Teach your children what we taught our children. The earth does not belong to us; we belong to the earth. All things are connected like the blood which unites one family. Mankind did not weave the web of life. We are but one strand within it. Whatever we do to the web, we do to ourselves. All things are bound together.
—Chief Seattle
From a speech on the environment in 1854, attributed to the patriarch of Duwarnish and Suquamish Indians of Puget Sound
Albert Schweitzer was a musician, philosopher, theologian, physician, and an example of a polymath. In 1912, using his own money, he established a clinic in Lambarene, Gabon, in Western Africa. Within nine months more than two thousand natives had come to see him. Schweitzer gave them quinine for malaria, digitalis for (congestive) heart disease, and salvarsan—the first antibiotic—for syphilis. When patients came to him with strangulated hernias or abdominal tumors, he anesthetized them with chloroform (performed surgery) and treated their pain with morphine. Albert Schweitzer brought modern medicine to a small part of Africa.
Toward the end of both of their lives, Norman Cousins, author of Anatomy of an Illness, met Albert Schweitzer. “At the dinner table of the Schweitzer Hospital at Lambarene,” wrote Cousins, “I had ventured the remark that the local people were lucky to have access to the Schweitzer clinic instead of having to depend on witch-doctor supernaturalism. Dr. Schweitzer asked me how much I knew about witch doctors. I was trapped by my ignorance. The next day the great doctor took me to a nearby jungle clearing where he introduced me to an elderly witch doctor.”
“For the next two hours, we stood off to one side and watched,” recalled Cousins. “With some patients, the witch doctor merely put herbs in a brown paper bag and instructed the ill person in their use. With other patients, he gave no herbs but filled the air with incantations. A third category of patients he merely spoke in a subdued voice and pointed to Dr. Schweitzer.” On the way back, Schweitzer interpreted what they had seen. The first group of patients had minor illnesses that would resolve on their on or for which modern medicine offered little. The second group had psychological problems treated with “African psychotherapy.” The third had massive hernias or extrauterine pregnancies or dislocated shoulders or tumors—diseases (or trauma that) the witch doctor couldn’t treat—so he directed them to Dr. Schweitzer.
Schweitzer described the value of the witch doctor. “The witch doctor succeeds for the same reason the rest of us succeed,” he said. ‘Each patient carries his own doctor inside him. They come to us not knowing the truth. We are at our best when we give the doctor who resides within each patient a chance to go to work.
—Paul A. Offit
Do You Believe in Magic?
By the 1600s it had been known for 1,400 years that blood was “created in the liver, moved outward from the heart toward the extremities, and, in nourishing the tissues, just disappeared there. The heart was also the source of some sort of vital spirit, which in some mysterious way had to do with the blood.”
In 1628 British physician and anatomist Dr. William Harvey announced his discovery of the circulation of the blood, and further reported that the heart was a simple pump that circulated the blood around the body in some form of closed circuit.
Harvey laid out his observations of blood circulation in 80 species of animals in a painstakingly detailed 72-page book written in Latin and titled Exercitatio Anatomica de Motu Cordis et Sanguinis in Animalbus, which is often shortened to De Motu Cordis (on the motion of the heart), or DMC. In his book Harvey noted “(I) pleased some more, others less; some chid and calumniated me and laid to me as a crime that I had dared to depart from the precepts and opinions of all anatomists . . . What remains to be said upon the quantity and source of the blood . . . is of a character so novel and unheard of that I not only fear injury to myself from the envy of a few, but I tremble lest I have mankind at large for my enemies.”
Three book-length criticisms were soon lodged against Harvey, the first in 1630, which was published by a Dr. James Primrose, an English provincial physician and prolific writer. Primrose’s book, with a title longer than Harvey’s (that ended in adversus Guilielmum Harveum) was a “collection of misreadings, misunderstandings, and misstatements” that were easily recognized by a casual reader.
Robert Willis, the translator of DMC wrote in 1878 that Primrose’s book was full of “obstinate denials, sometimes of what may be called perversions of statements involving matters of fact, and in its whole course appeals not once to experiment as a means of investigation” to resolve the controversy.
Primrose wrote, “Thou has observed a sort of pulsatile heart in slugs, flies, bees, and even in squill-fish (a species of shrimp). We congratulate thee upon thy zeal. May God preserve thee in such perspicacious ways . . . Those who mark in thy writings the names of so many and diverse animals will take thee for the sovereign investigator of nature and will believe thee to be an oracle seated upon the tripod . . . I speak of those who are not physicians and have a smattering of the science. But if we read the works of real anatomists, such as Galen, Vesalius, the illustrious Fabricius and Casserius, we see that they have provided us with engraved plates representing the animals they have dissected. As for Aristotle, he made observations of all things and no one should dare contest his conclusions.”
Because of a lack of appropriate technology, Harvey struggled with the question regarding the theorized and unseen connections between the arteries and veins. Four years after Harvey’s death, Marcello Mallpighi, an Italian physiologist was able (with an improved microscope and special stains) to demonstrate that arterial blood does not simply “leak into the tissues, to be collected somehow by the veins,” as was commonly believed. His microscopic studies demonstrated very clearly that there were “capillaries” and that these tiny blood vessels that were of such a small diameter that they could only accept one red blood cell at a time, and in fact they connected the arterial blood stream to the veinous blood stream. Robert Willis stated,“The circuit was, finally, complete, and Harvey could rest in peace.”
During the medieval times, physicians had only a limited number of ways to asses what was happening inside of the living patient. Medical laboratories were not yet commercially available, so they were limited to their senses and observations to arrive at a diagnosis. One generally used technique was the visual and taste examination of a patient’s urine. Doctors who examined urine were affectionately referred to as “piss-prophets.”
Piss-prophets recorded the color and taste of the urine (i.e., the sweet taste indicated diabetes; ammonia odor indicated liver disease; clear colorless urine indicated malabsorption, etc.). In many cases the physician would have the patient or servant taste the patients urine.
Physicians additionally listened to and attempted to translate the sounds (such as thumping, wheezing, whistling, and crackling, etc.) that were generated inside the belly and chest cavities.
In 1761 Dr. Leopold Auenbrugger, a German physician, proposed a method to convert the passive listening technique into a proactive technique. His theory was to tap or percuss the patient’s chest and belly and interpret the echo.
Auenbrugger was able to record and list his interpretation of these percussion echoes: a dull sound indicated chest congestion, and the duller the return sound, the more severe was the state of the congestion. Auenbrugger knew he had made a significant landmark improvement in the diagnostic techniques for the medical practitioner, although he had no thoughts of becoming a legend or medical hero: “In making public my discoveries, I have not been unconscious of the dangers I must encounter, since it has always been the fate of those who have illustrated or improved the arts and sciences by their discoveries to be beset by envy, malice, hatrid, destruction and calumny.”
Ignaz Philipp Semmelweis, who was from what is now the city of Budapest, initiated his medical studies in the medical of Vienna, but he was treated badly by fellow students, so he returned home to finish his training. The environment of primitive facilities and poorly-skilled professors at the University of Pest caused Semmelweis to return to Vienna to complete his studies.
In 1846, by the time Semmelweis turned 28, he was engaged as an assistant to the director of the First Obstetrical Clinic at Vienna’s Allgemeines Krankenhaus (General Hospital). This was a major teaching hospital in “the most forward-looking city in Europe, and it featured the largest lying-in clinic in the world.”
There was an extremely high death rate (13 to 30%) recorded in the women giving birth in the clinic. High death rates were not unusual in European lying-in clinics, and for three years, beginning in 1773, disease ravaged the lying-in hospitals of Europe, reaching a peak in the Lombardy region of northern Italy where “for an entire year, not one woman survived after giving birth in such a hospital.”
The cause was nearly always “puerperal fever” (also called childbed fever), a ferocious infection that blazed up in the mother’s body of the newly-delivered infant and raged through it like a wildfire, killing within days or even hours. Physicians theorized that childbed fever was caused by overcrowding, noxious air (“miasma”), an epidemic disease, or “cosmic emanations.”
In the Second Obstetrical Clinic, another obstetrical wing of the same hospital, the death rate was only two percent. The first clinic was functioning as a teaching hospital for medical students and the second was a teaching hospital for midwives. Semmelweis noted that pregnant women who had mistakenly been admitted to the First Clinic, would drop to their knees and beg to be transferred to the Second Clinic and be delivered by midwives. Physicians regarded the staggering death rate in the First Clinic an “intellectual exercise.” One hardened professor wrote, “The physician should be judged by the extent of his knowledge and not by the number of his cures. It is the investigator, not the healer, that is to be appreciated in the physician.”
The hospital originally opened in 1794. Medical students did not perform their own autopsies and dissections until 1822. It was soon after the awarding of these dissection privileges that the gruesome death rate began. Semmelweis began to suspect that cleanliness, or the lack of it, was related to childbed fever.
Between 1742 and 1758 Sir John Pringle, physician-general to the British army, published papers on antisepsis, infection, putrefaction, fever, and contagion, which he forwarded to the Royal Society. In 1752 he actively promoted the “gospel of cleanliness” in his Observations on the Diseases of the Army. Medical historian Roy Porter, noted that, while Pringle’s writings were not original, they “captured the Enlightenment concern for hygiene, public health and the value of life.”
In 1843 Oliver Wendell Holmes, an American jurist, physician, and writer proposed that infection was the etiology of childbed fever. He described how the infection was “being carried by attendants from bed to bed as rat killers carry their poison from one house to another.”
