Cornelius P. Rhoads

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Cornelius P. Rhoads
Worcester Foundation for Experimental Biology

Cornelius Packard "Dusty" Rhoads (June 9, 1898 – August 13, 1959) was an American

Memorial Sloan–Kettering Cancer Center. For his contributions to cancer research, Rhoads was featured on the cover of the June 27, 1949 issue of Time magazine under the title "Cancer Fighter".[1]

During his early years with the

chemical weapons and set up research centers. Research on mustard gas led to developments for its use in chemotherapy
at Sloan Kettering.

In early 1932, a letter Rhoads had written in November 1931, which disparaged Puerto Ricans and makes claims (which he referred to later as jokes) he had intentionally injected cancer cells into his patients, was given by a lab assistant to

whitewashing campaign to protect Rhoads and, by extension, Rockefeller interests.[3] In the ensuing investigation, Rhoads defended himself, saying he had written his comments in anger and as a joke to a New York colleague.[4] Neither Puerto Rico's Attorney General nor the medical community found evidence of his or the project's giving any inappropriate medical treatment, and the scandal was forgotten.[5][2]

In 2002, the controversy was revived. Alerted to the incident, American Association for Cancer Research (AACR), which had established the Cornelius P. Rhoads Memorial Award in 1979,[6] commissioned a new investigation.[3] It was led by Jay Katz, emeritus professor at Yale Law School and a specialist in medical ethics. He concluded there was no evidence of unethical human experimentation, but the letter was so offensive that the prize should be renamed. AACR concurred and stripped the honor from Rhoads because of his racism.[2]

Early life and education

Rhoads was born June 20, 1898, in

Peter Bent Brigham Hospital, and contracted pulmonary tuberculosis
. During his treatment and recovery, he developed a lifelong interest in disease research.

Early career

After recovering from TB, Rhoads published a paper on the

pathologist at Harvard and conducted research on disease processes.[8]

In 1929, Rhoads joined the staff of the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research, now

poliomyelitis. He worked at Rockefeller until 1939.[9][10]

Puerto Rico

While working for the Rockefeller Institute, in 1931 Rhoads was invited by

folic acid and a 3 to 6-month course of antibiotics.[13]

Rhoads was to assist Castle, and they established a base in San Juan at the Presbyterian Hospital. Rhoads corresponded often with Simon Flexner at the Rockefeller Institute in New York regarding his research and career interests. In Puerto Rico, the Rockefeller group had more than 200 patients; historian and ethicist

experimentally controlled patients' diets.[4] Lederer notes that in letters from this time, Rhoads referred to his patients as "experimental 'animals'."[4] He wrote: "If they don’t develop something they certainly have the constitutions of oxen." Rhoads sought to experimentally induce the conditions he was studying in his patients rather than simply treat them. If they did develop tropical sprue, he could treat it with liver extract.[4]

Castle wanted to perform a similar study in Cidra, in conjunction with the School of Tropical Medicine, which was doing related research, but this was not approved. Rhoads also collected polio serum samples for his boss Flexner at the Rockefeller Institute, for which he was assisted by contacts at the university.

Scandal

On 10 November, 1931, Rhoads was at a party at a Puerto Rican co-worker's house in

Memorial Hospital for Cancer Research in New York).[4]

He wrote the following:

Dear Ferdie:

The more I think about the Larry Smith appointment the more disgusted I get. Have you heard any reason advanced for it? It certainly is odd that a man out with the entire Boston group, fired by Wallach, and as far as I know, absolutely devoid of any scientific reputation should be given the place. There is something wrong somewhere with our point of view.

