Homburger, Freddy, M.D.
(Claims CTR tried to prevent him from publishing his research) PlaintiffBiographical Information:
Freddy Homburger was a most implausible figure to become embroiled in controversy. Until late in his life, the Swiss-born cancer researcher was probably best known for a unique event when he combined his passion for painting with his medical expertise to heal one of the painters who inspired him. But that would change dramatically.
Freddy Homburger was born in Sankt Gallen (Saint Gall), Switzerland, on February 8, 1916, and studied medicine at the University of Vienna and the University of Geneva, receiving a doctor of medicine degree from the latter institution in 1941. Along with his new bride, Regina Thurlimann, he then came to the United States to do a research fellowship at the Yale Medical School and an internship in pathology at the New Haven Hospital.
After completing his studies at Yale, Homburger did another fellowship at Harvard Medical School and Thorndike Memorial Laboratory, while interning at Boston City Hospital. During these years, he also served as a Swiss representative on the Red Cross Mixed Medical Commission. In 1945, he became a fellow in medicine at Memorial Hospital in New York City, and within a year he had assumed the additional duties of instructor of medicine at Cornell University Medical College and chief of the Department of Clinical Investigation at the newly opened Sloan-Kettering Institute for Cancer Research. He was hired for the latter position by the institute’s first director, Dr. Cornelius Rhoads, and became the first physician on the Institute’s payroll.
In August of 1948, the Homburgers returned to Boston when Freddy accepted a dual appointment as Research Professor of Medicine in the Department of Surgery and as Director of Cancer Research and Control Unit at Tufts University School of Medicine. They would remain in the Boston area for the rest of his life, with Freddy taking American citizenship in 1952.
His duties at Tufts included organizing the school’s research and cancer control units. But Homburger also remained an active researcher, focusing on conducting animal studies to isolate the genetic basis of cancer and other diseases. He became affiliated with the Roscoe Jackson Memorial Laboratory in Bar Harbor, Maine. While he conducted experiments with a variety of animal subjects, Homburger eventually became known for his use of Syrian hamsters, which he bred himself.
As Homburger earned a reputation as one of the leading authorities on cancer research, he found himself spending an increasing amount of time lobbying to increase government support of medical research. He testified before Congress, attended conferences and wrote letters in which he conveyed confidence that money was all that was needed to produce tremendous victories over disease. “Many of our fellow-citizens are being stricken in their prime by heart disease, cancer and a host of diseases that could be prevented if only research efforts were intensified … In all these fields only money is lacking to develop the inroads that have been made,” he wrote in 1955.
Although Homburger was now recognized as a foremost authority on cancer, he retained a self-deprecatory sense of humor. At one conference, after being introduced as a cancer expert, he declared, “There are no cancer experts, as yet. There are only degrees of ignorance.”
In addition to his busy professional life, Homburger was a talented painter and found time to create watercolors that were displayed in many galleries. He and his wife also amassed a large art collection and in 1950 Homburger found a unique way to combine his vocation and his avocation.
Homburger learned that renowned French Fauvist painter Raoul Dufy had become so crippled by arthritis that he had had to abandon his art. By coincidence, Homburger and colleague Charles D. Bonner had just received an experimental supply of ACTH and cortisone. He believed that Dufy’s case was treatable and he invited the seventy-three-year-old artist to come to Boston and participate in clinical trials. Dufy was treated with the drugs and intensive physiotherapy and the results were spectacular: “a completely infirm and immobilized old man became mobile within a few days and was able to walk with the aid of crutches, which he had barely been able to do before treatment, even when severely pressed. …With few exceptions, the mobility of all joints increased.”
Dufy soon experienced some severe side effects, but the medication was adjusted and the artist was once more able to paint. He was able to resume work on some long-abandoned canvases and, in gratitude to the doctor whom he called his “savior,” Dufy painted a portrait of Freddy Homburger. The painter could scarcely believe that such a “therapeutic miracle,” had occurred and he wondered, “Is it a rebirth or a swan song?” Dufy indeed died three years later, but his final years were made fulfilling ones by the cortisone treatment.
The influence of Dufy became increasingly evident in Homburger’s own paintings. His first one-man show opened in 1953 at the Carstairs Gallery in New York City, consisting primarily of Mexican scenes in watercolors. When his second exhibit opened at New York’s Galerie St. Etienne in 1955, the art critic for the New York Times reported that Homburger’s watercolors were “likely to prove popular because through them the spectator is transported to various beauty spots of the world – Switzerland, Mexico, Maine – where the painter has indulged his gusto for the picturesque. Dufy is his revered master and from him Dr. Homburger had learned how to key color up to a level of gaiety and to give flourishes to ordinary sights. But his sense of structure and form is feeble.”
By 1957, Homburger was feeling the need to devote more of his professional time to research. He resigned from Tufts and co-founded the Bio-Research Institute in Cambridge, a commercial laboratory, where he continued his research on cancer and other diseases and his experiments with and breeding of Syrian hamsters. He had become particularly interested in geriatric medicine. Convinced that the country would become “a huge nursing home” without much more research, Homburger made the topic the subject of his first book, The Medical Care of the Aged and Chronically Ill (1955).
At about the same time that he left Tufts, Homburger published his second book, The Biologic Basis of Cancer Management (1957), which was divided into sections on the etiology, the biological behavior, the diagnosis, and the treatment and prevention of cancer. As the title suggests, some of the medical researchers who had once dreamed of finding a cure for cancer were beginning to think less optimistically about ways to reduce the risk of cancer and of ways to treat and “manage” the disease.
