Alexander didn't need Bari for that discovery, for at least a few reasons. First, he had been on the path toward the same discovery while working on chemical weapons at Edgewood Arsenal in 1942 but been ordered to ignore possible medical innovations in order to focus exclusively on possible weapons developments. Second, similar discoveries had been made at the time of World War I, including by Edward and Helen Krumbhaar at the University of Pennsylvania not 75 miles from Edgewood. Third, other scientists, including Milton Charles Winternitz, Louis S. Goodman, and Alfred Gilman Sr., at Yale, were developing similar theories during WWII but not sharing what they were up to because of military secrecy.
Bari may not have been needed to cure cancer, but it did cause cancer. U.S. and British military personnel, as well as Italian residents, in some cases never learned or learned decades later what the source of their ailments likely was, and those ailments included cancer.
On the morning after the dropping of the nuclear bomb on Hiroshima, a press conference was held at the top of the General Motors building in Manhattan to announce a war on cancer. From the start, its language was that of war. The nuclear bomb was held up as an example of the glorious wonders that science and massive funding could combine to create. The cure for cancer was to be the next glorious wonder along the same lines. Killing Japanese people and killing cancer cells were parallel achievements. Of course, the bombs in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, just like in Bari, resulted in the creation of a great deal of cancer, just as the weaponry of war has done at an increasing rate for decades since, with victims in places like parts of Iraq suffering far higher cancer rates than Hiroshima.
The story of the early decades of the war on cancer recounted by Conant is one of slow and stubborn insistence on pursuing dead-ends while constantly predicting imminent victory, very much in the pattern of the war on Vietnam, the war on Afghanistan, etc. In 1948, the New York Times described an expansion in the war on cancer as a "C-Day Landing." In 1953, in one example of many, the Washington Post declared "Cancer Cure Near." Leading doctors told the media it was no longer a question of if, but when, cancer would be cured.
This war on cancer has not been without achievements. Death rates for various types of cancer have dropped significantly. But cases of cancer have increased significantly. The idea of ceasing to pollute ecosystems, ceasing to manufacture weapons, ceasing to haul poisons "out to sea," has never had the attraction of a "war," never generated pink-clad marches, never won the funding of the oligarchs.
It didn't have to be this way. Much of the early funding for a war on cancer came from people trying to paper over the shame of their weapons dealing. But it was exclusively the shame of U.S. corporations having built weapons for the Nazis. They had nothing but pride in having simultaneously built weapons for the U.S. government. So, moving away from war did not enter into their calculations.
A key funder of cancer research was Alfred Sloan, whose company, General Motors, had built weaponry for the Nazis right through the war, including with forced labor. It's popular to point out that GM's Opel built parts for the planes that bombed London. The same planes bombed the ships in the harbor of Bari. The corporate approach to research, development, and manufacturing that had built those planes, and all of GM's products, was now to be applied to curing cancer, thereby vindicating GM and its approach to the world. Unfortunately, the industrialization, extractivism, pollution, exploitation, and destruction that all took off globally during WWII and have never eased up, have been a great boon for the spread of cancer.
A key fundraiser and promoter of the war on cancer, who literally compared cancer to Nazis (and vice versa) was Cornelius Packard "Dusty" Rhoads. He drew on the reports from Bari and from Yale to create a whole industry in pursuit of a new approach to cancer: chemotherapy. This was the same Rhoads who had written a note in 1932 advocating the extermination of Puerto Ricans and declaring them to be "even lower than the Italians." He claimed to have killed 8 Puerto Ricans, to have transplanted cancer into several more, and to have found that physicians took delight in abusing and torturing Puerto Ricans on whom they experimented. This was supposedly the less offensive of two notes known to a later investigation, but generated a scandal that revives every generation or so. In 1949 Time Magazine put Rhoads its cover as "Cancer Fighter." In 1950, Puerto Ricans purportedly motivated by Rhoads' letter, very nearly succeeded in assassinating President Harry Truman in Washington, D.C.
It's unfortunate that Conant, in her book, maintains the pretense that Japan did not want peace until after the Hiroshima bombing, suggesting that the bombing had something to do with creating peace. It's unfortunate that she doesn't question the entire enterprise of war. Nonetheless, The Great Secret provides a wealth of information that can help us understand how we came to where we are including those of us living in the current United States that just found $740 billion for the Pentagon and $0 for treating a new deadly pandemic.
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