The situation is settled in Boston. Parker and Nye are to run the laboratory together and either Kenneth or MacMahon to be assistant; the chief to stay on. As far as I can see, the chances of my getting a job in the next ten years are absolutely nil. One is certainly not encouraged to make scientific advances, when it is a handicap rather than an aid to advancement. I can get a damn fine job here and am tempted to take it. It would be ideal except for the Porto Ricans. They are beyond doubt the dirtiest, laziest, most degenerate and thievish race of men ever inhabiting this sphere. It makes you sick to inhabit the same island with them. They are even lower than Italians. What the island needs is not public health work but a tidal wave or something to totally exterminate the population. It might then be livable. I have done my best to further the process of extermination by killing off 8 and transplanting cancer into several more. The latter has not resulted in any fatalities so far... The matter of consideration for the patients' welfare plays no role here — in fact all physicians take delight in the abuse and torture of the unfortunate subjects.

Do let me know if you hear any more news.

Sincerely, "Dusty"[14][15]

His unmailed letter was found by one of his staff and circulated among workers at the Anemia Commission. When Rhoads learned of this, he quickly made a public apology at a meeting of all staff and doctors.[4] A while later, he was dismayed to hear that the letter was going to be discussed at a meeting of the Puerto Rico Medical Association. With relations having deteriorated locally, he returned to New York in December 1931.[4]

Publicity and investigations

Pedro Albizu Campos, Puerto Rican nationalist

At the end of December, Rhoads' former lab technician Luis Baldoni resigned; he later testified that he feared for his safety. In January 1932 he gave the Rhoads letter to

Pan American Union, the American Civil Liberties Union, newspapers, embassies, and the Vatican.[2]

In addition to distributing the letter to the media, Albizu wrote his own, charging that Rhoads was part of a US plot to exterminate Puerto Ricans. He linked the letter to other complaints about American imperialism, saying that the US governors in Puerto Rico encouraged labor emigration rather than improving employment, and promoted birth control, which was offensive to the majority Catholic residents.[14]

A photograph of the Rhoads' letter was published on January 27, 1932 in La Democracia, the Unionist newspaper of Antonio Rafael Barceló, with a translation in Spanish of the entire letter. It did not support Albizu Campos' theory of a US conspiracy against Puerto Rico. On February 13, El Mundo published the entire letter, in both Spanish and English.[14]

The Rhoads' letter created one of the first crises for James R. Beverley, newly appointed as the acting Governor of Puerto Rico. He said the letter was a "confession of murder" and "a libel against the people of Puerto Rico", and ordered an investigation, one of his first acts.[14] Beverley said of Rhoads that "he was just a damned fool, ... a good doctor, but not very strong mentally on anything else."[14] Rhoads, already back in New York, released an official response to the media and the governor. He insisted that he was joking in his letter, which was intended to be confidential, calling it a "fantastic and playful composition written entirely for my own diversion and intended as a parody on supposed attitudes of some American minds in Porto Rico," explaining that nothing "was ever intended to mean other than the opposite of what was stated."[2] Rhoads offered to return to clear things up, but never did. The governor's inquiry concluded that Rhoads did not commit the acts included in his letter, nor any other crimes.[2] Later that year, Governor Beverley struggled with a greater political crisis than the Rhoads letter over his own remarks encouraging birth control use on the island. Residents were outraged and he was removed from office.[14]

Rhoads and his work were investigated by the Puerto Rican Attorney General Ramon Quinones, with review of medical aspects by Dr. P. Morales Otero, representative of the Puerto Rico Medical Association, and Dr. E. Garrido Morales, representing the Commissioner of Health. Sworn testimony was taken from several of Rhoads' patients as well as his colleagues, including Castle, William Galbreath, and George C. Payne. They reviewed the case files for the 257 patients treated by Rhoads and the Rockefeller Commission, including the 13 patients who died during this period. They found no evidence of the crimes described in Rhoads' unmailed letter. The Attorney General and medical community joined in absolving Rhoads of the Nationalist charges that he was part of a U.S. plot to exterminate Puerto Ricans.[5] Rhoads was subject to separate investigations ordered by the acting American governor of Puerto Rico, Beverley, and the Rockefeller Institute, and "neither...was able to uncover any evidence that Dr. Rhoads had exterminated any Puerto Ricans."[3]