Semmelweis finally came out and said it, “The hands of the students and the faculty went from the innards of a postulant corpse almost directly into a woman’s lacerated uterus—the raw surfaces left in the mother’s uterus after her child is delivered.”
In 1858 Semmelweis had his first scientific article published, The Etiology of Childbed Fevers, which appeared in a Hungarian medical journal. In 1860-61, Semmelweis, published his “magnum opus” The Etiology, the Concept and the Prophylaxis of Childbed Fever.
In Great Feuds in Medicine, Hal Hellman wrote, “By the middle of 1862, Semmelweis began having what would be described as clinical depression alternating with moments of elation—while he was still able to carry out his responsbilities, he had obvious pre-senile dementia and moments of bizarre behavior.”
In his last weeks of life, “Semmelweis was tricked into going to a Viennese asylum by being told that he was being taken to visit the laboratory of his old friend Ferdinand von Hebra. The three physicians who signed the involuntary commitment papers (required by law) were not trained as psychiatrists, and there were no records showing that they consulted a psychiatrist; there was no record to show that a priest had been requested to administer the final rites and sacraments; and the autopsy record noted major traumatic injuries to the head and body that could only have been sustained during a fatal beating—Semmelweis was dead at age 47.”
Claude Bernard was born on July 12, 1813, in the village of Saint-Julien, in the wine growing region of Beaujolais. As a teenager his family apprenticed him out to a pharmacist as his family could no longer afford to pay for his schooling.
After failed attempts at play writing, Saint-Marc Girardin, a literary critic, suggested that considering Bernard’s pharmacy experience, he should consider the study of medicine. By 1839 Bernard was interning at the Paris municipal hospital where he published a large and beautifully illustrated volume on operative surgery in collaboration with a colleague, M. Huette.
Barnard’s deeper interest leaned towards anatomy and physiology, anatomy being a science that was well-advanced, well-illustrated, and well-respected; however, the science of physiology was a strange mix of theory, myth, and few experimental facts. Physicians would deduce the functioning of a tissue or organ from its anatomy without experiment. For example, oxygen, which had been discovered a century earlier, was known to be a required factor for combustion, and because it was inhaled into the lungs, early physiologist believed that the lungs were the place that sugar is burned to produce heat and energy. It took years of experimentation and publication for Barnard to switch from the support of the theory to showing that energy was produced in all tissues. E. J. Georget, a French physiologist was moved to say, “Nutrition was not a function because it lacks a specific organ (system).”
Vitalism remained a catch-all for the explanations of the functions of life itself, any physiological event that was not understood was held up as an example of the “vital force” which allowed the question to go unanswered.
From 1841 to 1844, Bernard was responsible for the duties of preparateur for Francois Magendie, who was performing vivisection experiments in the medical school of the College de France. Bernard noted, “So soon as an experimental physiologist was discovered he was denounced; he was given over to the reproaches of his neighbors and subjected to annoyances by the police.” The weight of the antivivisection opposition to live animal research plagued Bernard for his entire life—it even impacted his married life. Between 1844 and 1847, Bernard was introduced to and married Marie Francois Martin, the daughter of a Parisian physician, who came along with a dowry which enabled Bernard to continue his research. However, this pursuit left him little to live on.
Unfortunately, his wife “was not prepared, as he was, to live on narrow means, in order that the world might be richer. The life of a prosperous physician’s wife would have been much more to her taste.” To complicate matters, Madame Bernard and one of their daughters spent a considerable portion of their time and funds in antivivisection activities.
Bernard’s research included studies of the physiology of the nervous system, the cerebrospinal fluid, and the location of oxidation in mammals, which led to the understanding of tissue respiration and metabolism and the physiology of digestion. He has been credited with being the first researcher to perform cardiac catheterization to extract samples of blood from a specific vein (the inferior vena cava) by inserting a tube via the jugular vein in the neck and through the heart into the vena cava.
Bernard is also credited with being the first to keep an organ alive separated from the body by feeding it with needed substances. This is now a commonly employed technique termed “perfusion.”
Bernard studied the physiological effects of curare, carbon monoxide, opium, strychnine, and anesthetics. These chemicals were used to study the functions of enzymes and nerves. Through these studies Bernard coined the theory of “internal environment,” as a state in which “all vital mechanisms, however varied they may be, have only one object, that of preserving constant the conditions of life in the internal environment.” This revelation led the eminent Scottish physiologist J. S. Haldane to remark about Bernard’s words, saying, “No more pregnant sentence was ever framed by a physiologist.”
Bernard’s theory of internal environment had far-reaching consequences. In 1929 it led an American, Walter Cannon, to develop the theory of “homeostasis,” the physiological process that maintains the body’s systems in balance in spite of wide fluctuations in both the internal and external environment.
Bernard proposed two theories to support his internal environment concept. One is that “internal secretions” or hormones, which are produced by the ductless glands (pituitary, thyroid, adrenal, testes, ovaries, islets of Langerhans, etc.). The second was about the nerve control over blood flow.
Wallach was a member of the National Science Foundation site visit committee and coauthor of the 1968 Animal Welfare Act that provides for the humane protection and handling of all laboratory, farm, and pet animals, which includes proper space, diet, and care for them, and required the presence of a properly trained veterinarian to be the director of all medical animal research facilities to prevent repeats of past abuses.
Prior to the mid-1880s, no physician had ever cured a disease, causing the medical profession to be held in low esteem, and which produced searing jokes and nasty comments. The periodical Judge stated at that time, “It is to the credit of the intelligence of the medical profession that they do not often make the mistake of taking their own medicines.” A month later, in another issue of Judge, it was said that, “Five times as many ambitious women take to medicine as to law. This contradicts that generally-received idea of the sex that they delight in scandals and qurrels, but abhor cruelty and killing.”
The public was clamoring for help with their personal health problems because the official medical system had failed them. This environment attracted “patent medicines,” some of which were simply a home brew in a bottle with a “Dr. Feel Good” type of label and were sold off the tailgate of wagons. Others were old family recipes that worked, such as that produced by Lydia Pinkums called “Lydia Pinkums’ Vegetable and Herbal Extract for Women’s Complaints,” which was marketed in newspapers for PMS, dysmenorrhea, amenorrhea, menopausal symptoms, and infertility.
Pinkums was a Quaker missionary and had used an ancient Native American herbal recipe as the basis of her patent medicine that was sold through newspaper and magazine adds. This herbal product worked so well the Harvard Glee Club sang songs of her abilities to solve the problems of American women and she became an American icon.
During this same period the press was on the constant look out for exciting headlines to sell newspapers. They would embellish health treatment stories that seemed to work (especially if the huckster would slip the reporter or editor a $20 gold piece). Then there were stories about treatments for serious life threatening diseases that actually worked, such as for the disease of rabies.
The bite of a rabid animal was of great concern. Once the victim began showing signs of the disease, the inevitable litany of horrible symptoms and death was as predictable as gravity. Until Pasteur’s treatment came along, the primitive attempts at a cure included the “firing” of the bite wound with a red-hot poker, which was a traditional medical approach to treating open wounds and to stop bleeding. Sometimes, by dumb luck, the victim survived the bite and the cauterizing treatment, and sometimes they didn’t, and the patient died of the shock of the treatment and/or the ugly and painful symptoms of rabies.
Pasteur’s new rabies treatment brought hope to people all over the world, even in the remote areas of America where people were illiterate. Others would read the breaking news out loud in the church or the town square, shouting “EXTRA! EXTRA!” And newspapers sold “like hotcakes.”
Doctors were looked at differently as a result. The community excitement over the successful rabies treatment and the news coverage was so “in your face” that surviving patients became heroes too. Four young children of an American working class family were sent to Paris on a clipper ship after being horribly bitten multiple times by a rabid dog.
The newspapers, both in America and Europe, reported the ongoing saga. The boys’ photographs and names were in bold print on the front page. Thousands of straining listeners in America followed the story, and when the boys returned home, thousands flocked to attend performances to hear the boys tell their tale.
Equally as amazing as the story that the boys had lived was that the name shouted out as the conquering hero was not a physician. The name of the man was Louis Pasteur who was a wine chemist! Pasteur had already captured the imagination of the academic world and the general public for his work in fermentation and for his destroying the old theory of “spontaneous generation” as the cause of disease by replacing it with the “germ theory” that microorganisms caused disease—not bad air. Pasteur was trained in basic chemistry, crystalography, and was known in the commercial world for saving the wine, beer, milk, and silk industries through a shelf-life process named after him called “Pasteurization.” He was also known throughout the livestock industry for developing vaccines for the prevention of chicken cholera and anthrax, which had nearly destroyed the French poultry and cattle industries.
Pasteur’s wildly successful treatment for rabies was not the first to use inoculation. Edward Jenner, using techniques that he had learned from milk maids and slaves, was able to prevent small pox. This was prevention, not a cure, and people began yelling for a cure for all infectious diseases including typhus, typhoid fever, pneumonia, plague, cholera, diphtheria, and syphilis—a medical revolution against infectious disease had begun in earnest!
One of Pasteur’s biographers referred to him as “the most perfect man who has ever entered the kingdom of science . . . within the limits of humanity, well-nigh perfect.” The Encyclopedia Americana even today states: “His discovery that most familiar diseases are caused by germs is the most important in medical history and one of the main foundations of modern medicine.” More than 100 research institutions are named for him.
Geison, a revisionist historian at Princeton University said: “In controversy, (Pasteur’s) combative self-assurance could be devastating to the point of cruelty. He so offended an opponent, an eighty-year-old surgeon, that the latter actually challenged him to a duel—which, happily for both, never took place.”
