[0:00]For the past 35 years, uh, I've been a science writer, uh, working specifically in the oncology community. Uh, over that time, I've published probably 5 or 600 bylined articles in major cancer journals. I've also, uh, interviewed 5 or 600 of the leading cancer experts in the world, including 5 Nobel Prize winners. In 2014, I, um, published, co-authored a book called The Great Prostate Hoax, How Big Medicine hijacked the PSA test and caused a public health disaster. Uh, my co-author was Dr. Richard Ablin, one of the primary scientists behind the discovery of PSA. Uh, I say that not to brag about my credentials, but just to let the audience know who I am, uh, because what I'm about to talk about later on in the story, uh, challenges a $200 billion per year, uh, cancer industry. And anytime you challenge that type of power structure, there's blowback. Um, they will try to discredit me, but they can't because I'm an insider, I'm one of them. Uh, my road to science writing was unconventional. I didn't go the usual, uh, high school, college career path. Uh, I grew up in Syosset, uh, a town on the North Shore of Long Island, New York. It's called a commuter town because it runs along the spine of the Long Island Railroad. Uh, I came from a very dysfunctional and poor family. Uh, my mother was bipolar, she was an original conspiracy theorist. Uh, she claimed to be abducted by a UFO. Uh, and, um, when John F. Kennedy was assassinated, that was sort of her tipping point. Uh, any maternal instinct, the little she had, vanished, and so I was basically on my own at an early age. Uh, my father waited tables at a German-American restaurant called Rothman's. And, um, when I was 14, I started working there, and, uh, I was making about 40, 50 bucks a week. So that's 1967. So I, I was doing very well, I was on my own, and by 15, I'd established myself as a man. I was self-sufficient, and two things, uh, were very prominent in my life, hard work and hard drinking. Uh, I could do both of those, and that would define much of who I later on became. Uh, so, I, um, always had a, uh, a keen, um, eye for adventure, and at 15 years old, I, with a buddy of mine, this guy named Terry McQuade, we hitchhiked down to Florida to visit my, um, Uncle Asa, who was a orange picker. He lived out in the Outback of Florida in a tin-roofed house set up on cinder blocks with 12 kids, my cousins. There was no indoor plumbing. It was, I was poor, but this was Southern dirt poor. It was a really wild experience. They were so far removed, and this is 1968, they were so far removed that my cousins had never heard of the Beatles, okay? So we picked oranges for a few weeks, and then we took a train back. Um, after that, I, uh, I didn't go to college, there was never any talk of college in our household. Uh, we didn't have any money, and, uh, it just wasn't part of the discussion. So I had an opportunity, I went to Paris, and I lived in a flat on Rue de Mosque, right by Garçan Lazare. And, um, I worked at a place called Heddiard as a prep cook. Heddiard was a very, very high-end emporium, food emporium. And I did that for about a year and a year and a half, and then I came back and bounced around as an itinerant cook. I ended up back in Rothman's, where I originally started. And, uh, as it happened, there were some Norwegian shipping brokers that used to drink there. And I butted up with this guy named Captain Marlansto. Uh, he was a hard drinker, as I was, and we started talking, and I I wanted to follow my childhood literary heroes and go to sea. But at that time, our, uh, merchant marine, our merchant, um, uh, merchant Marines was the size of a dime, and they were all unionized, it was impossible to get on. So I I begged him, I said, literally begged him, I said, can you get me on a ship? And he said, well, we're shipping brokers.