Confirmed in Lederer's 21st century account, "records at Presbyterian Hospital in San Juan, Puerto Rico, where Rhoads had performed his research, revealed no patients in the young

pathologist's care had died under suspicious circumstances."[4] Additionally, the investigators were "unable to confirm Rhoads's other claim (omitted in Time's account) that he had 'transplanted cancer into several patients.'"[4]

During the investigations,

medical press."[16] Francis Peyton Rous of the Rockefeller Institute was editor of the Journal of Experimental Medicine through the 1930s and 1940s. Although it accepted few articles on clinical research, he was careful about their wording in an effort to avoid criticism by the anti-vivisectionists.[16]

Lee was given access to pre-published versions of the articles on the controversy by both The New York Times and Time. He persuaded Time to eliminate the words "and transplanting cancer into several more," from its published version of the letter.[3] Also, based on the positive testimony of some patients, The New York Times headlined its article as "Patients Say Rhoads Saved Their Lives" and reported on this aspect as well.[17] Rhoads had returned to New York before the scandal broke in Puerto Rico. After the Attorney General's report[5] and that of the Rockefeller Institute in 1932, the controversy quickly faded in the United States.[4][2]

Reaction to the Rhoads scandal and controversy was mixed in the United States, in part due to the Rockefeller campaign. Starr says (in his 2003 article on the scandal) that Rhoads' colleagues did not believe the researcher's attempt to cast his letter as a "fantastic and playful composition...intended as a parody."[2] Some were worried about Rhoads' mental health at the time. A superior dismissed the incident as a case of local ingratitude. Time magazine headlined the incident as "Porto Ricochet"; Starr suggests they meant that Rhoads's humanitarian work in Puerto Rico had come back to bite him.[2]

In Puerto Rico, Albizu Campos used the Rhoads scandal as part of his

tried to assassinate President Truman to bring their cause to the world stage. When later interviewed, Collazo said that as a young man, in 1932 he heard Albizu Campos speak about the Rhoads letter and decided to devote his life to the Nationalist movement.[3][4][2]

Hematology

Following his study in Puerto Rico, in 1933 Rhoads was chosen to lead a special service at the Rockefeller Institute in clinical hematology, to study diseases of the blood-forming organs. He built on his research on anemia and tropical sprue.[18] In 1934, Rhoads and another researcher published results of the success in using liver extract therapy to treat tropical sprue (and relieve anemia).[19] Their work was recognized as contributing benefit in treatment of the disease by others in the field.[20]

Memorial Hospital and World War II

In 1940, Rhoads was selected as director of

oncologist. Ewing had written about cancer transplantation in 1931, a subject which Rhoads had referred to in his scandalous letter written in November of that year.[4] In 1941 Rhoads was studying the use of radiation to treat leukemia.[22]

During World War II, Rhoads was commissioned as a colonel and assigned as chief of medicine in the Chemical Weapons Division of the

U.S. Army.[21] He established the U.S. Army chemical weapons laboratories in Utah, Maryland, and Panama. With his enthusiastic participation, secret experiments including race-based tests involving African Americans, Japanese Americans, and Puerto Ricans were performed on more than 60,000 U.S. soldiers. Many were left suffering from debilitating, lifelong aftereffects.[23] For this work, he won the Legion of Merit for "combating poison gas and other advances in chemical warfare" in 1945.[6][23] In 2003, the chemical warfare experiments conducted at San Jose Island were also reviewed as a part of the investigation into Rhoads' actions in Puerto Rico. Yale bioethicist Jay Katz described the chemical warfare tests as "unconscionable," saying that they were based on the "cheap availability of human beings" and the soldiers were "manipulated, exploited, and betrayed."[23]

Due to his casualty studies on

mechlorethamine or Mustargen. Its success in clinical trials during the war years was the basis for the development of the field of anti-cancer chemotherapy.[24] Rhoads also became interested in total body irradiation, which led to early work on chemotherapy.[25]

