Cancer Crusader
Bethell, Tom
"Cancer Crusader" Bruce Ames Has Some Answers BY TOM BETHELL Bruce Ames was in Washington recently, speaking to a small group invited by the George C. Marshall Institute. His subject was...
...Ames treated his rats with two diet supplements available in health food stores, one of them an antioxidant specific to the mito chondria...
...And so the DNA is steadily damaged.There is in fact a spontaneous degradation of DNA all the time...
...It was a smaller place then, and he worked at the National Institute of Arthritis and Metabolic Diseases-one of the many institutes that have since been merged into something larger, and probably are housed today in a building named after a congressman...
...The idea of opportunity cost, seemingly so simple-time or money spent doing this cannot be spent doing that-is elementary to Ames, even though it remains either mysteriouse or repugnant to most of those who busy themselves with matters of environmental health...
...It costs $39.95 and includes a Workbook with all of the exhibits and a 3-Cassette Audio-Tape Set for studying at leisure while you drive...
...He told his listeners in Washington that he only spends 10 percent of his time "puncturing environmentalist balloons...
...What you want to do is go after the 15 percent who are low,"Ames said...
...Two decades earlier, he had developed what is now called the Ames Test, in which bacteria are used to detect the mutagenic properties of various substances...
...It's one of the oldest mail-order companies in the United States...
...The small decline in its incidence is mainly due to the decline in smoking...
...Ames says today that his earlier equation of carcinogens and mutagens was "a bit of an oversimplification...
...Berkeley press office noted that "Pauling's claim that megadoses of Vitamin C can prevent colds remains unproven, yet high doses of some vitamins could play a big role in the treatment of disease and perhaps slow the effects of aging...
...In contrast, there is every reason to think that Ames' attacks on high-dose animal tests, which he has sometimes characterized as pro bono work done more in the public interest than in the interests of pure science, will hold up well...
...It doesn't mean that the one has anything to do with the other...
...And that may still happen...
...Go to any small town and "collect all the ailments," then find a part per billion of something in the water...
...A research professor such as Ames depends on graduate students to assist him, and they are expected to discover new things, not correct old errors...
...More recently, his ideas about mutation have become mainstream, and Ames has received NIH grants galore...
...He adds one other tip that your mother may not have thought of...
...Inadequate earthquake protection had closed the Biochemistry building where he worked on the Berkeley campus, so Ames moved to a nearby research institute established by the Children's Hospital in Oakland...
...Many other carcinogens-radiation, for example certainly are...
...Ames' finding eventual ly became a cornerstone of the present-day understanding of cancer: a series of mutations that transform an ordinary cell into a cancerous one...
...The huge, near-fatal doses that over the years Senior editor Torn Bethell profiled Edward O. Wilson iii T1S, March/April 2002...
...B - Your Chances for Success in the Mail-Order Business...
...He also gave $2 million to the university for the seismic retrofit of Barker Hall on campus...
...If it lacks the necessary micronutrient fuel, conveniently provided in the form of fruit, vegetables and vitamin supplements, it suffers damage...
...Please give account number and expiration date...
...Nor has there been a functional demonstration of a set of mutated genes, inserted into a test animal, giving rise to a tumor...
...A direct connection between the intake of antioxidants and the prevention of chronic disease has yet to be adequately established," said Norman Krinsky, who chaired the Panel on Dietary Antioxidants and Related Compounds...
...Ames attended the famed Bronx High School of Science, Cornell University and Caltech...
...The great and simple lesson was that "Carcinogens Are Mutagens"-the title of a 1973 article by Ames...
...With his partner,Tory Hagen, who is the principal investigator for the Linus Pauling Institute at Oregon State University, Ames patented the combination treatment (as he had not with his original Ames Test), and a company called Juvenon will license it...
...Aries likes to tell jokes, too...
...A good many of those who work there "have their careers invested" in scary tales about cancer risks, he said...
...His "real interest:' he said, is in discovering "what's causing cancer and how to prevent it...
...Once again,Ames had been thinking like an economist...
...What we are really rejuvenating are the mitochondria," he told me, after the Marshall Institute lunch...
