to die that afternoon and nothing could change the decision of the sunset committee chairman. Had Wallach come all the way to Oregon and worked so hard to become a naturopathic physician, and in the very month of his graduation and attainment of a degree in naturopathic medicine, have the naturopathic profession executed before his eyes?
At that point Wallach insisted on getting a visit with the chairman of the sunset committee, and after a lot of gnashing of teeth the chairman grudgingly agreed to receive two members of the naturopathic team, but no one else wanted to go to see the chairman for fear of being blamed for the loss of naturopathic medicine in Oregon, which would necessarily mean the closure of NCNM.
Wallach then proposed that Dr. Jim Sensenig and Wallach be the messengers and ambassadors for the profession, and with great relief all of the members of the naturopathic team voted “yes.” At the appointed hour Wallach and Sensenig appeared in the committee chairman’s office. The chairman was a stern-faced Vietnamese man in his fifties. He waved us into his office, folded his arms over his chest, leaned back in his chair and said, “Well, I can save you a lot of time; there is nothing you can say that will save naturopathic medicine in Oregon—it is dead, there is no appeal!”
A dead silence filled the room. Wallach looked at Sensenig who seemed in shock, so Wallach spoke, saying, “At least you owe it to us to let us know what terrible thing has happened to cause the sunset committee to sunset naturopathic medicine in Oregon, which in effect would kill naturopathic medicine in the entire country.”
The chairman laid his chest across his desk, stiff and wide-eyed, stretched out his right arm and pointed his finger at Wallach and yelled, “You’re all a bunch of God-damned draft dodgers. My son was a green beret who was killed in southeast Asia and naturopathic medicine is dead.”
Wallach responded, “Is that all? What if it is not true that naturopathic physicians are all draft dodgers? Will you give us time to prove our case?” The chairman said, “I will give you fifteen minutes to prove your case!”
Wallach and Sensenig gathered up the naturopathic team in the capital lunch room and identified those who were military veterans:
Joel Wallach, Lt. Col Air Force – newly licensed naturopathic physician, professor of Nutrition, NCNM
Jim Sensenig, U.S. Army – Dean of Students, NCNM, licensed naturopathic physician
Jim Massey, Capt. U.S. Army – fourth year naturopathic student
Bill Henry, U.S. Navy – member of the Board of Naturopathic Physicians, the State of Oregon, licensed naturopathic physician
Don Walker, U.S. Army – Chairman of the Board of Naturopathic Physicians, the State of Oregon, licensed naturopathic physician
Each veteran who had their military identification card gathered themselves and returned to the chairman’s office for their final plea. The team of naturopathic military veterans introduced themselves to the chairman and displayed their military identification cards. After examining each of the identification cards, the chairman began to weep. After he composed himself he asked, “Why do the medical doctors hate you so much?” To which Wallach stated, “Mr. Chairman, it is a turf battle between MDs and NDs for the hearts and minds of the people and patients of the state of Oregon.”
The chairman pondered for a brief moment and pronounced, “Don’t worry gentlemen, naturopathic medicine will not be destroyed this day. Because of your military service you have changed my mind and you have prevailed!”
The Saga of “The Book” Finally Ends and It Is Published
Over the years, Wallach ended up with all 28 chapters of the book. “The Book” had become his book by default! Wallach said at the time that “There are a lot of people smarter than me, but there are few who are as persistent or who are willing to work as hard as me to complete a project.” As Carroll Cann, the W. B. Saunders editor predicted, all but one of the 28 original book contributors except for Wallach had fallen ill, died, or gave up in exhaustion.
Twelve hundred pages, two thousand illustrations, hundreds of editorial meetings, 25,000 autopsies, 10 million chemistries, 10 million slides with special stains and eighteen years later, Wallach finished it! In 1983 the tome entitled The Diseases of Exotic Animals was finally finished. The book represented 20,000 animal (454 species) and human autopsies and tens of thousands of clinical cases.
To sell the book at $140 each, W. B. Saunders insisted that Wallach add the name of a clinical veterinarian as a co-author of the book and add an obvious clinical subtitle to enhance sales. There are far more clinicians than pathologists in the world. Wallach was to get 90 percent of the royalties and the clinical veterinarian ten percent. Wallach chose Dr. William Boever, a former intern of his at the St. Louis Zoo; Boever retired thirty years later, having worked his entire professional career as the clinical veterinarian at the St. Louis Zoo.