Due to this “combustible combination,” Pasteur’s wide range of interests and abilities, contentious personality, and complete faith in his abilities, he found himself embroiled in philosophical wars on many fronts. Some were quite serious, and like Bernard he faced the combined mighty armies of chemists, physicians, naturalists, and antivivisectionists.
During one speech, Pasteur had asked, “Where . . . will you find a young man whose curiosity and interest will not immediately be aroused when you put into his hands a potato, when with that potato he may produce sugar, with that sugar alcohol, with that alcohol ether and vinegar?”
Pasteur was describing the process of fermentation, which proved to be a pivotal moment in his career. When one understands the importance of bread and wine throughout human history it is seen that both require passage through the process of fermentation. Throughout time bakers, winemakers, and brewers had made their livings from fermentation, but did not actually understand what was happening. The prevailing theory even up until the mid-19th century was that the process of fermentation was the result of an inanimate chemical reaction.
Pasteur’s investigations of yeast and bacteria provided the first complete and correct insight that fermentation was produced by the activities of living organisms.
Baron Justus von Liebig, “an arrogant, influential German chemist with a worldwide following and impeccable reputation,” compared Pasteur’s biological theory of fermentation and putrefaction to “the opinion of a child who imagined that the rapid current of the Rhine depended on the movement of the many wheels on the mills on the Main River, which sent the waters towards the city of Bingen.” Liebig was so stubborn and arrogant that he even refused to look into a microscope to view living microorganisms.
In the late 1870s, a famous physician was speaking on the subject of childbed fever at the Academy of Medicine in Paris as he utilized formidable volumes of Greek and Latin terminology to explain the cause of childbed fever as a metabolic disorder. Abruptly, from the rear of the lecture hall came, “The thing that kills women with childbed fever—it isn’t anything like that! It is you doctors who carry deadly microbes from sick women to healthy ones.” The shout came from Pasteur and once again he was up to his neck in controversy and at odds with a thousands year old theory!
Victor Robinson noted, “As severe as been the criticisms of Pasteur by naturalists and chemists, it was nothing compared with the enmity which greeted him when he came among the doctors . . . When Pasteur presented facts, their answer was: Monsieur, where is your MD?”
With his writing of The Origin of Species, Charles Darwin (a polymath) forever changed our concept of the world’s creation and its evolution.
Never has a scientist been so favored by fortune. Darwin came from a line of gifted intellectuals, with great wealth on both sides of his family. He went to the best schools but was a mediocre student. Though he struggled with studies in medicine, and later in his studies to prepare for the ministry that his father insisted on, Darwin was rescued by a professor’s recommendation that he serve as the scientist on the HMS Beagle.
He set off on the five-year voyage, and by the time they reached the Galapagos Islands, he wrote that “we seem to be brought near the great fact—the mysteries of mysteries—the first appearance of new beings on this earth.”
Yet Darwin kept postponing publication of his groundbreaking theory because he feared society’s—and his wife’s—disapproval. Only when Darwin realized that another eminent scientist, Alfred Russel Wallace, was pursuing similar ideas and was about to publish them did Darwin race to produce a popular treatment of the theory.
Paul Johnson, Darwin’s biographer, stated in his book Darwin: Portrait of a Genius, “In what we have seen to be a remarkably lucky life, this was the greatest stroke of good fortune he enjoyed. The Origin of Species sealed Darwin’s fate as the discoverer of the theory.”
The physical crystalline structure of proteins had been mapped out by Linus Pauling just before Rosalind Franklin was hired at King’s College, London in 1951. The brief period leading up to the announcement of the double helix should have been a race between two scholarly teams: Watson and Crick from the Biophysics Unit of Cavendish Laboratory at Cambridge, England, and Wilkins and Franklin at King’s College, London.
Had Wilkins and Franklin been able to get along and collaborate they would have gone down in history as the discoverers of the double helix. The physical chemist and the physicist had both entered the strange new world of biophysics.
The scientific question of the day was “. . . proteins seem to do so many things in the body; could they also be the carrier of heredity? Some scientists thought so. Others suspected the real carrier was a different chemical substance also found in cells: deoxyribonucleic acid, or DNA.”
Pauling had reported that the strength of protein molecules was related to a “helical spine” consisting of alternating phosphates and sugars, which supported a series of small molecules referred to as “bases.” It was these bases that made proteins so reactive and gave them the ability to transmit information. Pauling posited that DNA was a triple helix, however one could not see the structure with a light microscope or even an electron microscope, as the structure was too small and too fragile to survive the preparation process.
Pasteur’s early research with crystals “demonstrated a connection between the crystalline structure of a molecule and the chemistry of a biological molecule.” At the turn of the 20th century, Sir William Henry Bragg, using the fact that X-rays have a considerably shorter wave length than visible light, created a method to employ the regular anatomy of atoms in crystalline molecules to diffract X-ray beams. The process produced a distinctive “finger print” of each individual molecule on a film plate. Bragg’s son, William Lawrence Bragg, cooperated with and supported his father’s research and the two men ultimately shared the 1915 Nobel Prize in physics.
Wilkins had previously done some basic research on crystallography as an undergraduate; however his primary interests were those of a physicist and his work encompassed the tobacco mosaic virus that required some X-ray studies. At the same time, Franklin was invited to King’s to set up an X-ray diffraction laboratory to study DNA. Franklin was told in writing that, “. . . as far as the experimental X-ray effort is concerned, there will be at the moment only yourself and Raymond Gosling and a graduate student from Syracuse” and from that moment she believed that the project was hers.
In the fall of 1951 Franklin was producing streams of X-ray defraction data, at the same time that Wilkins returned with several DNA samples he had acquired in New York. One of the plates produced by Franklin from these DNA samples showed that DNA was a helical structure. When Wilkins looked at Franklin’s plates and noted verbally that it showed that DNA was a helical structure, Franklin, according to historian Robert Olby, “snapped at Wilkins, and (retorted) with . . . Don’t interpret my data for me!” Little came immediately from Franklin’s data, but it was to become the seed of discovery for Watson and Crick one and a half years later.
Crick and Watson met for the first time early in October of 1951. Crick was a graduate student working towards his PhD at Cambridge, where he was doing X-ray diffraction studies on polypeptides and proteins. James Watson was 12 years younger than Crick, although he had received his PhD from Indiana University by the time he was 22 years old studying bacterial phages (viruses). However, he knew little about DNA.
On November 21, 1951, Franklin and Wilkins gave a update on their X-ray diffraction studies at a King’s College colloquium. This data that Watson and Crick later used was presented by Franklin. Using Watson’s understanding of Franklin’s data, Watson and Crick instantly produced a helical model of DNA and they invited Franklin and Wilkins, amongst others, to view it and render their opinions. Franklin, who by then had created her own model, “blasted” the Watson and Crick model and gave a tongue lashing to both Watson and Crick.
Watson and Crick both made an offer that both groups should collaborate on the DNA project but the King’s group “spurned the offer.” Early in 1952 Franklin produced a progress report, which Watson and Crick were able to see. Franklin, theorized that “. . .the bases faced inward and were held in place by the phosphate backbone.” Franklin’s proposal was to prove “an explosive finding,” but not immediately.
Another quirk complicated the story. The four bases paired up repeatedly: adenine bound to thymine and guanine bound to cytosine. This observation was reported and published in 1949 by Erwin Chargaff, an Austrian-American biochemist. In May 1952 Chargaff visited Cambridge and met Watson and Crick, and while there, he brought up his 1950 publication, and he was surprised to find out they had never read his paper.
After Chargaff exposed Watson and Crick to his work on the base-pairing of DNA, Crick noted, “Well, the effect was electric, yet, he also argued that the key discovery, the exact nature of the two base pairs, was Watson’s, and that ‘he did this not by logic but by serendipity’. . . he was looking for something significant and immediately recognized the significance of the correct pairs when he hit upon them by chance. . .”
By the fall of 1952, Linus Pauling was preparing a paper on DNA while at the same time Pauling’s son Peter was working in the same laboratory with Watson and Crick! Peter Pauling begins to get detailed letters from his father from Caltech in Pasadena, California, detailing his own work. It was obvious that a three-way race was on between King’s College, Cambridge, and Pauling at Caltech.
Hal Hellman in Great Feuds in Medicine: Ten of the Liveliest Disputes Ever tells us that Pauling’s passport was taken away in 1952 because “Pauling was suspected of being a leftist, this in the glory days of Joe” and he was on his way to view Franklin’s material in London at a Biophysics Committee progress report to the Medical Research Council. According to Watson in his book The Double Helix: A Personal Account of the Discovery of the Sturcture of DNA Crick learned of the report from Wilkins and inquired if they could see the report when Watson and Crick saw the report, . . . Watson noted, “he would treat me almost as a fellow collaborator rather than a distant acquaintance . . . (Then he told me that) Rosy had evidence for a new three-dimensional form of DNA . . . When I asked what the pattern was like, Maurice went into the adjacent room to pick up a print of the new form they called the ‘B’ structure.
The instant I saw the picture my mouth fell open and my pulse began to Race . . .”
This was the iconic photo, number 51, that Franklin had produced in May, and which was the pivotal piece in the ultimate discovery. It is thought that Franklin never knew that Watson had seen the plate, and she didn’t know that Watson and Crick had additionally viewed her earlier data that clearly outlined the double helix with the bases in the center.
On April 25, 1953, in the British journal, Nature, a 900 word article was published titled “A Structure for Deoxyribose Nucleic Acid,” and that introduced the world to the “double helix” structure of DNA.