...In order to survive against insects and the grub-infested soil, fruit and vegetables are impregnated with natural chemicals that are far more toxic than faint pesticide residues...
...What is less clear is whether the DNA-damaging effects of oxidants or the antioxidizing effects of micronutrients are the true explanations for the outcomes that are observed...
...It will prove to be invaluable to you in almost whatever activity you ultimately decide to engage in...
...With an aging population, and an intelligentsia that does not anticipate an afterlife, large sums of money are now pouring into research in aging...
...Mutations are like misprints in a text...
...They doubted that single-celled bacteria could shed light on human cancer...
...But, all in all, the toxicologists believe me now, and I think I'm winning the scientific battles...
...The cancer "epidemic" supposedly triggered by man-made chemicals never existed...
...It's like trying to add gas to a full tank...
...There was a paper attacking us," he said, and I thought `if that's the best they can do, I've won the battle.' I think the people who had spent their lives doing animal cancer tests were just threatened by our claims...
...There are also two important appendixes: A - Components and Structure of a Mail-Order Offer...
...In the early 1990s, in response to the mounting claims that many synthetic chemicals are carcinogens, Ames upset the chemical-hazard bureaucrats by pointing out that the natural foods we eat every day contain dozens of known carcinogens...
...Some of those who don't eat enough of the right things have been in the sample populations under study, "but they are diluted by all the normal people...
...By inclination, Ames is a generalist in an age of grotesquely narrow specialization...
...But p53, called a tumor suppressor gene, was Science magazine's "molecule of the year" nine years ago, and nothing much has come of it...
...This finding was embraced by many cancer researchers, some of whom at that time were warring over the importance of DNA to cancer...
...Now Oracle's Larry Ellison is on the case with his medical foundation, and there's a whole institute at NIH devoted to research on aging...
...In his 7-volume work, How to Build a Great Fortune in Mail Order, he gives a complete course on how to get started in this fascinating business, how to prosper in it, and how to build a great fortune in it...
...There he developed his eponymous test...
...But these reactions, even though essential to life, release what are called free radicals, or oxidants, and these are thought to damage the DNA...
...Besides,Ames has more important problems to address...
...Once, visiting New York, Ames and his wife went to a restaurant and there was Woody Allen...
...In Ames' view, cancer, aging and diet all converge on the idea of mutation, the detection of which his own test had facilitated...
...Trained both as a geneticist and a biochemist, he learned to see "all these wonderful problems that the geneticist turned up and did n't know how to tackle and that the biochemist didn't know existed...
...As people age, their chances of getting cancer increase greatly...
...People tell him that he looks like Woody Allen, and like Allen, he is ofJevvish extraction and grew up in New York City...
...One thing more needs to be questioned, however, and that is the validity of Ames' claim that damage to DNA-gene mutation-really is what transforms normal cells into cancer cells.To be sure, that claim is not Ames' alone, but also that of NIH and most cancer researchers...
...Nonetheless, if you skip your vegetables, your risk of getting cancer goes way up...
...A minute or two later, he seemed to amend his own agenda by claiming that MAY/JUNE 2002 • THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 39 "aging is my main scientific interest now" Then he added diet as a leading concern...
...But her nerve failed her...
...It, too, damages the DNA.To be sure, the body has its anti-oxidant defenses and DNA repair systems-spell-checkers that run along the double helix of the DNA, repairing bases as fast as possible...
...oftence hooks division of jomiraladvance 47OThird St., #211, San Francisco, CA 94107 'f) Order bu toll-free phone: (800) 600-2777 or (fastest...
...We'll add shipping/insurance charge of $4.95 (plus sales tax for California delivery...
...Not worth it," Bruce Ames says...
...Lung cancer is declining in men, still rising in women...
...In breaking with the consensus, Ames was also drawing attention to a remarkable premise that has undergirded much of modern thought...
...I think that's a sex difference.You're not supposed to talk about that in Berkeley, but it's true...
...Lesson 4 - Some First Thoughts About Mail-Order Merchandise...
...By then, he has already moved on to one or another of his professional enthusiasms, perhaps the causes and prevention of cancer or the vitamins needed to keep our metabolism running smoothly or that little unsolved mystery of life called aging...