The book, The Diseases of Exotic Animals: The Medical and Surgical Management, is found in every veterinary school and medical school library and in the private library of every veterinarian, wildlife expert, and zoologist and by 2013 copies were being sold on the internet at prices that ranged from $400 to $10,000 depending on the condition of the book.
Wallach had hoped that the 23-year collection of nutritional-deficiency truths and their relationship to human disease in the book The Diseases of Exotic Animals would precipitate a revolution in healthcare. Instead it has become a tome, a reference book so massive that no one can afford to update the project. It is a classic that any academic professional would be proud to have authored and published, but it didn’t stir the medical profession to incorporate nutrition into their treatment protocols. The public, of course, is almost entirely unaware of the book’s existence, so no healthcare revolution could be expected from that quarter either.
Getting the Message About Nutrition Disseminated to the Public to Change Healthcare in America
Wallach had done his best. He had been educated using tax-payer’s money to the tune of $7.5 million, and he had used the best science to publish peer-review and refereed articles in respected scientific journals, published reference books, and contributed chapters to multi-authored text books on the subject of nutrition and nutritional deficiencies. In fact he was now by definition and diverse experience and training a “polymath”; however, he still felt that he had not been successful in reaching his goal of changing human healthcare in America for the betterment of all. He knew that he had to find another way to be more effective in getting the message disseminated to the general public. What would Paracelsus, Pasteur, Darwin, and Mendel do?
In 1990 Wallach, along with his wife Dr. Ma Lan, published an article that reported the details of 1,700 autopsies of Chinese children under the age of twelve years who had died of Kheshan disease hypertrophic cardiomyopathy, a known selenium-deficiency disease. The purpose of the study was to see if cystic fibrosis (theorized to be a genetic disease of eastern European children) occurred in the study group. Wallach had discovered the first non-human case of cystic fibrosis in a rhesus monkey which was proved to be caused by a congenital selenium deficiency, and he believed that if his initial work was correct and that cystic fibrosis was a selenium-deficiency disease, then a certain number of Chinese children who had died of Kheshan Disease (a known selenium-deficiency disease) would have cystic fibrosis as well as cardiomyopathy.
The results of the Wallach/Ma Lan Chinese Kheshan disease study was profound: 35 percent (595) of the 1,700 cardiomyopathy cases also had confirmed cystic fibrosis lesions of the pancreas, lungs, and liver and surprisingly one hundred percent exhibited the classic lesions of muscular dystrophy of the heart!
Although Wallach believed that he knew the cause, prevention, and cure of human cystic fibrosis in 1977, the “truth” laid dormant until 2003, when a small girl (Sydney Myer) who at two years of age was presented to Dr. Wallach as a cystic fibrosis patient who was seriously ill. Sydney was placed on a strict gluten-free diet and given the 90 essential nutrients and extra selenium. Within weeks she was symptom free.
Wallach first worked with the Lancaster County, Pennsylvania Amish community in 1993 where one of his first Amish pediatric cases was a small six-year-old boy who was born with muscular dystrophy. The boy was so weak that he moved through the house holding onto furniture or rolling like a log from one room to the next using his head and neck to propel himself. Wallach placed the child on a nutritional program and a supplemental program that was made up of the 90 essential nutrients and extra selenium.
Upon his return to Lancaster County three months later, Wallach was lecturing in a community church building on a hot August night. Lacking electrical power, the front and back doors of the church were open. Well into the lecture a group of small boys ran from the front door though the main isle of the church and out the back kicking a soccer ball, and in the lead was the six-year-old boy who had apparently completely recovered from muscular dystrophy.
In 2012 Wallach was contacted by Deborah Ramsey, who had a nephew (Skyler Colli) born in Italy with cystic fibrosis (Italy screens all newborn children for CF, MD and many other “genetic” diseases) and asked if Wallach had a program that could help the baby. Wallach recommended the 90 essential nutrients with an emphasis of extra selenium appropriate for body weight and a gluten-free diet.
The “genetic marker” for cystic fibrosis is a positive sweat test, which is the abnormal readings of electrolytes in sweat. After three months on the Wallach protocol Skyler’s positive sweat test converted to normal, according to hospital records!
In 2005 Wallach teamed up with Marvin Ropp, a retired Navy SEAL. Ropp had been raised Amish in James Port, MO. At age eighteen he handed his team of horses over to his brother, shaved his beard, and joined the U.S. Navy. After retiring from the navy, Ropp joined Dr. Wallach’s program to solve a personal fertility problem and to save the Amish colonies from exploitation by the medical system.