In the succeeding years, Homburger’s research began to deal less with finding a genetic cause for cancer and more with identifying environmental substances that were associated with cancer. In 1961, he testified at a Senate Hearing that “there was increasing evidence that man is surrounded in his daily life by ‘innumerable substances, some of them indispensable for his existence, which are capable of causing cancer in certain experimental conditions.’” Homburger criticized the domination of cancer research grants by “an oligarchy of a few scientists” and contended that a significant amount of the money being devoted to finding a cure for cancer needed to be shifted into “preventing cancer by studying and identifying the agents that can cause the disease.”
One of the subjects of Homburger’s research was safrole, a sassafras extract that had one been widely used in root beer and other sassafras tea, and other common household products. In 1961 he demonstrated that safrole produced cancer in rats and its use as a food additive was banned. He had also begun to research tobacco smoke, under a grant from the Tobacco Industry Research Committee (TIRC). In 1962, Homburger announced that he had been able to duplicate Dr. Ernst Wynder’s findings by producing tumors in mouse-painting mouse experiments.
Over the next decade, Homburger’s laboratory, the Bio-Research Institute, continued to receive funding from the TIRC (which changed its name to the Council for Tobacco Research (CTR) in 1964). His laboratory eventually received close to a million dollars in funding from the CTR/TIRC, but the relationship ended in acrimony and controversy after Homburger led a CTR-funded one-hundred-week inhalation study of Syrian hamsters in the early 1970s. The study found a dramatic relationship between smoke inhalation and pre-cancerous lesions in the larynx, but when Homburger submitted a draft of the findings to the CTR, he was asked to make changes.
According to Homburger, the requested revisions “would have completely castrated the paper. They didn’t want us to call anything cancer. They wanted it to be ‘pseudoepitheliomatous hyperplasia,’ a euphemism for lesions preceding cancer. And we said, ‘No, that isn’t right. It is cancer.’” The dispute escalated, and Homburger later testified that he was threatened with having his funding cut off and that the CTR would expose pre-existing diseases in his hamster, thereby ruining him financially. When Homburger didn’t back down, but instead scheduled a press conference to coincide with a presentation of his findings at the 1974 annual meeting of the American Federation of Biological Societies, CTR outside publicist Leonard Zahn arranged to have the press conference cancelled. Needless to say, Homburger’s laboratories received no more funding from the CTR.
Throughout his life, Freddy Homburger retained an impressively wide range of interests, both inside and outside of the medical profession. He spoke at the first Connecticut State Congress on Medical Quackery in 1962. From 1964 to 1986, he served as honorary Swiss consul in Boston, doing everything from processing documents to promoting the interests of his native country and organizing social events for visiting Swiss officials.
In 1984, Homburger went into semi-retirement, though he continued to be affiliated with the Boston University School of Medicine and to do consultant work. By then, like many of the researchers who had once been optimistic about finding a cure for cancer, his outlook had darkened. In a 1987 letter, he reminisced about the days when cancer researchers were convinced that the cure to cancer was imminent, then sadly acknowledged that the “utopian promise” of those years had not been fulfilled. “Real progress,” he reported sadly, “has been far less spectacular than that hoped for two generations ago.”
Freddy Homburger died on September 25, 2001, at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston. His wife of sixty-two years passed away less than three months later.
Sources:
Allan M. Brandt, The Cigarette Century: The Rise, Fall and Deadly Persistence of the Product that Defined America (New York: Basic Books, 2007).
John W. Finney, “Cancer Research of U. S. Criticized,” New York Times, June 16, 1961, 35.
“Freddy Homburger, a Physician, Artist,” Boston Globe, October 16, 2001.
Nate Haseltine, “Hill Funds Asked for Cancer Study,” Washington Post, April 21, 1961, C3.
Nate Haseltine, “Tobacco Industry Study Finds Cancer Agent,” Washington Post, April 18, 1962, A5.
Richard Kluger, Ashes to Ashes: America’s Hundred-Year Cigarette War and the Unabashed Triumph of Philip Morris (New York: Vintage Books, 1996).
For More Biographical Information:
American Men & Women of Science, various editions.
Biography Index. A cumulative index to biographical material in books and magazines. Volume 2: August, 1949-August, 1952. New York: H.W. Wilson Co., 1953. (BioIn 2).
International Medical Who's Who. A biographical guide in medical research. First edition. Two volumes. Harlow, England: Longman Group, 1980. (IntMed).
Who Was Who in America, Who Was Who in American Art, Who’s Who in Frontier Science and Technology, Who’s Who in Medicine and Healthcare, Who’s Who in Technology, Who’s Who in U.S. Writers, Editors & Poets and Who’s Who in the World, various editions.
Papers:
Homburger’s papers are at the Library of Congress
Key Publications:
“Aiding Medical Research,” (letter to the editor) New York Times, July 17, 1955, E8.
The Biologic Basis of Cancer Management (1957: Hoeber-Harper).
“For Medical Research,” (letter to the editor) New York Times, August 10, 1952, E8.
Letter to the editor, New York Times, May 24, 1987, SM74.
“Life Is a Short Story,” unpublished memoir in Homburger’s papers at the Library of Congress.
The Medical Care of the Aged and Chronically Ill (1955: Little, Brown).
“Raoul Dufy, artist and patient,” Postgrad Medicine, December 1953;14 (6): 551-2.
“The treatment of Raoul Dufy’s arthritis,” (with Charles D. Bonner) New England Journal of Medicine (1979) 301:669-673.
Synonyms
Homberger, FreddyHomburger, Dr.
Homburger, Freddy