...They are kept on the reservation for months at a time, while one food ingredient after another is changed and outcomes are observed...
...Recently, Ames has been doing experiments on "rejuvenating" rats...
...After treatment, his aging lab creatures "got up and did the Macarena...
...As for aging, average lifespan has been increasing, but we are still all getting older as we live longer...
...The claim that a diet rich in fruit and vegetables reduces the risk of cancer is well supported...
...About 99.9 percent of all the chemicals that humans ingest are natural-they are not produced by man...
...Presented with a batch of risks, women will always worry about them more than men, who are more happy-golucky," he told me...
...It has been said that Ames' advice for healthy living amounts to taking your mother's advice: Do everything in moderation, don't smoke, eat your fruit and vegetables...
...Lesson 3 - How to Organize Your Mail-Order Busi ness...
...Every vegetable in the supermarket contains carcinogens," Ames says...
...No one genetic alteration [in the DNA] is enough to make a normal, healthy cell a cancer cell...
...Ames has now given them $8 million for a nutrition and genomics center...
...Even if you do not plan to go into the mail-order business, you will benefit greatly by the insights and revelations on advertising, marketing, merchan dising, consumer motivation, customer service, business planning, pricing strategies, financial projections, financial analysis and ratios, and so much more...
...It was started by one of his own graduate students, and when it was sold, Ames and his wife found that they were "seriously rich...
...Rather, an accumulation of changes in a relatively small number of genes during the lifetime of a cell is required," says the National Cancer Institute...
...Don't waste your money on those pricey "organic" foods...
...If you don't eat your vegetables, you are irradiating yourself, in a sense,"Ames says...
...Many carcinogens turned out to be mutagens...
...In fact, NIH regards it not as theory, but as fact...
...His continued work in this area was funded by the Atomic Energy Commission...
...You may return the Volume for full refund (except shipping/insurance) within 30 days...
...Fully, one-third of cancer is attributable to smoking, he added...
...Radiation has the same effect as oxidation...
...38 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR • MAY/JUNE 2002 have been administered to rats in order to demonstrate carcinogenicity bear no rational relation to what humans ingest...
...Get Rich in Mail Order (a 7-volume course) Volume I just $19.95* G erardo Joffe is president emeritus of Haverhills...
...Smoking also naturally depletes Vitamin C, so smokers need more of that than most people...
...Ames may be one of the few research scientists who can think like an economist...
...In researching diet, confounding variables galore make it easy to attribute good outcomes to irrelevant inputs.The Department of Agriculture is trying to overcome this difficulty Ames said, with studies in Grand Forks, North Dakota, where they attract volunteers by advertising in poetry journals for aspiring greatAmerican-novel writers, pay them a per diem and give them room, board and a computer...
...It is not mutagenic...
...The rebuttals, published in Science and elsewhere a decade ago, were filled more with fury than with substance...
...As for the movie Erin Brockoaich, he considers the "true" story behind it a triumph of legal demagoguery over science, which was "very implausible...
...The quarter of the population that eats the fewest fruit and vegetables has about double the cancer rate for most types of cancer, when compared to the quarter with the highest intake...
...Metabolism produces oxidants as byproducts-think of the body as slowly "rusting," thanks to them...
...Horses emit more pollution than cars...
...Writing at the time that Ames first published his test for mutagens, Isaac Berenblum, of the Weizmann Institute, found "a closer correlation between mutagenic and tumorinhibiting action than between mutagenic and carcinogenic action...
...Cancer chemotherapy is mutagenic, in short...
...Ames also argues that one-third of cancer is due to "unbalanced" diets, particularly the insufficient consumption of fruit and vegetables, and this deficiency tends to be concentrated among the poor...
...Giving them more doesn't help...
...Because people are stubborn, the FDA decreed in 1998 that folate must be added to processed grains such as cereal and bread.We'll see if this brings their cancer rate down...
...The fire-retardant chemical PCB, the elimination of which became a crusade at the EPA (see TAS, Jan/Feb 2002) and has given rise to a small increase in cancer in rats when administered in huge doses, is negative in the Ames Test...
...But nothing in the supermarket would pass their standards...