Wallach gave a nutritional program and a supplemental recipe to Ropp and his wife designed for infertile couples and stated, “after ninety days you will be a pregnant couple.” After three years of being childless Ropp was quite skeptical, but the pregnancy occurred in four months, and Ropp decided to join the Wallach team and take the health message back to the Amish community.
Ropp pointed out to Wallach that “the Amish were being used as an ATM machine” by the medical system claiming that many diseases that afflicted the Amish communities were genetic.
Certain communities of Amish, Mennonites, and Hutterites had extremely high rates of cystic fibrosis and muscular dystrophy. Some families had children with both cystic fibrosis and muscular dystrophy.
Ropp’s ability to speak Amish Dutch and interface with the Amish culture allowed Wallach to work with Amish children suffering from cystic fibrosis and muscular dystrophy. Over a period of five years it became evident that there were several factors involved in the genesis of cystic fibrosis and muscular dystrophy.
Almost every mother of a Kheshan disease (hypertrophic cardiomyopathy), cystic fibrosis, and or muscular dystrophy child has clinically significant gluten intolerance. The families live in a geographical location that is known to have selenium-deficient soil (by actual university assay); the culture has a high-grain diet (eaten by the Amish, Mennonites, Hutterites, Kheshan Chinese, Mormons, Seventh Day Adventists, etc.) and they typically do not supplement with selenium.
Over a period of five years, using dietary changes to eliminate gluten (in wheat, barley, rye, and oats) and supplementing the cystic fibrosis and muscular dystrophy afflicted children and young adults with the 90 essential nutrients plus high doses of selenium, children rapidly improve and became symptom free!
In December of 2013, Wallach was notified that a four-year-old Amish boy in Indiana who had had several positive sweat tests for cystic fibrosis was brought back to the pediatrician after months on a gluten-free diet and that Wallach’s protocol (90 essential nutrients spiked with extra selenium) and produced a perfectly normal sweat test. His previously positive “genetic marker” had been reversed and he had become a normal, cystic fibrosis free child.
Wallach’s muscular dystrophy data was sent to Jerry Lewis in 2010 to see if he wanted to be the person to make the announcement, “In fact we now know the cause, prevention, and cure for cystic fibrosis and muscular dystrophy.” Violet, Mr. Lewis’s assistant, acknowledged that Mr. Lewis had received the data in both e-mail and hard copy format and would review the material. We did not want money from the Muscular Dystrophy Foundation; however, it felt right to offer the opportunity to Jerry Lewis to make the announcement that the cause, prevention, and cure of muscular dystrophy had been found and proved in clinical trials to be correct—in fact the cure for MD had been found for “Jerry’s Kids”!
Mr. Lewis, it seems, took the data to the medical committee of the Muscular Dystrophy Foundation, but they refused to review the data and fired Jerry Lewis for insisting that they interview Wallach and Ropp to see if there was any validity or value that might benefit “Jerry’s Kids.” They fired Jerry Lewis!! They sent him on a cruise to prevent him from being available to reporters who would inquire as to why he didn’t for the first time in twenty-two years participate in the MD Telethon to raise money to find the cure for MD and Jerry’s Kids.
In 2013 Todd Harrison, a 24-year-old muscular dystrophy patient from Stockton, California, reported to Wallach that he had been on Wallach’s protocol for muscular dystrophy for six months, and through the Internet he had documented his clinical improvement through regular video updates on Facebook. He had attracted 2,700 muscular dystrophy patients and families who were following his progress, and many had opted to follow Wallach’s protocol for the reversal and prevention of muscular dystrophy.
Before starting on the Wallach Protocol, Todd could do 30 curls with a five pound dumb bell in three minutes with his left arm. After one year on the Wallach Protocol he could do 30 curls with the five-pound dumbbell with his left arm in 33 seconds, and his walking gait is significantly improved.
Todd, his mother, and her brother, David, (who also had muscular dystrophy) formed a not for profit organization called “Defying Muscular Dystrophy.” By the time they had met Wallach, they had raised $50,000 for a FDA approved study that looked at a medical device that was an electronic muscle stimulator used for the purpose of toning up weak muscles in muscular dystrophy patients.
Layne Chavez, an 18-year-old young man, introduced himself to Wallach at a Long Beach, California Health Expo, started on the Wallach Protocol for Muscular Dystrophy, and in six months went from being wheelchair-bound for eight years to riding an adult tricycle on the street.