The authors, James Watson, an American, and Francis Crick, an Englishman, were immediate heroes. Now, the basics of genetic information coding, and the ability to pass the information on to the next generation, was known—“all of the body’s genetic secrets were suddenly opened for study at the molecular level.”
The medical world now had the tools to, “attack many of its challenges from below—challenges that include not only obvious hereditary diseases like Down’s syndrome and hemophilia, but such problems as cancer, heart disease, and aging as well. Much of what is exciting in biology today—cloning, genetic therapy, DNA vaccines, mapping out the human genome—harks back directly to this work.”
For their part in the discovery and publishing the structure of DNA as a double helix, three men: James Watson, Francis Crick, and Maurice Wilkins were jointly awarded the Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine in 1962.
The Nobel Prize ceremony, officiated by Professor A. Engstrom of the Royal Caroline Institute, highlighted the “profound effect that the discovery has had on all areas of biology . . . He highlighted the artistic nature of the molecule and the creative thinking of the three discoverers who were being honored.”
However, Hellman, in Great Feuds in Medicine, reminds us that “Hovering about, was the ghost of a young woman {Rosalind Franklin}—a dedicated, even heroic, scientist who had died four years earlier, and who, some claimed, deserved at least as much credit (for identifying the double helix structure of DNA) as the three honorees. It was, in fact, on the basis of Rosalind Franklin’s highly specialized X-ray (defraction) studies that the final discovery was made.”
On March 5, 1978, Emory University released the news that a verified case of cystic fibrosis had been discovered by Dr. Joel D. Wallach in a young rhesus monkey that had been raised for NASA—the first case of non-human cystic fibrosis to be identified.
“This appears to be the first animal model of cystic fibrosis, and we’re excited about its implications,” said Drs. Joel Wallach and Harold McClure, veterinary pathologists at the Yerkes Regional Primate Research Center.
The release went on to say, “Since cystic fibrosis is thought to be a genetically (transmitted) disease, there is a possibility that the parents or relatives of the affected monkey (are carriers) and can have additional offspring with cystic fibrosis.”
The discovery came as Dr. Wallach, assistant veterinary pathologist at the Yerkes (Regional Primate Research) Center, was performing a routine autopsy on a six-month old male rhesus monkey that had died of unknown causes. He noticed pancreatic disease and bronchial mucus production; evaluation of the tissue later under the microscope revealed “a classic textbook case” of cystic fibrosis as pictured in human medical literature, the Yerkes scientist said.
Studies of tissue from other organs confirmed that the monkey was indeed a victim of cystic fibrosis, Dr. Wallach said. Dr. Wallach’s diagnosis was confirmed by Dr. Victor Nasar, an Emory pediatric pathologist at Atlanta’s Grady Memorial Hospital and by Dr. John Easterly, pathologist at the Chicago Lying-in Hospital, who is a national authority on cystic fibrosis. They said that the affected animal was bred in a colony of rhesus monkey supported by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration for studies pertaining to the U.S. space program.
“We have here a classic example of serendipity,” said Drs. Wallach and McClure. As a footnote to the news release Dr. James A. Peters, medical director of the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation, which has its headquarters in Atlanta, commented: “We eagerly await the results of Dr. Wallach’s studies because of the importance of an animal model to both basic and clinical research on cystic fibrosis.”
He noted that Dr. Wallach would participate in a May 25–26 workshop in Bethesda, MD, on the animal model for the study of cystic fibrosis which will be jointly sponsored by the U.S. National Institutes of Arthritis, Metabolism, and Digestive Disease and the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation.
On March 22, 2013, James Watson spoke at the Salk Institute and the University of California, San Diego, on the status of genetic engineering, gene sequencing, and the Human Genome Project (of which he was the first director). It was to be a 60-year update on the anniversary of the 1953 DNA structure revelation announcement in the journal Nature. Interestingly enough, this was exactly the 35-year anniversary of Emory University’s announcement of Wallach’s discovery of the first non-human case of cystic fibrosis.
As a result of Emory’s March 5, 1978, news release, a flurry of news articles appeared throughout the United States:
The Tuscaloosa News – March 6, 1978
Cystic Fibrosis Finding Is Hailed
ATLANTA (AP) – A routine autopsy of a young rhesus monkey which revealed what is believed to be the first known case of cystic fibrosis in a nonhuman provides a “great boon” to researchers seeking a cure to the disease . . ..
Since cystic fibrosis is believed to be genetic, doctors say there is the possibility that the parents or relatives of the affected monkey could produce other offspring with cystic fibrosis.
The center said the discovery came as Wallach, an assistant veterinary pathologist at the center, was performing a routine autopsy on a six-month old male rhesus monkey that had died of unknown causes.
Wallach said he noticed pancreatic disease and bronchial mucus production and under a microscope the tissue revealed “a classic textbook case” of cystic fibrosis” as pictured in human medical literature.
The diagnosis was later confirmed by other authorities, including Dr. John Easterly, pathologist at the Chicago Lying-in Hospital, who is a national authority on the disease.
The Telegraph, March 7, 1978
Cystic Fibrosis Uncovered in Monkey Aids Research
ATLANTA (AP) – A routine autopsy of a young rhesus monkey revealed the first known case of cystic fibrosis in a nonhuman and provided a “great boon” to researchers seeking a cure to the disease.
“This appears to be the first animal model of cystic fibrosis, and we are excited about its implications,” said Drs. Joel Wallach and Harold McClure, veterinary pathologist at the Yerkes Regional Primate Research Center at Atlanta’s Emory University, where the discovery was made.
The Albany Herald, March 7, 1978
Breakthrough Reported In Cystic Fibrosis Fight
ATLANTA (AP) – A routine autopsy of a young rhesus monkey which revealed what is believed to be the first known case of cystic fibrosis in a nonhuman provides a “great boon” to researchers seeking a cure to the disease scientists say.
“This appears to be the first animal model of cystic fibrosis and we’re excited about its implications,” said Drs. Joel Wallach and Harold McClure, veterinary pathologists at the Yerkes Regional Primate Research Center at Atlanta’s Emory University, where the discovery was made.
The result of the Emory March 5, 1978 news release created a heady environment where everyone was initially excited and anticipated more detailed information of the cystic fibrosis discovery at the upcoming laboratory animal meeting May 25–26, 1978 at the NIH headquarters in Bethesda, MD.
Dutifully Wallach forwarded the requested abstract of his presentation. By this time Wallach had learned the cause of the cystic fibrosis in the rhesus monkey, an iatrogenic (doctor caused) selenium deficiency and included the information in the presentation abstract. In the middle of April, 1978 Wallach was abruptly terminated from his post and uninvited from the NIH meeting in May.
Wallach, self published his paper on cystic fibrosis and appeared in Bethesda, MD, on the appointed day and handed out 100 copies as the researchers entered the hall, which forced the NIH to allow Wallach to give his presentation as he had been listed on the program that had been mailed out to all of the attendees.
Dr. John Troxel, a fellow University of Missouri graduate of the school of veterinary medicine, funded a news release to bring the general public up to date, which produced another round of heady days with the media:
The Telegraph-Herald, August 24, 1978
Scientist Upsets Cystic Fibrosis Theory
NEW YORK (UPI) – A maverick scientist who found that a mysterious sickness in five monkeys was cystic fibrosis Thursday upset the theory the disease is an inherited disorder – and raised the possibility that environmental factors are the cause.
Dr. Joel D. Wallach of St. Louis said he traced the first finding of the ailment in a primate colony to dietary factors—“supplemental feeding with large amounts of polyunsaturated oil which interfered with normal cell metabolism of the trace elements selenium and zinc, plus vitamin B2.”
It happened late last year at the Yerkes Primate Center in Atlanta and in a colony of research monkeys involved in unrelated investigations for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.
The chance finding, said Wallach, led him to try to produce the disorder in other monkeys through dietary manipulation.
“I think proper investigation could show that cystic fibrosis could be caused, reversed or prevented, “Wallach said.
He said the later experiments were not endorsed by the Center and that the monkeys were removed from his area and then he was fired for attempting the research.
Wallach’s theory says cystic fibrosis occurs prenatally when the mother is deficient in certain trace elements and postnatally when the baby’s diet is disordered.
The traditional theory holds cystic fibrosis is genetically transmitted and seen only in humans.
It is fatal in the majority of cases in infancy. Fewer than half of those who survive beyond that stage live beyond the age of 21.
The Pittsburgh Press, August 25, 1978
Monkey Study Links Diet, Cystic Fibrosis
NEW YORK (UPI) – A maverick scientist who found a mysterious sickness in five monkeys was cystic fibrosis has upset the theory the disease is an inherited disorder – and raised the possibility that environmental factors are the cause.
Dr. Joel Wallach of St. Louis said yesterday he traced the first finding of the ailment in a primate colony to dietary factors – “supplemental feeding with large amounts of polyunsaturated oil which interfered with normal cell metabolism of the trace elements selenium and zinc, plus vitamin B2....
The chance finding, said Wallach, led him to try to produce the disorder in other monkeys through dietary manipulation – a route he said is needed to test his theory.
“I think proper investigation could show that cystic fibrosis could be caused, reversed or prevented,” Wallach said. “And I want to share this information with open-minded physicians and scientists.”
He said the later experiments were not endorsed by the primate center and that the monkeys were removed from his area and then he was fired for attempting the research.
“I was fired on March 5, 1978 with just hours notice,” he said.
Wallach’s theory says cystic fibrosis occurs prenatally when the mother is deficient in certain trace elements (such as selenium) or postnatally when the baby’s diet is disordered . . .