...But after he left NIH and went to Berkeley, in 1968,Ames at first could not get funding from the National Cancer Institute to continue his work...
...It is highly recommended...
...This had made him a hero of the environmentalists.The fireretardant chemical Tris-phosphate or TDCPP, applied to children's pajamas, was taken off the market when it failed the Ames Test...
...We consume more carcinogens in one cup of coffee than we get from the pesticide residues on all the fruits and vegetables we eat in a year...
...In 1953, he went to the National Institutes of Health, in Bethesda, Maryland, and stayed there for 15 years...
...Quick-growing Salmonella bacteria were used to detect the mutagenic properties of various substances.The test was much simpler and gave results more quickly than anything then in use...
...In short, considerable uncertainty surrounds the entire field of what is called cancer genetics.The mutation test that made Ames one of the most cited scientists of his generation still has its uses, but it may also have helped steer cancer research into a blind alley...
...Recently, he made a shrewd investment in a biotech company called Operon, which found a better way to synthesize DNA segments...
...In a press release on Ames' latest work, the U.C...
...worse, it was what Business Week called a "startling turnaround...
...None of this has stopped him from winning just about every science prize you can think of, including the Japan Prize, the National Medal of Science and the Joseph PriestleyAward-everything except the Nobel...
...The Environmental Protection Agency, he says today, does more harm than good...
...Ames' wife was tempted to approach the famous humorist and ask if by any chance he was the well-known biochemist from the University of California at Berkeley, Bruce N. Ames...
...The course is a virtual college education...
...A further problem with the gene-mutation theory of cancer is that scientists have not yet been able to say which genes, exactly, when mutated, turn a cell into a cancer cell...
...In a recent article, Ames notes that "surprisingly few animal cancer studies have been done to examine vitamin or mineral defi40 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR • MAY/JUNE 2002 ciencies...
...Doubts remain because some of the best known carcinogens are not mutagenicasbestos, tar and polycyclic hydrocarbons, for example...
...Ames has libertarian tendencies...
...It would be more useful to test the link between vitamin and mineral deficiencies and cancer in achieving the goal of cancer prevention than testing the effect of exposure to synthetic chemicals, which humans are only exposed to in miniscule doses...
...Robert A. Weinberg, who directs a cancer research lab at MIT, says that by the 1970s "my friends and I came to believe that Ames was preaching a great and simple lesson about chemical carcinogens...
...He was making a point about dosage-it's not the ingredient, but the dose that counts...
...As for his advice-from-mom-everything in moderation, don't smoke, eat your vegetables-you can take that to the bank...
...Corrected for age and smoking, however, cancer rates in the United States are now declining slowly...
...he said, whereupon editors sat up and paid attention...
...Two years ago, a National Academy of Sciences panel found no convincing evidence that large doses of antioxidants reduce the chances of getting cancer, heart disease or other illnesses...
...The other is something called acetyl-L-carnitine...
...he says...
...Then, after a few years, they get buried beneath the evermounting piles of new cancer research being turned out by hundreds of laboratories...
...Green potatoes can kill a pig...
...Very little progress has yet been made in overcoming cancer...
...Ames was now occupying territory at the intersection of science and public policy normally controlled by liberal activists...
...He founded it in 1967...
...There's a gene called p53 that's mutated in half of human tumors, so everybody thinks, `Well, that's one of the steps,"' Ames said...
...Cancer is a degenerative disease of old age," he said in his Washington talk...
...Lesson 2 - How to Get Started in the Mail-Order Business...
...Mitochondria are the "power plants" in every cell...
...If so, Juvenon will do well...
...But if the damage is too swift (a sudden burst of radiation) or too unrelent ing (years of smoking or poor diet), then the repair machinery may not be able to keep up...
...Nobody knows what's important any more," Ames says...
...There are echoes of Linus Pauling here...
...This course may lead you to a great future...
...Nonetheless, we should remain politely skeptical of the underlying idea that DNA damage is the unifying link between aging, cancer and oxidation...
...I asked Ames if his critics in the EPA, the Natural Resources Defense Council and elsewhere had found any serious errors in his work...