[4:21]He said, but he was very frank, he said, I would not, in good conscience, send you aboard the Edith because, um, it's a, she flies the Liberian flag, and it's a very dangerous environment, especially for an American, a white American. But I prevailed on him and, uh, he finally said, okay. So I joined the Sovereign Edith, and, um, it was a wild experience. Uh, the, the crew was a collection of very poor, ignorant, proud and violent men. Uh, and, um, we sailed the dangerous waters of the Caribbean. We had ports of call in Central and South America. And, um, after about a year and a half, we were in, um, Puerla Mont, Costa Rica, picking up mahogany. And I got very sick. I had a peritonsillar abscess that went septic, my whole systemic, my whole body. I couldn't move. They, I had to be rushed to the, um, the clinic there, and they did surgery on me. Uh, it was a very primitive place, and, uh, I tell people this story, and, uh, some people look at me with disbelief. I was in the operating room, and instead of, instead of stainless steel, where you'd expect because they're going to put the IVs on, there were two wooden planks. And they put the, they put me on like my arms like that, they put the planks out. The surgeon comes in and he has long black hair and he's, this is the God's honest, he's in the mirror looking at himself. And I'm on the table looking at him like this, he's in the mirror and admiring himself as he's having a nurse helping him put the, the cap on, and I see him slap her backside, and this is my surgeon. But he did a great job, they saved my life, and, um, so the shipping company sent me after that to San Jose to convalesce. And, um, I was drinking about three bottles of good wine a day there, so after about a week, they said, no, you're going to rejoin the ship in Cartagena, Colombia. Um, but, uh, for reasons that beyond the scope of this discussion, it wasn't a good idea, it'd become too dangerous for me. So I was standing outside in San Jose, uh, with about 6 or 7 dollars in my pocket, and these two young guys came up. One guy introduced himself as Luigi Canaca. He had a broad smile, just beaming, and, um, he asked if I was an American, I said, yeah, I guess it shows. And he said, well, we're students, we were in Panama, and we're going to our place in our home in Miraflores, Honduras. Do you want to come? Well my calendar was had plenty of blank spaces on it, so I said, sure. So with the remaining money that I had, uh, I bought a bottle of rum, a hand of bananas, and, um, a pair of shoes for Luigi, uh, off a street vendor, and off we went. And, um, we went in across Costa Rica, into, uh, El Salvador, and then across Honduras, Nicaragua. And we were walking 20 to 30 miles a day, and Luigi would beg a ride here or there with a truck or a bus or something. And, uh, we'd go for several days without eating. It was, it was a wild experience, uh, it took us about 14 days, and through Nicaragua, Um, at that point, it was after a devastating earthquake, and it was the rumblings of the Somosa, I mean, I, pardon me, of the Sandanista revolution. Um, against Somosa, the autocrat. And so, it was under martial law, it was, it was a very dangerous condition. But I I met some of the most beautiful people I'd ever met. The, the poorest of the poor, and they'd, they'd give me, you know, tortillas with some frijoles, and, and I'll never forget it, it it with hallucinogenic recall, I can still see, we were walking by on this abandoned highway, and out of this ramshackle shelter, built of, you know, tin and cardboard, these little kids come, come walking out, and they're stark naked. And then I see the mother come out, and then the father. They were all naked. Um, it was a the most bizarre, heart-wrenching sight you could see, they just stared at us as we walked by. But throughout this whole thing, Luigi Canaca would sing opera or tell jokes. He was an incandescent human spirit that just kept us going, and then we got to finally got, it took us about two weeks, we finally made it to Miraflores, Honduras, and he put me up in his house and I got a job at a at a taco joint there for a few weeks, and saved up some money and flew back home. After that, I did the itinerant cooking thing, bounced around, went to Florida, New York, and, um, I ended up, uh, at this place in Oyster Bay called Uva's restaurant, uh, I was working as a sous chef there, and I met a beautiful girl and fell in love and we were married. But I was going nowhere, I'm bouncing around, and I then I had the opportunity arose to, uh, open up a restaurant. A high school guy that I knew, who was working as a bartender found me and said, you want to do this joint? We had no money, but we got money together, um, it was a wild experience also, because his father, um, had been a very famous, what they call Ten Man, but in replacement windows, uh, business, became a multi-millionaire, but then, uh, for reasons, uh, business reasons, it went south, he ended up robbing five banks, and he became a famous bank robber in New York called the Gentleman Bank Robber. He was a fascinating character, and the guy that, that, um, ended up bankrolling us, this guy, T.C., was a Wall Street guy who also did a five-year bit upstate for wire and mail fraud, and my main guy in the restaurant, Bob Kang, who was the son of Young Hill Kang, who was short listed for the Nobel Prize. He was A-wall from the Marines. So you get the picture here, two X cons and an A-wall Marine. But we made it, and it was an interesting ride for five years, and, um, we got a great review and did some, did some good business, we sold it for a bunch of money. And, uh, but then I was just doing, uh, physical manual labor, and then again, several years later, he came back and said, you want to do another restaurant? It was a bad idea, and we went into another underfunded, um, venture, uh, called Ronaldo's Cafe in Syosset by the train station. And, um, it was a black hole. It was a, uh, cocaine den, masquerading as a restaurant, and in the three years that we had it, I think I brought home $9,000. So my, my family was living far below the poverty line, the federal poverty line. Uh, but my wife always, she kept her chin up, and we kept moving forward. Uh, I do remember one thing because I, the kindness of strangers has always impressed me. Uh, during this time, Ronaldo's, I, I, on my way home, I'd, I'd stop at this little court