The traditional theory holds cystic fibrosis is genetically transmitted and is seen only in humans. It occurs in one of every 2,500 births and is marked by sticky substances and lesions in the lungs, liver, (pancreas) and other vital organs.
Sarasota Herald-Tribune, August 26, 1978
Researcher Is Fired
Theory On Cystic Fibrosis Is Disputed
NEW YORK (UPI) – A chance finding of cystic fibrosis in research monkeys upsets theory that the disorder is inherited and raises the possibility that environmental factors are the cause, a St. Louis scientist has reported.
Dr. Joel D. Wallach told a news conference he traced the first finding of the ailment in the primates to dietary factors – “supplemental feeding with large amounts of a polyunsaturated oil which interfered with normal cell metabolism of the trace elements selenium and zinc, plus vitamin B2.”
Wallach said other scientists had confirmed that the lesions he found late last year in the sick animals at Yerkes Primate Research Center in Atlanta were similar to those seen in (human) cystic fibrosis.
The veterinary pathologist said he was attempting to cause the disorder in another group of primates at Yerkes, where he was assistant pathologist, when word of his work got to his superiors.
“I was fired on May 5, 1978 with 24 hours notice,” he said.
“Before that I was starting to get some success when my monkeys were removed from my area. I do not know what happened to them.”
“There is no question that this is an interesting theory,” Dr. Harold McClure said when reached by phone. He is the pathologist at Yerkes and was Wallach’s boss.
“It has not been proved or disproved, but I have no intension of pursuing it.”
Dr. James Peters, Scientific Director of the National Cystic Fibrosis Foundation, said, “Wallach has a hypothesis that has not been rigorously tested by scientific methods. He is attempting to explain observations without any scientific backup.”
Wallach received his doctor of veterinary medicine degree in 1964 from the University of Missouri in Columbia. Sponsoring his trip to New York and Thursday’s news conference was a classmate Dr. John F. Troxell, a veterinarian from Flossmoor, IL, who said, “he thinks the theory is worth investigating.”
At this point, much in the same manner as the British naval doctors, who scoffed at the idea that scurvy was connected to diet and continued to look for the “germ” that caused scurvy, even after it was widely known for more than a hundred years that scurvy was caused by some dietary problem related to the consumption of polished rice and that fresh vegetables and fruit, rich in vitamin C, could prevent and reverse the disease that had caused the death of more than two million of British and Japanese sailors; and similar to the deaths of millions of people all over the world from beriberi and pellagra, doctors all over the world continued to look for the “germ” when it was widely known that these diseases were related to the consumption of high corn and polished rice diets, in fact deficiencies of vitamins B1 and B3 respectively; doctors all over the world, even after the discovery of the relationship of cystic fibrosis to a selenium deficiency in primates, continue to look for the “genetic connection” for cystic fibrosis when it is caused by the combination of a gluten intolerance and a deficiency of selenium and can be prevented and cured with the supplementation of all 90 essential nutrients with a special emphasis on the trace mineral selenium—as a result of their self-serving arrogance, millions of children all over the world have died of cystic fibrosis since 1978 unnecessarily.
A year and a half after Wallach’s termination from Yerkes in May of 1978, the denials and lies of the Yerkes staff and the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation became extremely aggressive and they prevented Wallach from getting a position as a pathologist anywhere in the U.S. At this point, what should have been encouragement to prove that the initial findings of cystic fibrosis in the five monkeys were not a fluke, Yerkes, Emory University and the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation invested their energy and reputation in the attempt to destroy Wallach and any future investigation—history it seems was repeating itself.
Times Daily, December 1, 1978.
Yerkes Center Denies Finding Disease Cure
ATLANTA (UPI) – The director of the Yerkes Primate Center Tuesday denied the claim of a St. Louis veterinary pathologist that the center (Wallach) had discovered a cure for cystic fibrosis.
Dr. Frederick A. King said the prestigious center had never even looked for a cure for the disease, one of childhood’s deadliest.
“Unfortunately, there is no known cure for cystic fibrosis,” said King. The national headquarters of the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation in Atlanta also issued a denial the disease could be prevented or cured.
Dr. Joel D. Wallach held a news conference at Northwestern Memorial Hospital in Chicago last weekend to announce that medical science (Wallach) had found the answer to cystic fibrosis.
Wallach said, “The disease (cystic fibrosis), long thought to be a genetic disorder, is caused by a deficiency during pregnancy (and the early post natal period) and can be prevented and cured. He said it also could be prevented by a proper diet and autopsies and tests of thousands of monkeys (their exaggeration) at the Yerkes Primate Research Center in Atlanta supported his theory.
King said Wallach was assistant pathologist at Yerkes in 1977–78 and that during that time the death of one monkey revealed lesions of the pancreas resembling those of cystic fibrosis (in 1978, cystic fibrosis experts including Drs. Victor Nasar, Emory University and John Easterly, Chicago Lying-in Hospital, and Robert Beale, the national Cystic Fibrosis Foundation had all confirmed that the disease found in the initial monkey were in fact cystic fibrosis). He said that whether this single case (there were positive cystic fibrosis biopsies of five additional cases from the same colony) represents or is even similar to cystic fibrosis in humans “remains to be proven.”
King said a few other monkeys housed in the same area were evaluated, “but there was no verifiable evidence of pancreatic or cystic fibrosis-like pathology in these animals (Dr. King’s statement is an absolute lie, classic pancreatic lesions of cystic fibrosis were found in all five biopsies and the inclusion bodies found in the liver of these monkeys, classic for cystic fibrosis from the liver were magnified 126, 000 times through an electron microscope and the electron photomicrographs became the cover picture of Wallach’s book, Rare Earth: Forbidden Cures).”
The Yerkes director said that contrary to Wallach’s claim that thousands of monkeys (their exaggeration) were used in cystic fibrosis research at Yerkes, “no such research on cystic fibrosis has been carried out here. Consequently, we have no evidence of any kind at the Yerkes Center to support his beliefs.”
At his news conference, Wallach said, “the disease was caused by a lack of selenium, a trace element, during the first three months of pregnancy or in the first months postnatal. It can be prevented,” he said, “and also cured.”
Eugene Register-Guard, December 3, 1978
Doctor claims he’s found cure for cystic fibrosis
CHICAGO (UPI) – Cystic fibrosis, a deadly disease of children, long thought to be a genetic disorder, actually is caused by a nutritional deficiency during pregnancy and can be cured, a researcher said Saturday.
Dr. Joel D. Wallach, a St. Louis veterinary pathologist, said the disease is caused by a lack of selenium, a trace element, during the first three months of pregnancy. He said cystic fibrosis can be prevented by proper diet and supplementation of all 90 essential nutrients with a special emphasis on the trace element selenium and can be cured – by surgery in some cases and selenium in others.
Wallach said he has been called a “snot-nosed horse doctor” by geneticists (and medical doctors) because he refuted the 40-year theory that cystic fibrosis is a genetic disorder.
Cystic fibrosis is found in one of every 2,500 children born in the United States. The disease is usually fatal in infancy. Fewer than half its victims live beyond age 21. CF is characterized by defects in the pancreas, male genitals, lungs and small intestine.
Wallach says the key to its prevention and cure is selenium, a trace element found in liver, eggs, kidneys and some varieties of high selenium rice.
“Normal selenium levels in pregnant women will prevent CF,” Wallach said, and tests on thousands of monkeys (their exaggeration) have shown the disease is 100 percent curable when diagnosed within 30 days of birth (actually cure can be accomplished in teenagers and young adults).
He (Wallach) began his work on his theory in 1977 when the disease—long thought to affect only humans—was discovered by Wallach, in five biologically unrelated monkeys at the Yerkes Primate Research Center in Atlanta, where he worked.
CF symptoms in the five monkeys were traced by computer to a deficiency of the trace elements selenium and zinc, and of vitamin B2.
Saraota Herald-Tribune, Sunday December 3, 1978.
Diet Called Key to Cystic Fibrosis
CHICAGO (UPI) – Cystic fibrosis, a deadly disease of children, long thought to be a genetic disorder, actually is caused by a nutritional deficiency during pregnancy and can be cured, a researcher said Saturday.
Dr. Joel D. Wallach, a St. Louis veterinary pathologist, said the disease is caused by a lack of selenium, a trace element, during the first three months of pregnancy. He said cystic fibrosis can be cured – by surgery in some cases and with selenium in others.
Wallach said he has been called a “snot-nosed horse doctor” by geneticists (and doctors) because he refuted the 40 year theory that cystic fibrosis is caused by a genetic disorder.
“It’s mind-boggling that this is true,” Wallach said of his nutritional theory at a news conference at Northwestern Memorial Hospital. “But nothing has said tilt. Everything keeps reinforcing this (selenium deficiency as a cause of CF) . . .”
He began his work on his theory in 1977 when the disease—long thought to affect only humans—was discovered (by Wallach) in five biologically unrelated monkeys at the Yerkes Primate Research Center in Atlanta, where he worked.
CF symptoms in the five monkeys were traced by computer to a deficiency of the trace elements selenium and zinc, and vitamin B2.
Following the revelation that a selenium deficiency caused the childhood disease cystic fibrosis, Wallach continued to investigate selenium deficiency disease in humans. A selenium deficiency could produce liver necrosis (death), liver cirrhosis, pancreatic disease (i.e., CF, pancreatitis, etc.), hypertrophic cardiomyopathy heart disease (in humans, in China, known as “Keshan disease” and in animals known as “mulberry heart disease”), white muscle disease in animals (aka: muscular dystrophy in humans), etc.
