Word: vitamin
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LAETRILE, an extract from crushed apricot pits that releases minute amounts of cyanide in the body. The drug's propagandists claim that it helps prevent cancer, reduces tumors and relieves pain. Despite the FDA ban, anyone who wants to eat crushed apricot kernels-sometimes sold as "vitamin B17"-can legally buy them in some health-food stores...
...throw in the sponge on Laetrile? The FDA could run a few tests on the alleged wonder drug to assure itself of its basic innocuousness, slap a Surgeon General-type warning on it ("The Government has determined that Laetrile, alias vitamin B17, can do nothing for your health"), and let it loose in the marketplace, along with such other pharmaceutical miracles as cold tablets, skin creams and vaginal deodorants. Under the Government's nodding supervision, the purity of the product might then be assured, the flourishing black market in Laetrile-which has netted some of its pushers millions...
Coming to Harvard during the depression years of the '30s, Wald started as an instructor and tutor in Biochemistry, receiving tenure in 1948. He was named to the Higgins chair in 1968. Wald had isolated Vitamin A in the human retina before he came to Harvard and eventually won the Nobel Prize in Physiology for his vision research. Today, Wald says it is his dedication to and understanding of science, rather than belief in any specific political philosophy, that has compelled him to become a social activist. He admired Salvadore Allende's Marxist government but says, "I don't know...
...Harvard but came to the University after distinguishing himself as a researcher. He earned his B.S. degree at New York University in 1927 and received a Ph.D. at Columbia five years later. At the age of 27, on a fellowship in Europe the next year, Wald succeeded in isolating Vitamin A, which had just been discovered. He helped to complete the identification of the vitamin several months later...
...exhaustive studies with mice, researchers at his world-renowned institute concluded that in spite of early indications it might control the spread of tumors, the controversial drug Laetrile showed no anticancer properties. Yet even while they were strengthening the scientific case against the apricot-pit extract, also known as vitamin B17, Laetrile's supporters were predicting that the drug - now used illicitly by tens of thousands of cancer patients - would soon be sold legally everywhere...