Friday, August 17, 2012

Carlton Hazlewood, the Burzynski Research Institute IRB chairman - what ARE the links between him and Stanislaw Burzynski?

The well-known blogger and cancer surgeon & scientist Orac has written another great blog examining aspects of the failures of the Burzynksi Research Institute (BRI) Institutional Review Board (IRB), linking to recently discovered letters relating to FDA inspections. It brings into question the entire relationship between Dr. Burzynski and Carlton F. Hazlewood

Carlton Hazlewood may be an even more "interesting" character than even the FDA letters appear to make him. A study of Burzynski's CV (available to download from the Burzynski Clinic website http://www.burzynskiclinic.com/sr-burzynski-md-phd.html shows that his very first mention of the word "antineoplaston" appears in a paper published in 1976 (listed as number 140 in the CV) in a journal listed (by abbreviation) as Physiol Chem Phys - this turns out be be "Physiological Chemistry and Physics". This has now morphed into "Physiological Chemistry and Physics and Medical NMR" in 1982. http://www.physiologicalchemistryandphysics.com/

Sadly, the online archive of this journal is incomplete, with only 2 articles from 1976. PubMed has no abstract available  

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/1013179

Oh well! However, further information reveals on the journal's website that its "Editorial College"  has listed among its members, a certain Carlton F. Hazlewood 

http://www.physiologicalchemistryandphysics.com/editorial.htm

Bottom left-hand corner. Hmm! It also turns out that Hazlewood was employed by Baylor College of Medicine from 1965 until 1997.

http://www.forbes.com/profile/carlton-hazlewood/

When Burzynski first worked in the US, he worked at - Baylor College of Medicine - from 1970 to 1977. This, of course, may be pure coincidence and I don't know how long Hazlewood has been on that journal's Editorial College. Burzynski does, however, have 5 other publications in that journal between 1973 and 1977.

Also of note is the name of the journal's Chief Editor, Gilbert Ling. He has a number of book titles listed on Amazon, but doesn't have a Wikipedia entry. Googling his name, you can find his own website - the contents seem a little "odd" to me (are those ducks I can hear?). Going further down the list takes you to this

http://gerson-research.org/docs/HildenbrandGLG-1979-1/index.html

Yes - it's a Gerson website. Oh dear! Searching that page you find several mentions of Ling and - Carlton Hazlewood. It appears that the article is a re-publication of an article published in something called "The Healing Journal". The title itself raises a red flag. It's certainly not PubMed listed. Googling it takes you to http://www.thehealingjournal.com/

This is going from bad to worse - the red flags are waving so much you could start a wind farm! The article is dated 1979 and seems to be too old for the archive on the website. 

Much is made in the article of a connection between Ling, Hazlewood and Raymond Vahan Damadian, inventor of the MRI scanner. Curiously, there seems to be no mention of Ling or Hazlewood on Damadian's Wikipedia page or on that about the MRI scanner. Perhaps someone can enlighten readers about the veracity of this claimed connection? It seems that the article's author, Gar Hildenbrand, (more red flags - Gerson!) thinks that MRI will prove that Ling's theories about cell structure, which seem to be at odds with the work of other scientists in the field of cellular structure, e.g sodium channels. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sodium_channel

Gar Hildenbrand is, it seems, a former Executive Director of the Gerson Institute.

I have no idea whether Ling is or was a genuine cell biology researcher who may have gone bad (there do seem to be several articles authored by him listed on PubMed) or is simply having his name taken in vain by cranks. It's not my field - if someome knows the real story could they please provide a link or reference. However, the article on that Gerson website claims that "Gilbert N. Ling may very likely be known by future generations of scientists as the Father of Cellular Biology". Really? Surely such an achievement would've merited a Wikipedia entry..... 

Maybe I'm simply making too much of connections by association. Maybe someone in the USA knows more or can find out more about Carlton Hazlewood. There is some more stuff on Google, but I'm not sure how relevant it is to this subject. 

Another letter has just emerged from the FDA to Hazlewood dated 14th December 2009 shows that the Burzynski Research Institute hadn't been keeping up with its obligations and had failed to register "at a site maintained by the Department of Health and Human Services".

http://www.circare.org/info/bri/fda_to_bri_undated.pdf

It's still not registered, it seems http://ohrp.cit.nih.gov/search/irbsearch.aspx?styp=bsc

One has to wonder if the relationship between Burzynski and Hazlewood is more complex than it appears to be based just on the IRB stuff.