After his marriage to Dr. Ma Lan, in 1985, a micro-surgeon who had done research and taught surgery at the Harvard school of medicine, Wallach visited mainland China, Dr. Ma Lan’s native country. In their travels through China, Wallach learned that 13 per 1,000 children in Keshan Provence died of a selenium-deficiency hypertrophic cardiomyopathy heart attack each year and the WHO recognized Keshan Disease as a selenium-deficiency disease.
Although it was believed that cystic fibrosis was an iconic example of a simple Mendelian genetically-transmitted disease and primarily occurred in white Europeans, Wallach reasoned that if selenium deficiency was in fact the cause of cystic fibrosis, then, there would have to be some of the Chinese kids who died of Keshan disease who would also have cystic fibrosis!
In 1987, Wallach and Lan, in a study funded by Wallach’s mother and arranged by Ma’s parents, they went on a tour through Keshan Provence and with the cooperation of Harbin Medical University and in collaboration with researchers at Harbin Medical University, Wallach and Ma showed very clearly that hitherto unrecognized pancreatic, liver, lung and muscle lesions occurred in 35% (595) of 1,700 Chinese children who had died of documented Keshan Disease, the endemic cardiomyopathy heart disease occurring in low-selenium regions of China.
Other researchers have since drawn attention to the aberrant oxygen radical activity and the low selenium and antioxidant status in CF patients. It is now also agreed that selenium deficiency may develop in children leading to CF because of a digestive malabsorption (gluten intolerance) or after prolonged total parenteral nutrition. In addition, a case of cardiomyopathy in a CF patient caused by a selenium deficiency has been described.
The treatment of CF patients with selenium and antioxidant vitamins has also been tested in a human clinical trial:
“In cystic fibrosis (CF) patients, the antioxidative-oxidative balance is chronically disturbed. Free radicals were generated by bronchialpulmonal infection and additionally (there) exists a deficiency of antioxidative substances by enteral malabsorption especially of vitamin E and selenium. For CFpatients, therefore, we recommend a sodium selenite substitution therapy, best in combination with vitamin E.”
On March 22, 2013, the headlines of the Union–Tribune newspaper, from San Diego stated, “(Gene sequencing is not) the solution. The solution is good (bio) chemistry,” and the story went on to say, “Nobel laureate James Watson . . . tells Salk audience gene sequencing to cure cancer (and other diseases is) mostly irrelevant.” Watson continued, “Sequencing genes isn’t proving to be particularly useful in fighting diseases such as cancer (and diabetes).”
To maximize man’s potential for health, longevity, productivity and spirituality we must widen our horizons. The medical system has failed humanity fearfully— to the point that the longest lived peoples on earth are the ones who did not engage or employ “modern medicine.”
By “dumb luck,” the healthiest and longest lived peoples in the world chose to live in places that had optimal levels of raw materials (i.e., the essential minerals) necessary for man to flourish and be long-lived and be productive.
In 2004 a Forbes magazine article stated that the average American billionaire’s life span was 78 years of age and none had ever lived to be 100 years. In a follow-up survey in 2011, Forbes recorded a whopping 12-year drop in the average life span of billionaires to 66 years of age, and Steve Jobs, Apple founder, had died at 56 years of age—10 years short of the average!
As a group, billionaires spend more for health care and fitness than any other group of people, yet they fall far short of the human capacity for longevity because they invest in the opinions of a “highly respected” medical doctor rather than investing in the raw materials necessary for the maintenance and maximization of health and longevity.
In May 2013 the National Geographic published a cover story “This child will live to be 120 years of age.” The article pointed out that the longest living and healthiest peoples, were primitive peoples who were legendary for not having access to modern western medicine. They had no electricity, no access to physicians, health insurance, clinics, or hospitals, and they lived in thatched roof huts with dirt floors. The general conclusion of the article was that the long healthy lives of these people were “either due to genetics or simple dumb luck.” We will bet on the dumb luck, which allows us to collect information regarding the raw materials obtained by these people, which, can then be imported into each home, and then all humans can have the same health and longevity benefits.
In August of 2013 it was reported that Carmelo Flores Laura, an illiterate Aymara Indian from Bolivia actively working as a sheep herder at 13,000 feet elevation, was listed by the Guiness Book of Records as the oldest living person ever documented at 123 years of age. He lives in a thatched roof, mud floored hut without utilities in an isolated hamlet near Lake Titicaca. He tends his sheep on the side of a mountain without the aid of a cane, walker, or wheel chair.
The veterinary industry tripled the life span of dogs over the last 60 years. Sixty years ago, an old dog was eight years old. Today, in 2013, an old dog is twenty-five years of age. Veterinarians have eliminated 900 diseases in dogs that still plague people, and veterinarians have eliminated all birth defects in dogs that still plague humans. The animal industry didn’t do these wondrous things in the animal industry with organ transplants, wonder drugs, stem cells, or genetically engineered proteins. The miracles were produced simply and economically by perfecting the nutritional value of over-the-counter dog food.
There are three principals that must be practiced to the level of an obsession if we are to maximize the optimal health, longevity, and productivity of an individual and their progeny and by doing these things we will assure the survival of the human species:
1. Eliminate acute and chronic damage, both self inflicted and environmental (grow as much of your own organic food as possible).
A. Consume as much organic food, non-GMO food, and fresh foods as possible.
B. Store and have available as much freeze-dried organic food and non-GMO food as possible—include a serving in each meal—get used to it!
C. Drink clean water (slightly alkaline: i.e., 7.5 to 8.5), however, do not drink alkaline water during meals as it will neutralize the essential acid environment of the stomach.
D. Avoid the consumption of processed meats containing nitrates and nitrites and gluten-laden fillers (e.g., deli slices, sandwich meats, sausage, bologna, salami, pepperoni, jerky, hamburger patties, meatloaf, meat balls, canned meats, etc.)
E. Work on being as gluten free as possible, especially if you have symptoms of a gluten intolerance—you are not what you eat—you are what you absorb.
F. Avoid all sources of trans-fatty acids, heterocyclic amines and acrylamides (e.g., oils, burnt meats, super-heated carbohydrates, etc.)
G. Keep sugar (natural and processed) to a minimum.
2. Repair existing cellular, tissue and organ damage through non-hazardous and supportive nutritional and non-pharmaceutical methods.
A. Except for emergencies of great magnitude, avoid doctors as much as possible. Refer to the trilogy of books Let’s Play Doctor, Let’s Play Herbal Doctor, and Passport to Aroma Therapy by Wallach and Ma for self-treatment of minor emergencies and self-treatment approaches to chronic diseases.
B. Avoid surgery as much as possible except for emergencies of great magnitude. Always employ non-invasive tissue supporting methods first. Give self-help 90 days.
3. Establish an ongoing preventive maintenance and repair program by employing an optimal diet and daily supplementation with all 90 essential nutrients and herbs as medicines when appropriate.
A. Employ what might be considered “alternative” or “complimentary” medicine preferentially to avoid unnecessary damage.
Ancient Dietary Traditions
Food, diet and dietary restrictions appear to be the first and perennial basics of ancient attempts at proactively controlling health and longevity. Initially, traditional Chinese medicine (TCM), Ayurvedic medicine, and Naturopathic medicine based their dietary recommendations on the belief that “you are what you eat.” Today we know (Wallach) that “you are what you absorb.”
These early healers knew that the proactive pursuit of certain diets and the avoidance of certain substances, foods and plants would contribute to a more energetic, healthy and longer life.
Ayurvedic Medicine
Ayurveda, is a holistic system of health and longevity that began in India, and is thought to be the world’s oldest system of natural medicine. Ayurvedic medicine is believed to be the early scientific map that birthed Egyptian, Chinese, Greek and Persian medicine. The term “Ayurveda” is derived from veda, meaning knowledge or science, and ayus, meaning life or life span, combined to mean science of life or knowledge of life span. Ayurveda delivers preventative medicine, promoting wellness by the support of mental, emotional, and physical strength.
Ayurvedic medicine sprang from the historical Hindu philosophy and spiritual practices that embraced the “Vedas,” which were initially practiced more than 5,000 years ago. The Vedas were a collection of the ideas and practices of the holy men of ancient India. It is thought that these practices were “divine wisdom” that were employed in the four categories of human conduct including:
1. Self-knowledge
2. Cosmology of the Universe
3. A path to God
4. Physical health
A large cadre of medical scholars, believe that Ayurvedic medicine is the oldest natural health and healing system. This system is based on prana, which is a “vital energy” thought to be required for the maintenance of health and life itself. In the Ayurvedic system, all are blessed with prana. However, it must be protected, maintained, and renewed by each individuals actions, including dietary choices.
An essential practice for the replenishment of prana is a collection of breathing exercises referred to as pranayama and air is believed to be made up of the vital energy of prana.
Ayurveda also teaches that each being is composed of the five basic elements of the universe:
Air
Water
Earth
Fire
Space
Ayurveda teaches that the combination and pattern of these primary elements that individuals are born with is the “fingerprint” of each individuals “constitution.”
In an effort to understand how the human functions, the Ayurvedic system combines the elements into three groups called doshas:
Vata (space and air) – “light and airy”; governs the nervous system; indicative of an active, alert personality type;
Pitta (fire and water) – “flowing fiery”; governs the digestive system; indicative of an aggressive, can-do personality type;
Kapha (earth and water) – slow and strong; governs the bones, muscles, and healing; indicative of a steady, tranquil personality type.