Post-war

In 1945, the

Sloan-Kettering Institute was founded as a cancer research center, in the hopes that an industrial approach to research would yield a cure.[21] It opened in 1948. While still director of Memorial, from 1945 until 1953 Rhoads also served as the first director of the Sloan-Kettering Institute.[3][21] He was "praised by Memorial for his 'essential role in the evolution of the hospital into a modern medical center.'"[3][21] As director of Sloan-Kettering, he had oversight as well over research related to Department of Defense radiation experiments through 1954. For instance, that year, a Sloan-Kettering team began a multi-year study of "Post-Irradiation Syndrome in Humans."[26]

In 1953, Rhoads stepped back slightly, becoming scientific director of the newly merged

Memorial Sloan–Kettering Cancer Center.[21] He also continued as the scientific director of Sloan-Kettering operations.[27] He also was an adviser to the United States Atomic Energy Commission regarding nuclear medicine. Some AEC funding supported Sloan-Kettering research into the use of iodine to transport radiation to cancer tumors.[28]

Rhoads continued to serve as scientific director of the

Memorial Sloan–Kettering Cancer Center until his death.[27] He died of a coronary occlusion on August 13, 1959, in Stonington, Connecticut.[8] In 1979, on the 20th anniversary of his death, the American Association for Cancer Research established the Cornelius P. Rhoads Memorial Prize in his honor, as an annual award to a promising young researcher.[6]

Honors

Revival of controversy

In 1982, Puerto Rican social scientist and writer Pedro Aponte-Vázquez discovered new information at various archives which raised questions about the investigations conducted on Rhoads and Rockefeller Project. Most prominent among his findings was a 1932 letter written by Governor Beverly to the associate director of the Rockefeller Foundation, stating that Rhoads had written a second letter "even worse than the first" and which, according to Beverley, the [Puerto Rican] government had suppressed and destroyed.[2] In 1932 the Puerto Rican Attorney General, aided by top-ranking Puerto Rican doctors, had investigated all of the work of Rhoads and the Rockefeller Project, including 13 deaths that occurred among nearly 300 patients treated. They found no evidence of wrongdoing or crimes.[5] In addition, Rhoads' superior at the Rockefeller Project had conducted a close investigation of the 13 patients who died under Rhoads' tenure, but found no evidence of wrongdoing. But in 1982 Aponte-Vázquez urged the Puerto Rico Department of Justice to reopen the case. It refused as Rhoads had been dead for so long.[2]

In 2002, Edwin Vazquez, a biology professor at the

bioethicist from Yale University. Katz said although "there was no evidence of Dr. Rhoads' killing patients or transplanting cancer cells, the letter itself was reprehensible enough to remove his name from the award." The AACR agreed with his conclusion.[3]

Eric Rosenthal of Oncology Times in 2003 characterized the case as the AACR having to "deal with the embarrassment of having history catch up to modern-day sensibilities."[3] He wrote,

The complicated legacy of Cornelius "Dusty" Rhoads, who died in 1959, should not cause society to promote nor deny his existence but should provide a perspective that neither condones what he wrote or thought—or the whitewashing of the incident by institutions and media of the 1930s—but that does give him due appropriate credit for his accomplishments as well as acknowledgement of his faults and sins."[3]

In 2003 the AACR renamed the award, stripping the honor from Rhoads posthumously, to the Award for Outstanding Achievement in Cancer Research.[29] The AACR indicated that the new name would be retroactive and past awardees would receive updated plaques.[3][30]

Representation in other media

  • During the 1980s, the Puerto Rican political satire comedy group, Los Rayos Gamma, performed parodies of Rhoads with Jacobo Morales portraying a Cornelio Rodas as an insane, Frankenstein-like scientist bent on the elimination of Puerto Ricans.[31]
  • Roberto Busó-García wrote and directed the dramatic film, The Condemned (2013), which he said was loosely based on the Rhoads' controversy in Puerto Rico.[32]