In July of 2013, Wallach was appointed as the Chairman of the Scientific Advisory Board for the not-for-profit Defying Muscular Dystrophy organization.
In 1994 Wallach began to use KSCO, a Santa Cruz, California AM radio station, to broadcast an interactive talk show to spread his message of self-help and supplementation of the 90 essential nutrients to prevent and reverse human diseases.
The radio show was called “Dead Doctors Don’t Lie” after the s uccessful launch of an audio cassette of the same title. The introduction started with “Hello, welcome to Dead Doctors Don’t Lie. This is Dr. Joel Wallach, your host, a veterinarian and physician . . .” It wasn’t long before the county medical association launched a lawsuit to charge Wallach with unlawfully using the word “physician” to identify himself.
Wallach obtained a certified copy of his degree from NCNM declaring him as a graduate naturopathic physician and a certified copy of his current Oregon license declaring him a licensed naturopathic physician in good standing. The lawsuit was dropped, and Wallach was never again harassed by the medical community of California, and in 2005 the state of California passed the Naturopathic Practice Act allowing the licensure of Naturopathic Doctors in the State of California. Dr. Wallach’s California license number is 061.
In 1997 Wallach was contacted by Lauren Knievel, the niece-in-law of Evel Knievel (the famous dare devil). She was two and a half months pregnant, and her embryo had been diagnosed with Down syndrome at the two and one half month stage by both an amniocentesis and an ultrasound by two separate laboratories. She wanted to avoid an abortion that many were recommending.
This was the first time that Wallach had to answer the question, “can the embryo be saved and the Down syndrome ‘gene defect’ be reversed?”
Wallach answered that he didn’t know; he had never been asked before to intervene in an early pregnancy to save an embryo. He told her, however, if she wanted to try, he was willing to try and would do his best.
Wallach knew that they must work quickly, as the window of time that would allow a reversal of such a ‘genetic defect’ may have already passed. Wallach put together a formula of all the known 90 essential nutrients and the very day that Lauren Knievel posed the question, “Can the gene defect that caused the Down syndrome in her embryo be reversed?” she began to consume the 90 essential nutrients.
Lauren Knievel’s baby was born a full-term perfectly healthy baby—the Down syndrome “genetic defect” had been reversed!
In 1996 Theo Ratliff, a 28-year-old NBA basketball player, was told his career was over. Theo at a young age had bone-on-bone arthritis in both knees, the cartilage on his right hip had popped off, and the orthopedic surgeon for the Atlanta Hawks stated that the injury required surgery to replant the cartilage. His right wrist was broken catching a pass during a regular season game, and the orthopedic surgeons for the Atlanta Hawks said, “We can’t sign off on Theo. He’s too much of a risk— he’s too fragile to play professional NBA basketball.”
Theo was cleaning out his locker in the Hawks’ training facility when he heard Mike Glen, “The Stinger,” the legendary guard for the Hawks talking to another player about rebuilding his own knees with Wallach’s supplement program (Glen had regrown his knee cartilage in both knees after retirement and had declared, “I could have played for five more years if I had known about Wallach’s program earlier !”). Ratliff walked over to Glen and asked if he thought that Wallach’s program could also help him. Glen replied in the affirmative, and Glen started Ratliff on the program. Ratliff passed all of the physicals, and the next season he was given a $40 million contract with the Portland Trail Blazers! In 2012 Ratliff finished his professional career of sixteen years after three years with the Los Angeles Lakers.
In 1998 Wallach was giving a lecture in Salt Lake, Utah, to a room packed with 300 eager attendees, when during the question and answer period, a man enquired about his mother who had been declared legally blind for eight years as a result of chronic macular degeneration, and he asked, “Can anything be done to restore my mother’s eyesight even though she has been declared legally blind as a result of macular degeneration?”
Wallach replied, “Macular degeneration is easy to prevent and easy to reverse with a dietary change and a complete supplement program that includes a heavy antioxidant approach, as macular degeneration was due to the accumulation of “ceroid lipofucin,” a pigment caused by free radical damage to the retina of the eye.” Immediately a man jumped in the back of the room and yelled, “Wallach, you’re a liar! I am an eye doctor and there is no way that you can prevent or cure macular degeneration, as it is due to aging and there is no way to prevent or cure it.”