In Ayurvedic medicine, vata, pitta, and kapha are employed in the same manner as Western medicine pigeon holes people into body types known as ectomorph (vata); endomorph (pitta); and mesomorph (kapha). By contrast, Ayurvedic medicine also places psychological, emotional, and spiritual value to each dosha category.
Matching Your Diet to Your Dosha
The Ayurvedic belief of a “personal constitution” is a significant feature of it’s nutritional and medical philosophy. Ayurveda stresses that each individual must put conscious effort into living life in accordance with their constitution. Living contrary to each one’s personality produces an imbalance, a build up of toxins, disturbances of their main dosha, and eventually a deterioration of their health.
Diet is a significant factor in maintaining balance, personal harmony, and health according to the Ayurvedic tradition.
The Primary Ayurvedic Personality Types
|
Vatta (air & space) |
Pitta (fire & water) |
Kapha (water & earth) |
|
Slender & light build |
Hot, sharp, light |
Heavy, cold, oily |
|
Energy in bursts. Walks Quickly, always moving |
Medium strength and endurance |
Energy is steady |
|
Excitability, changing moods |
Irritable when stressed |
Possessive, forgiving, relaxed |
|
Enthusiasm, worries, vivacious |
Intense, ambitious |
Happy with status quo |
|
Irregular hunger, constipated |
Strong appetite, cannot skip meals |
Eats for emotional comfort |
|
Quick to grasp new information |
Bright intellect Precise speech |
Slow and graceful slow to make decisions |
|
Performs activity quickly, loves excitement |
Takes command Enterprising |
Easy going, laid back |
|
Sleep times change, skips meals, insomnia |
------- |
Deep sleeper, wakes up slowly |
From Paul Froemming. The Best Guide to Alternative Medicine. 1998
Foods are divided into their “primary tastes” that are “the six tastes”:
Sweet – sugar, milk, butter, rice, bread, pasta
Salty – salt
Sour – yogurt, cheese, lemon
Pungent – ginger, cumin, spicy foods
Bitter – green leafy vegetables, turmeric
Astringent – beans, lentils, pomegranates
In Ayurvedic tradition, the main meal of the day must include a serving of each of the six tastes. Each taste is used to balance or aggravate the individuals dosha.
Six Tastes
|
Taste that Aggravate |
Tastes that Balance |
|
|
Vata |
Pungent, bitter, astringent |
Sweet, sour, salty |
|
Pitta |
Sour, salty, pungent |
Sweet, bitter, astringent |
|
Kapha |
Sweet, sour, salty |
Pungent, bitter, astringent |
From Paul Froemming. The Best Guide to Alternative Medicine, 1998
The second feature of the Ayurvedic food guidelines is refered to as the “six qualities.” They are linked to direct effects that certain foods have on the human body.
Six Qualities
|
Heavy vs. Light |
Oily vs. Dry |
Hot vs. Cold |
|
Heavy – beef, cheese, wheat |
Oily – soybeans, milk, coconut |
Hot – eggs, honey, pepper |
|
Light – chicken, skim milk, barley |
Dry – lentils, honey, cabbage |
Cold – milk, sugar, mint |
Through a combining of the six tastes, the six qualities and the three doshas, each individual can choose which foods will balance or aggravate each body type.
Traditional Chinese Medicine and Food Therapy
In 1933 The New York Times reported the obituary of Professor Li Chung Yun, a remarkable Chinese man who is said to have died at the age of 256 years. His age was officially recorded by the Chinese government and confirmed by Professor Wu Chung Chich, head of the Chang-Tu University. Li was born, lived, and died in Sichuan Province; Li had outlived 23 wives and was living with his 24th wife at the time of his death.
Authorities at the Minkuo University displayed records of Professor Li’s birth date of 1677 and on his 150th and 200th birthdays he was congratulated by the national Chinese government and issued a certificate on each birthdate to authenticate the event.
Professor Li was an herbalist who grew, prepared, mixed, and sold herbs to his patients. When Li was asked about his secret and personal practices that led to his exceptional longevity, he replied: “Keep a quiet heart, sit like a tortoise, walk sprightly like a pigeon, and sleep like a dog.”
Wallach and Ma would like to know what the mineral analysis would be of the soil that Professor Li lived on and obtained his wood supply for fuel! If Professor Li’s age was in fact correct, the soil would have to be rich in its rare earth content ,as rare earths are known to double the life span of laboratory species. As of May 2012 China’s production of rare earths composed 95% of the world’s production and supply.
The Taoist tradition of health and well-being, which is embraced by Traditional Chinese Medicine, is based on three aspects of life: san bao (three treasures) or san chi (three marvels). The Taoists believe that every human is born with optimal amounts of these treasures (telomeres) at birth, and depending on how well they are managed will determine the individual’s health and how long they will live:
Jing – The physical body and its essential fluids are referred to as jing (essence) or Vitality.
Chi – The vital force that empowers the body and initiates the “life functions” or energy. Energy is the vital force that consciously and unconsciously drives and moves every system of the body.
Shen – All functions of the mind, consciousness and cognition are combined in shen (spirit). To the Taoist, spirit, is in the ultimate meaning of all things is the force of creation.
Vitality or essence (jing) and energy (chi), is evidenced by mental vigor, immunity and resistance to disease, and sexual potency—the bench mark for optimal health in the Chinese mind set is vitality (jing-chi).
Traditional Chinese Medicine philosophy looks at food as a significant factor in an individual’s health. The Taoist believes that the quality of one’s diet, the presence of nutrients in each meal, and the efficiency of digestion and metabolism play a significant role in the “quality” of the bodies two fluids, or essences, that they believe form the foundation of life itself: chi (vital energy) and blood. The Traditional Chinese Medicine concept of health and human physiology is centered on two organs, the stomach and the spleen, which they believe transforms food into chi and blood.
According to Traditional Chinese Medicine, the lack of optimal amounts of the correct foods or an excess of food can negatively impact energy and health. The failure to consume proper amounts of the correct foods produces a deficiency of chi and blood, which ultimately causes various organs to fail. An excess of food produces a stagnation of energy and blood which can result in a stomach disease.
The Taoist nutritional beliefs and science show that inappropriate food choices have a direct negative effect on health. The Traditional Chinese Medicine view is that good food contains essential nutrients that transforms chi into blood and that it also has an impact on the two bioenergetics polarities of the universe—yin and yang.
Yang foods are stimulating and warm and yin foods are calming and cooling. Traditionally, foods are selected to balance the yin and the yang functions and qualities of the body’s organs and also yin and yang status outside the body:
Depression (yin) – use yang foods for balance.
Weather (yin: damp and cold) – use yang warming foods that dry the internal organs.
Fatty greasy foods, alcohol, and sweets produce dampness and heat.
Too much raw food strains the yang of the spleen which produces the condition of Internal Cold and Dampness which manifests itself as abdominal pain and weakness.
Traditional Chinese Seasonal Foods
An additional factor in traditional Chinese food choices and food therapy that have been employed for thousands of years, is the eating of foods that are produced in specific seasons and months of the year (astrology). The yang foods are eaten during the winter for warming, and the yin foods are eaten during the summer for their cooling effects.
|
Yang (warming foods) |
Yin (cooling foods) |
|
Cooked vegetables |
raw vegetables |
|
Tomato sauce |
rice |
|
Kidney beans, lentils |
yogurt |
|
Potatoes |
tofu |
|
Cooked fish |
milk |
|
Garlic |
curry powder |
|
Miso |
sashimi (raw fish) |
|
Molasses |
sugar |
|
Cloves |
salt |
Acupuncture
Acupuncture is a 4,000-year-old therapy that is used today by 1.5 billion Chinese and millions of other oriental peoples. Acupuncture therapy is based on the concept that the human vital energy is distributed to various “points” on and in the body, and when these points are “blocked” disease is the result. These points are thought to be linked to the nerves that connect subcutaneous “meridians” with the internal tissues and organs. It is believed that acupuncture releases blocked energy and restores health by inserting needles into specific acupuncture points and releasing the blockage. Acupuncture is particularly useful for relieving pain and providing low-risk anesthesia for major surgical procedures including abdominal, chest and bone surgical procedures.
Naturopathic Physicians
Naturopathic medicine can trace its beginnings to Hippocrates, and similarly to Ayurvedic medicine and Traditional Chinese Medicine, and is based on the concept that the human body has a “vital force” that must be managed and kept in balance to maintain optimal health.
Naturopathic medicine is a holistic approach to health, meaning the body, mind, and spirit are entities that are of equal weight in managing the state of health of each individual.
A healthy, balanced lifestyle supported by an optimal diet containing all 90 essential nutrients (usually guaranteed by supplementation) promotes a healthy self maintaining body. Naturopathic philosophy engenders the belief that the natural direction of the body’s life energy flows towards preserving optimal health and the cells of all tissues contain the ability to remain healthy, to duplicate themselves and to resist disease under ideal conditions (homeostasis).
The father of modern naturopathic medicine, Dr. Benedict Lust, a German physician who immigrated to the U.S. in 1896, was a supporter of the concept that the body could defend and heal itself when provided with optimal intakes of all essential nutrients in optimal levels.
Dr. Lust instituted the first modern training program for naturopathic medicine in New York in 1902. The curriculum consisted of courses in botanical medicine, nutritional therapy, physiotherapy, psychology, homeopathy, and naturopathic manipulation including manual manipulation technique and medical message.