References

  1. ^ "Frontal Attack - TIME". 2007-07-12. Archived from the original on 2007-07-12. Retrieved 2022-08-16.
  2. ^
    S2CID 5534392
    .
  3. ^
    S2CID 76355659
    .
  4. ^
    ISSN 0896-7148
    .
  5. ^ a b c d "DR. RHOADS CLEARED OF PORTO RICO PLOT", New York Times, 15 February 1932
  6. ^ a b c d e Packard, Gabriel (29 April 2003). "RIGHTS: Group Strips Racist Scientist's Name from Award". Inter Press Service. Retrieved 7 September 2013.
  7. ^
    ISBN 978-0-7432-6068-8
  8. ^
    S2CID 26685816
    .
  9. PMID 19869621
    – via Silverchair.
  10. PMID 19869595
    .
  11. ^ "William B. Castle", National Academy of Sciences, Biographical Memoirs
  12. ^ Norman Maldonado. "The Changing Clinical Picture of Tropical Sprue" (Revista de Hematologia) Archived 2011-07-22 at the Wayback Machine, Hematología 2010;11(2): 95-98 April — June 2010. Retrieved 17 December 2012.
  13. PMID 9135537
    .
  14. ^ a b c d e f Truman R. Clark. 1975. Puerto Rico and the United States, 1917-1933, University of Pittsburgh Press, pp. 151-154
  15. ^ "Borinquén : Throughline". NPR.org. 2020-07-16. Retrieved 2020-07-16.
  16. ^
    OCLC 40909116
    .
  17. ^ "PATIENTS SAY RHOADS SAVED THEIR LIVES; Testify in Porto Rican Inquiry Into Charges Against Rockefeller Institute Doctor". The New York Times. February 2, 1932 – via NYTimes.com.
  18. ^ George Washington Corner, A History of the Rockefeller Institute, 1901-1953, Rockefeller Institute Press, 1965, p. 271
  19. ISSN 0098-7484
    .
  20. ^ Philip, CORR (1936). "Intensive Liver Therapy in Sprue". Ann. Int. Med. 9 (9).
  21. ^ a b c d e f g h i "Cornelius P. Rhoads", ECommons, Cornell University Library
  22. ^ "Postirradiation Changes in the Levels of Organic Phosphorus in the Blood of Patients with Leukemia", Cancer Research
  23. ^
    OCLC 1036104286.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link
    )
  24. PMID 13947966
    .
  25. ^ Goozner, Merrill. 2004. The $800 Million Pill: The Truth Behind the Cost of New Drugs. p.172
  26. ^ Appendix 1: Contract DA-49-007, in "Report on Search for Records of Human Radiation Experiments", US Department of Defense, p. 125
  27. ^ a b "SERVICE FOR DR. RHOADS; Memorial for Sloan-Kettering Director Here Tomorrow", The New York Times
  28. ^ "New Hope is Held Out for Cancer Cure", Daytona Beach Morning Journal, 16 June 1948, Retrieved 17 December 2012
  29. ^ "AACR Timeline 1964-1981 - AACR History". American Association for Cancer Research (AACR). 2021-04-05. Retrieved 2022-03-31.
  30. ^ "Cancer Body to Probe Claims that Scientist Killed Subjects", IPS News
  31. ^ Collado-Schwartz, Ángel, editor; "El humor como expresión cultural", La Voz del Centro II, Fundación La Voz del Centro, 2006
  32. ^ Manohla Dargis, "Disgraced Life Conjures Mysterious Forces", New York Times, February 2013, accessed 21 October 2013

Further reading

  • Susan E. Lederer. Subjected to Science: Human Experimentation in America before the Second World War, Henry E. Sigerist Series in the History of Medicine. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995, reprinted 1997 (paperback).

External links

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