Wallach Asked, “Who are you?” To which the doctor replied, “I am Dr. Ronald Pugh.” Wallach then challenged Dr. Pugh, “Give me twelve of your macular degeneration patients who have been legally blind for eight to ten years, and if I can get half (6) to be able to read 20/20 in ninety days, will you apologize?”
Dr. Pugh responded, “If you can get two out of twelve to be able to read 20/20 in ninety days I will apologize!” The next day Dr. Pugh brought a box full of twenty-seven charts of patients who had been declared legally blind for eight to ten years because of macular degeneration. Wallach took all twenty-seven, gave each his 90 nutrient/antioxidant program for macular degeneration, and in ninety days all twenty-seven could read 20/20 and only two required glasses! Dr. Pugh kept his word and produced an apology on a CD entitled, “Seeing is Believing!”
Later in 1998, Wallach was introduced to Elaine Iagotta, who was diagnosed ten years earlier with primary sclerosing cholangitis, a form of liver cirrhosis that caused the death of NFL great Walter Payton, and for which the preferred medical treatment was to install stints into the bile ducts to prevent them from being crushed by scar tissue and surgically remove as much damaged liver as possible until a liver transplant became necessary. Iagotta had had 12 major liver surgeries at the Harvard Teaching Hospital prior to meeting Wallach and was on the liver transplant list.
Wallach put Iagotta on a gluten-free anti-inflammatory diet and added the 90 essential nutrient supplement program spiked with selenium and mega doses of B vitamins. In sixty days she had regrown her liver to normal size, canceled the plans for a liver transplant, and went back to a normal life.
A presentation was scheduled at the Harvard Medical School Campus to share Elaine Iagotta’s story with the faculty who were quite familiar with her plight. In spite of individual invitations to the faculty, not a single one appeared for the event.
Wallach continued to give 300 free lectures each year to spread the information about nutrition and how it could reverse diseases thought to be genetic by the medical system. This allowed Wallach to have an interface with the general public throughout the world and have the opportunity to treat the untreatable with nutrition.
Wallach had been giving hundreds of lectures in Canada for over fifteen years, and in 2008 he was in Moose Jaw Canada giving his standard lecture when on this occasion a couple approached him before the meeting started and asked for help. The wife did the talking as the husband was in the advanced stages of Parkinson’s disease. The man’s name was David Dietrich, and he had a severe total body palsy that was unremitting. David was a very wealthy man; however, his doctors had essentially given up on him and were in a hospice mode “waiting for the inevitable.”
By the time Dietrich had shown up Wallach had successfully treated numerous people with multiple sclerosis, ALS, and Parkinson’s disease. Dietrich was a big man, weighing 260 pounds, and thus required a rather large amount of nutrients to achieve the desired effect.
In addition to the 90 essential nutrients (Dietrich was dosed for a 300 pound human), Wallach administered products to increase brain circulation and increase energy conversion in the brain, and he administered nutrients that were the raw materials for the brain to manufacture neurotransmitters and nutrients that increased antioxidant power.
In addition to the supplement program, Dietrich was admonished to avoid trans-fatty acids, heterocyclic amines, and acrylamides to stop ongoing damage, and he was instructed to eat at least twelve to fourteen poached eggs each day to provide raw materials for the rebuilding of myelin.
Three months later Wallach returned to Moose Jaw Canada for follow-up meetings, and Dietrich showed up at the meeting. He was excited, energetic, and totally symptom free! He thanked Wallach profusely and introduced him to the regional directors for Sun Life of Canada, who had come to meet the doctor who had wrought Dietrich’s miracle recovery, as they thought that “Wallach had hypnotized Dietrich into thinking he was cured.”
When Wallach asked the Sun Life representatives, “Would you consider paying doctors for following the nutrition program that reversed Dietrich’s Parkinson’s disease?” the Sun Life representatives replied, “There is no way we could do that, even though it would save us money; the doctors would drive their patients to other insurance companies.”
In 2008 Wallach was lecturing in Gary, Indiana, and upon return to his hotel at 1:00 AM., he was met in the lobby by Pastor Tyrone Crider and his wife Regina. Crider stated that he was referred to Wallach by Martin Luther King III. The two men had been roommates at Morehouse College as young men and Wallach had helped Martin with his own health challenges. Crider, six feet tall and weighing 300 pounds, was suffering from coronary artery disease, hypertrophic cardiomyopathy, and congestive heart failure. Additionally, he had many complications, was on 27 prescription drugs, and had been getting a half-day full physical (for which he paid $5,000 cash for each physical) every Friday for three years “to be prepared if a heart becomes available.”