and shoot baskets just to blow off some steam, and I'd generally take my wallet and watch off and so forth. And on this particular day, Lou had given me 80 bucks, my partner, and it was 80 bucks was like $5,000 to me at that time. And, uh, I'm three-quarters of the way home, and I realized, my God, I left my wallet at the court. I turn around, going back. It was gone. I get home, and I was disconsolate. My wife, again, took it on the chin, can't do anything about it, and I was in the shower, she came in, she goes, Ron, the second precinct called. The death sergeant said some guy brought your wallet in and it has $80 in it. Uh, but somehow my hair was still wet by the time I got there. Um, I was just shaking with joy, and he said, yeah, this young Hispanic guy came in. And I knew he was an illegal, but I had to ask him his name, and he said, Jose Diaz, it just like, oh, what's your name, Joe Smith. Uh, and he was terrified, but he gave me the wallet and, and I thought after that, here's a guy that found this wallet in the middle of nowhere with $80 in it. That's a week's salary for him, he's probably pushing a lawnmower, yet he took the risk. Instead of just pocketing the money and throwing the wallet away, he took the, the personal risk to go to this police station and turn it in. And, uh, you know, my father always did tell me, um, he said, you know, everybody has a story. It's not an excuse for bad behavior, but it explains it, but everybody has a story, and I, I, I never became a judgmental person because of that, but this guy, Jose Diaz, whatever his name was, did that for me, and I, I've told this story a thousand times because it's, it's important to think about things like that. So we were going out of business at Ron Lou's, and, um, I didn't know what I was going to do. And I had a customer there by the name of, uh, George Rosetti.
[15:19]Like myself, he was a hard drinker, and we drank together, and he's a good guy, very smart guy, we we shared literary stories together. And he asked me, said, Ron, what are you going to do after this restaurant closes? And I said, George, I haven't the faintest idea, I'm, I'm done with the restaurant. It's over, I just, I'm burnt out, um, and I just don't know what I'm going to do. And he said, well, would you consider becoming a proofreader? He says, I'm a medical editor, and I work for this, uh, company called PRR, you know, it's a place in Huntington. They publish cancer journals. Well, I said, sure, I said, it's I, I'll try anything, that sounds good.
[16:15]So I said, but George, you know, I never went to college, I don't have a college degree. He said, don't worry about it. The medical editor is this guy Jim McCarthy, he's a crusty old Irishman, just dazzle him with some stories, and you'll, it'll work out. So I did, I went there and met Jim, we had some, we, we connected right away, and I took a proofreading test, and I aced it. Um, so I was hired a week later, uh, for $34,000, and my wife was ecstatic because for the first time ever, uh, I had a career, and I was surrounded by well-educated, well-mannered squares. Um, uh, it was good, it was good for the family. Uh, but I was a voracious reader, and, uh, and I always studied, I made a point every day to spend an hour studying. So as I was proofreading, I studied all about cancer. I said, the biology, the economics, the politics behind it, and I quickly rose through the ranks. I from proofreader, to editor, to senior editor, managing editor, um, and then I became a freelance writer also, I began doing interviews. And everything was good, it was, it was great. We traveled across the country, my wife would attend cancer meetings with me, we'd go to, uh, Orlando, New Orleans, Chicago, San Francisco, uh, it's, it was just a great time. But after a while, something began to not feel right with the industry I was working in. Uh, the money, the Pharma money had too big of a presence. There was something there, and I'd see these meetings, I'd see the doctors presenting, and I'd see their names on the presentations and the pharma companies and the consulting fees. And so it just, it was, I was unsettling to me. I think the first inflection point came, I got a side gig, uh, with this guy Bob Ross. He, uh, he had a small medical publishing company. And he said, look, there's this company, they, they want to get into, they, they want to break into the oncology sector. And, um, they have a new drug in a phase 1 trial, and they want me to come down with you and write a white paper on it. He said, fine. We went down there, and, um, they had assembled a group of doctors, consultants, and they were presenting the data from this clinical trial. Now, drugs go from a laboratory, they go into phase one, then phase two, then phase three. Phase three is the randomized controlled trial, it's the most important, that's what the FDA looks at when they approve or disapprove of a drug. So they were in phase one clinical trials, and it was a trial on, um, pediatric brain tumors, kids with brain tumors. And I'm listening to the presentations, and they, the way they just talked about these kids, subjects, and there was, but I, I understood that, this is a clinical trial. But then I would hear words like, harmonize the data and clinically meaningful activity, and I was fairly young in the business at this time, and, you know, after the meetings, we were there for a couple of days, I'd say to Bob, I said, what's going on with this harmonizing the data? Clinically meaningful activity, they said, they're just looking for something, any activity, anything to move this on, and I said, but it's, it's not affecting the kids at all. He said, no, it won't, it's they're just, they just want to move their drug to phase two. And, um, I realized that the agent that they were testing on these kids had no chance, or was close to zero chance as you can get of having any benefit for these poor kids, okay? One of the side effects, I read the, you know, the side effect profiles of this terribly toxic drug was suicidal ideation. Just think, a 12-year-old kid contemplating suicide because the drug they were giving him was so toxic. I asked Bob, I said, look, why would they spend money on, on this drug that has no chance of of benefit? And he said, well, all they're looking for is some activity. So you can put a placeholder right there, and I'll get back to that why that happens, okay?