...Over 100 such genes have been posited, and often trumpeted in headlines...
...Coffee contains 20 of them...
...His subject was "The Causes and Prevention of Cancer: Do Federal Regulations Help...
...His colleague Lois Gold, a toxicologist who has coauthored 100 papers with him over the years, has helped considerably in this task...
...that is to say, they altered the bacteria's DNA...
...Scare people with hundreds of minor hypothetical risks and a society becomes distorted...
...was in biochemistry and molecular genetics...
...Although his main interests may seem scattered at first, you realize when you listen more closely that he is working with a broad theory in which cancer, aging and diet are interlocking pieces of the same biological puzzle...
...The scientific basis for such a claim is nonexistent...
...But his quick, offhand way of doing so conveys that he's too busy and distracted to notice whether his quips fall flat or not...
...In some quarters, aging is now spoken of as a disease, with "symptoms...
...by fax: (415) 356-7304 C Visit our website at www.haiverhills.com MAY/JUNE 2002 • THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 41...
...His Ph.D...
...But his later revisionist ideas about carcinogen scares that failed to take dosage into account made him persona non grata at the NationalToxicology Program (a division of the National Institutes of Health...
...Now it seems to be falling out of favor...
...Insufficient intake of folic acid (found in leafy vegetables) has been associated with chromosome breaks-and radiation has the same effect...
...Berenblum was forced to conclude "that almost any chemically-reactive compound, if tested by a sufficiently wide range of methods, is likely to prove mutagenic...
...Indeed, it was when scientists began running natural chemicals such as those found in fruit and vegetables through the Ames Test-and found that they, too, were mutagenic-that Ames came to his important conclusion that the dose was likely to be more deadly than the substance per se...
...Dredge the Hudson River for PCBs...
...Aging, therefore, and the diseases associated with it, such as cancer, may be due to the accumulated oxidative damage in DNA, which (as we are often told) contains the "blueprints" of the body...
...To order Volume f, please give order code Y246a for the "regular" ($19.95) or Y246b for the "expanded" ($39.95) version...
...In the course of a lifetime, the leading cellular biology textbook reports, every single gene is likely to have undergone mutation on about 10 billion separate occasions in any individual...
...Perhaps 400 studies confirm this,Ames says...
...The treatment, said the University of California press office, "put the spark back into aging rats and might do the same for aging baby boomers...
...They degrade a message, eventually making it unreadable...
...Once it was the jet set who went to Switzerland for their hormone injections, or their extracts from lamb testicles or whatever was the latest fad...
...Ames says that the epidemiology here is tricky, because only about 15 percent of the population is low on such micronutrients as Vitamin C. Most people are already "saturated...
...He repeated it at the Washington lunch: What is natural is good, and what is man-made is bad...
...As to the subjective assessment of risk, Ames points out that women consistently rate risk more highly than men...
...Ames has not yet been able to show that his rejuvenated rats actually live longer, but needless to say, his researchers are watching that closely, and Juvenon is doing clinical trials in humans...
...Slim and energetic at 73,Ames has rather an owlish and distracted look, as befits a professor...
...The idea is to see if the same combination of supplements helps with heart disease or brain function...
...But they are not hazardous to our health...
...Now he is in a position to fund science projects himself...
...They may stir up the mud and cause worse problems...
...They burn fat and carbohydrates and release energy...
...Volume I (207 pages) covers the following important topics: Lesson 1 - What the Mail-Order Business Is All About...
...There is also an "expanded" version...
...Tomato, cabbage, broccoli, likewise...
...He is an engineer and a Harvard MBA...
...But misprints do not generate a new message, which is what a cancer cell is comparable to...
...We can accept only Visa/MasterCard for this offer (no checks, please...
...So they started up the Bruce and Giovanna Ames Foundation...
...Cancer Crusader Bruce Ames Has Some Answers B Y T O M B E T H E L L B ruce Ames was in Washington recently, speaking to a small group invited by the George C. Marshall Institute...
...So it saved everyone a great deal of time...
...He has never written a book, but he has written literally hundreds of scientific papers on these subjects, and he turns out new ones at the rate of about one a month...
Vol. 35 • May 2002 • No. 3