In the 21st century, naturopathic medicine is the leading proponent, in the various forms of Western medicine, of healthy diet and optimal supplemental programs that provide all 90 essential nutrients through the concept of epigenetics (i.e., most diseases that are thought to be genetically transmitted are in fact nutritional deficiencies that negatively impact the functions of DNA, RNA, and enzymes) in order to prevent and reverse most diseases.
The Six Principles of Naturopathic Healing
1. The healing power of nature – the body itself has a natural healing power, and the physician is required to identify any “blockages” to the body’s own healing powers.
2. Treat the whole person – the body is an intricate web of forces, which when they are in a harmonious state produce an optimally healthy body. Disease is considered to be an imbalance in one part or system that affects the whole. Naturopathic therapy is therefore designed to support the whole person rather than attacking only symptoms.
3. First do no harm – naturopathic physicians, as primary care physicians are licensed to perform most medical procedures and prescribe pharmaceuticals, however, they preferentially use homeopathy, herbal medicine, nutritional therapies and other non-invasive therapies.
4. Identify and treat the cause of the disease – symptoms are not the cause of the disease, rather symptoms (i.e., fever, pain, elevated blood sugar, swelling, etc.) are the body’s efforts to defend and heal itself. Usually, the underlying causes of disease are related to the individual’s lifestyle, nutrition, personal hygiene, and emotional state.
5. Prevention is the best cure – the patient is educated on how to eat, supplement with optimal levels of all 90 essential nutrients, and to correct their lifestyle and avoid the “bad” things to prevent disease.
6. The naturopathic physician is the patient’s teacher – the naturopathic doctor teaches the patient how to be responsible in all phases of diet, supplementation, personal hygiene, and lifestyle.
The Basic Tools of Naturopathic Medicine
Nutritional therapy and fasting – the use of diet, supplementation, and fasting to provide the body with all of the basic raw material it needs to develop and maintain itself.
Herbal medicine – the use of herbs, plant substances, aromatherapy, spices and plant based foods as medicines.
Homeopathy – the use of homeopathic remedies that employ the “like treats like” principle.
Hydrotherapy – the use of hot and cold water therapy to stimulate the immune and circulatory systems.
Naturopathic and chiropractic manipulation – multiple forms of physical treatment through massage, physiology, and reestablishing normal alignment.
Chiropractic Medicine
Chiropractic translates to “done by the hand.” Chiropractic theory posits that many illnesses begin when the vertebrae of the spinal column “subluxate” or slip out of place or alignment, pinch or compress nerves and thus block the body’s vital energy flow. Chiropractic practitioners work to realign the spinal vertebrae by hand and body maneuvers. Chiropractic is most often used for neck, shoulder, arm, back pain, slipped discs, and other musculoskeletal pain.
There are at least two divisions of chiropractic:
1. Straights – chiropractic practitioners who limit their practice to manipulation.
2. Mixers – chiropractors who employ chiropractic manipulation, acupuncture, nutrition, herbs, homeopathy, etc.
Supplementation
Nutritional supplementation is a broad concept that describes the regular dietary employment of vitamins, minerals, amino acids, essential fatty acids and a wide scope of food factors (e.g., bioflavonoids, polyphenols, antioxidants, etc.), and herbs to support optimal health, and to treat and prevent disease.
The general role of vitamins and minerals is their requirement as cofactors to implement the activity of enzymes, coenzymes, DNA, and RNA. Enzymes facilitate the activity of metabolic processes in mitochondria and every cell in the body. Coenzymes support the optimal activity of enzymes.
Enzymes and coenzymes perform by connecting or disconnecting metabolic molecules by producing or dissolving chemical bonds. The general goal of nutritional supplementation is to supply the optimal levels of nutritional cofactors to facilitate optimal metabolic activity of tissue enzyme systems.
Enzymes are typically made up of a protein and cofactors that are vitamins and or minerals.
DNA and RNA replicate proteins, amino acids, and enzymes for all of the bodies functions of life, reproduction, and longevity.
If the essential cofactor is missing, the enzyme cannot perform properly, if at all. Studies have shown that most Americans fail to obtain optimal levels of all 90 essential nutrients: the U.S. government (NHANES 1, II, III, and 2007–2008; 10- State Nutrition Survey; USDA nationwide food consumption studies, etc. have shown that marginal nutritional deficiencies continue to exist in a significant (50%) number of the U.S. population; and for selected nutrients 80% of U.S. individuals in targeted age groups took in less than the Recommended Daily Intake (RDI).
These studies show that most Americans are highly unlikely to take in a meal or a diet that provides the RDI for all 90 essential nutrients. Subclinical deficiency is the term used to describe minor or marginal nutritional deficiencies. Subclinical nutrient deficiencies typically manifest themselves as chronic fatigue, lethargy, depression, lack of concentration, slow recovery after exercise, etc.
It is well documented that even an aggressive effort to “eat well” will fall short in providing all of the essential nutrients in optimal levels. Vitamin levels in food have decreased by more than 37% between 1950 and 1999, and trace mineral levels have decreased by 77% between 1940 and 1991.
In April 16, 2012, the well respected journal Food Chemistry reported that most commercially available infant formulas contain less than 20% of the minimum daily requirements of dietary minerals and vitamins.
Most investigators fail to grasp the gravity of the situation and blame the nutrient deficiencies in American food on “synthetic fertilizers” and “types of seeds.” If fact the deficiencies are caused by three factors:
1. Minerals do not occur in a uniform blanket throughout the earth’s crust— they occur in veins, in much the same manner as chocolate in chocolate ripple ice cream and plants do not manufacture minerals.
2. The traditional source of the daily renewal of U.S. subsistence farm soils from plant minerals—aka wood ashes—disappeared shortly after 3:00 p.m. in the afternoon, Monday September 4, 1882, when Thomas Edison pulled the switch to start the first commercial electric generating plant on Pearl St. in New York City. Within ten years of this event almost all towns and cities in the Industrialized World converted from wood as the universal fuel to electricity, natural gas, and propane, effectively eliminating humanity’s traditional source of mineral supplementation from plant minerals that were contained in wood ashes.
3. The annual flooding of rivers reinvigorated soils with minerals that originated in mountains and upstream soils. Classically “bottom land” and “flood plains” were the most fertile and most expensive farm land because of this annual renewal process. The damming of rivers to prevent floods and additionally to produce hydroelectric power cut off the historical annual renewal of soil mineral levels by flooding and silt deposition. And another major consequence of damming the great rivers was to cut off the food supply to the oceans. It’s not pollution that is destroying the oceans. Humans simply cut off the food supply to the oceans—no silt, no plant life, no little fish, no medium sized fish, no large predator fish—oops, Houston, we have a problem!
In practical terms, one cannot estimate to any effective level how much of any nutrient that might be in an individuals diet. Even vegetarian diets composed of organic fruits and vegetables fall short according to a 2012 meta-study reported in The Annals of Internal Medicine with 240 small studies combined. Therefore a cornerstone of optimal health in the 21st century is a comprehensive nutritional supplementation program that provides all 90 essential nutrients.
Recommendations for a Daily Multiple Vitamin and Mineral Intake
|
Vitamin |
Daily Dose/ Adults and children over 9 years old |
|
Vitamin A (retinol) |
2,500 – 5,000 IU |
|
Vitamin A (beta – carotene) |
5,000 – 25,000 IU |
|
Vitamin B1 (thiamine) |
10 – 100 mg |
|
Vitamin B2 (riboflavin) |
10 – 50 mg |
|
Vitamin B3 (niacin) |
10 – 100 mg |
|
Vitamin B5 (pantothenic acid) |
25 – 100 mg |
|
Vitamin B6 (pyridoxine) |
25 – 100 mg |
|
Vitamin B12 (methylcobalamin) |
400 mcg |
|
Vitamin C (ascorbic acid) |
250 – 1,000 mg |
|
Vitamin D |
1,000 – 2,000 IU |
|
Vitamin E (mixed tocopherols) |
100 – 200 IU |
|
Vitamin K1 or K2 |
60 – 300 mcg |
|
Niacinamide (niacin) |
10 – 30 mg |
|
Biotin |
100 – 300 mcg |
|
Folic acid |
400 mcg |
|
Choline |
10 – 100 mg |
|
Inositol |
10 – 100 mg |
|
Bioflavonoids |
1,000 – 5,000 mg |
|
Minerals |
Range for adults and children/100 pounds |
|
Boron |
1 – 6 mg |
|
Calcium |
600 -1,000 mg |
|
Chromium |
200 – 400 mcg |
|
Copper |
1 – 2 mg |
|
Iodine |
50 – 150 mcg |
|
Iron |
15 – 30 mg |
|
Magnesium |
250 – 500 mg |
|
Manganese |
3 – 5 mg |
|
Molybdenum |
10 – 25 mcg |
|
Potassium |
NA |
|
Selenium |
100 – 200 mcg |
|
Silica |
1 – 25 mg |
|
Vanadium |
50 – 100 mcg |
|
Zinc |
15 – 30 mg |
NA: The FDA restricts the amount of potassium in supplements to 99 mg. Murray, M.T. and Pizzorno, J.: The Encyclopedia of Natural Medicine. ed. 2012.
Liquid Plant Derived Coloidal Minerals One Ounce/ 100 pounds/day PPM
The Pearl
Failure to be obsessive about health, survival, and longevity, and failure to provide all of the 90 essential nutritional necessities of an optimal, healthy life for ourselves will, over time, result in the disappearance of man. We can and will become extinct if we fail to employ our intellect. We do have access to the knowledge and the materials to be a “successful species.” However, if we “choose poorly,” the end will surely come for us as it has for other careless and uncommitted species.