Inspecting the 27 prescriptions, Wallach noted that three of them were different diuretics (water pills, including Lasix) with three different modes of action, yet Crider’s chest and belly were full of fluid which made him breathless and unable to walk five feet without holding on to the backs of chairs and stopping to catch his breath. This meant that he was probably having an absorption problem and could not even absorb the prescriptions.
Wallach put Crider on a gluten-free diet, eliminated all inflammatory foods (fried foods, oils, processed meats, etc.), and put him on a supplement program (90 essential nutrients, selenium, amino acids, and mega doses of B-complex vitamins) for a 300 pound man. One week later Crider went for his regular weekly physical.
On the following Friday, Crider’s cardiologist called his wife and asked to have Crider to return to redo the physical as they felt they had mixed his lab work with some other person’s lab work and admonished her not to give her husband any medications, and, “Oh, by-the-way send an additional $5,000 cash.”
On re-examination, Crider’s cardiologist took him off of all 27 prescriptions and took him off of the heart transplant list after only five days on a diet change, and Wallach’s 90 essential nutrients!
Later in 2009 Wallach was giving lectures in Cook County Illinois near the town of Naperville when he received a call from a man who identified himself as Joey Levy. He said he and his brother Steve wanted to take him out to lunch because the information on Wallach’s Dead Doctors Don’t Lie audio cassette had helped his brother reverse “an inoperable and terminal seven centimeter aortic aneurism with the 90 essential nutrients” and they wanted to take Wallach out to lunch to thank him.
Joey sent a limo to pick up Wallach and his four-member staff and related the story. After the dinner, Joey’s brother asked what he could do for Wallach in return for saving his life, to which Wallach replied, “Fire your doctor.” Steve called his secretary Christina and instructed her to fire his doctor of 20 years, upon which Wallach said, “We are now even.”
In 2013 Steve Levy had a physical that included an angiogram, as he historically had had a ninety-eight percent blockage of the main descending coronary artery. The results of the angiogram showed that his artery was 100 percent clear and open!
In 2010 Wallach was giving lectures in Poplar Bluff, Missouri, and through a mutual friend he was invited to meet with Dr. Jerry Murphy for a breakfast. Murphy owned Gama Labs, a large medical laboratory that provided analytical services for thousands of hospitals and medical offices throughout America each day. Murphy was afflicted with serious brittle and uncontrolled type 2 diabetes.
Murphy, as the owner and operator of a large interstate medical laboratory, had access to the most highly trained endocrinologists, the most cutting edge diabetes research, and the most advanced medicines, was in trouble—he just couldn’t get his diabetes under control and stabilized.
Murphy said that he would give Wallach a chance to “show his stuff,” and if it worked they would be best friends and he would put his staff on Wallach’s 90 for Life nutritional program and self-insure for only the serious catastrophic diseases. If Wallach failed, Murphy said he “would be determined to destroy Wallach and roast him before medical groups everywhere.” Wallach agreed to Murphy’s challenge without hesitation, which literally startled Murphy.
To make a long story short, Wallach put Murphy on his standard “Healthy Blood Sugar Pak” appropriate for his body weight, admonished Murphy to do a fasting blood sugar test each morning before he medicated himself, and told him to contact Wallach every two months with his fasting blood sugar and A1C lab results.
Murphy followed Wallach’s instructions and had his blood work duplicated by several of his own laboratories under a false name so that the results would not be tainted and so that one test result could be compared with the result from another lab.
Jerry Murphy’s Blood Sugar and AIC Test Results
It was obvious to the most ardent critic that Wallach’s program had reversed Murphy’s diabetes. And in keeping his part of the agreement, Murphy put his employee’s on Wallach’s nutritional program and self-insured Gama Labs, which saves Murphy’s Gama Labs millions of dollars each year!
In February of 2012 Debbie Ramsey, one of Wallach’s associates, called and informed him that her sister who lived in Italy had given birth to a small boy named Skyler, who had a positive sweat test (“the genetic marker for cystic fibrosis”) during the standard screen at birth for genetic diseases by the Meyer University Hospital. She asked if there was anything that could be done for her nephew.
Wallach recommended a gluten-free diet and the basic 90 essential nutrient supplement program with extra selenium appropriate for body weight. In April 2012, two months later, a rerun of the sweat test was negative, and in June 2012, two months after that, it remained negative. The diet and supplement program had apparently reversed the “genetic marker” for cystic fibrosis.