[21:30]The next inflection point was, uh, I was attending a meeting, the ASCO meeting, American Society of Clinical Oncology. It's the largest cancer organization in the world, about 40,000 members. Very powerful, very politically connected, and, um, at this time, I'm, uh, attending the, the meeting, and they have what they're called poster sessions. The poster session, this is the size of a football field, this, this arena it's in, the poster session. And it's lined with posters that are 4 foot by 6 foot up on, upon posts, they're just straight line. The posters are essentially abstracts, concepts, they consolidate what was presented at that, at the meeting, what the particular person presented. And I was walking by this one and it was, uh, I was presented by Amgen, the pharmaceutical giant, and it was for this drug called Aranesp. And I had what's called what I call the the Toto moment. Like in the Wizard of Oz, when Toto pulled the curtain and he saw the fake wizard. As I was walking by, the famous oncologist named John Glaspy, tall imposing man was talking to his associate, and he said verbatim, what we need is a drug that fucking works. And that got me, and our eyes glanced a little bit and just we went off, I kept on my way. And so Aranesp is a drug, it's called an ESA, an erythropoietin stimulating agent. Erythropoietin is a hormone produced in the kidneys that stimulates red blood cell growth in, um, in the bone marrow. It became famous, that's what Lance Armstrong did, it was the EPO drug that's what he got busted for in the Tour de France. So it's used for anemia, and, um, there were, Amgen got it approved for chemotherapy-induced anemia. Okay, it was a very difficult approval because it's a growth factor, and anytime you enter a growth factor into the cancer setting, because cancer is unregulated cellular growth, there, many times, there are many problems. One of the expert panel came, it was leaked that he said, I hope we're not, I hope we're not approving miracle growth for cancer, okay? But they did approve it. But Amgen wasn't satisfied with that market. They wanted a blockbuster, another blockbuster. Now, in cancer lingo, a blockbuster is a drug that generates at least $1 billion per year. So they wanted the other market in cancer, the bigger market, fatigue. Cancer fatigue is the most dreaded symptom cancer patients have, even more so than pain, because pain can be treated with opioids. Cancer fatigue, there's no treatment for it. And it's not like being totally exhausted, like, oh, I'm exhausted. It's cancer fatigue takes you into an otherworldly sense. The world outside you is moving at one speed, and you're locked in place. It's soul-searing. So any drug that helps this is a huge, it would be a blockbuster. The problem was that Aranesp didn't work. Okay, instead, but, but the, but the FDA still approved it, and they began, Amgen began direct consumer marketing of this drug that had very dangerous side effects for cancer fatigue. So later on that night, I went down to the hotel bar, and I'd seen the Amgen reps, sales reps. And these are very slippery people. They're mechanisms, okay? Uh, I mean, they're just, they're just simply mechanisms working for the country, uh, and, um, I was there and talking and listening to them. And I'd done some amateur boxing when I was a kid, young guy, and they were talking about boxing. So I made a, you know, a correction, I corrected, it wasn't Marvin Hagler, one of these things, just to sidle up and have a conversation. So we started, started talking to this guy named Tom. And, uh, I dropped in as an aside, said, wow, you guys hit another home run with Aranesp, a blockbuster. He said, yeah. He said, the Docs love it, they can't get enough of this shit. I said, why? And he said, well, it's $2,600 an injection, in-office injection. Bang, $2,600, bang, $2,600. He said, they're making a fortune, we it's we just can't get enough of this stuff to them. So I waited a little bit, and then, uh, sort of jokingly, I said, yeah, but it doesn't work. And I'll never forget, he paused for effect, and he said, if you're putting your kids through Stanford, and looking at a waterfront property in Malibu, it works. And my spine just cringed. That was my tipping point, when I realized that the incestuous relationship between Pharma and, um, the oncology community, the healers, had been so corrupted by their money that everything had fallen off the cliff. So that was the real tipping point for me, and I began doing a lot more investigation. Uh, I contacted my my sources on the hill that I'd met, um, during the writing of the my book, and I kept moving along.
