This article was first published inÂ
Want to prolong life? To start with, you need three corpses from healthy young men accidentally killed in within the previous 12 hours.
Then you remove tissue from their spleen and bone marrow and grind these in a mortar with saline solution. Centrifuge this mixture and inject the fluid that rises to the top into a horse, goat or rabbit. Three to five days later, bleed the animal and collect the serum, the liquid part of the blood that does not contain any cells. Then inject what is now termed “anti-reticular cytotoxic serum (ACS)” into a person to treat disease or just increase longevity.
Soviet physician Alexander Bogomolets came up with this scheme in 1934, drawing the attention of Soviet leader Joseph Stalin, who was interested in increasing life expectancy, mainly his own. Stalin appointed Bogomolets director of the Institute of Clinical Physiology in Kyiv, where ACS was subsequently produced for wide distribution in the Soviet Union. Stalin is said to have gotten shots of it from time to time.
Bogomolets did not come up with the idea of using “anti-reticular cytotoxic serum” as therapy out of the blue.
In 1890, Emil Adolf von Behring in Germany had isolated an “anti-toxin” for diphtheria from the serum of horses that had been injected with the bacteria that cause the disease. For this conquest of diphtheria, he was awarded the first Nobel Prize in Medicine and Physiology, in 1901.
Following up on this discovery, Belgian microbiologist Jules Bordet, working in the lab of Ilya Metchnikoff at the Pasteur Institute in Paris, found that the liver of a rabbit was destroyed when injected with serum taken from an animal that had been previously injected with material from the liver of that rabbit.
Only the liver was affected. However, if only a tiny amount of this serum was injected, the result was quite different. The rabbit seemed to be energized.
Metchnikoff had already developed an interest in longevity and had garnered much attention with his claim that Bulgarian peasants had extra long lives because they consumed yogurt. Supposedly, the healthy bacteria it contained crowded out disease-causing bacteria in the intestinal tract. The longevity of the Bulgarians was questionable, but Metchnikoff deserves credit for introducing the connection between health and the microbiome, the population of bacteria in our gut. He also extended Bordet’s work by injecting various cells taken from one animal into another and then introducing serum from the treated animal back into the original one. He reported that while the serum was “cytotoxic,” that is, it was toxic to the type of cell that had been used, “in small portions the serum strengthens specific elements of tissues rather than killing or dissolving them.”
Both Bordet and Metchnikoff would go on to be recipients of the Nobel Prize for Medicine or Physiology.
It was this research that stimulated Bogomolets’s interest. His own work on aging had suggested that the main cause was the wearing out of the body’s connective tissues, the network of cells and collagen fibres that separates and supports other tissues, such as bones and organs. Basically, connective tissue is the “cement” that holds the body together. If this cement can be strengthened, Bogomolets believed, people could live past a hundred, maybe even as long as a 150.
By this time, it was known that the bone marrow and the spleen were involved in producing and regulating the body’s immune cells, including those found in connective tissue. Bogomolets hypothesized that serum from an animal that had been treated with living bone marrow or spleen cells from a human would be toxic to those cells when the serum was injected into a person. But, in small doses, à la Bordet and Metchnikoff, the treatment would enhance the immune cells’ ability to protect connective tissue.
A horse was ideal for the experiment because of the large amount of serum that could be isolated. But from where would fresh, living cells be obtained? Finding volunteers willing to have their bones drilled into for the removal of marrow was not going to be the answer.
That is where fresh corpses came into the picture. How these were acquired was never clearly explained except that they were supposedly accident victims.
Bogomolets went on to carry out a number of experiments on animals and humans. He found that mice with transplanted cancer cells lived longer than expected when treated with ACS. He had no success with curing human cancer patients, although he claimed that the treatment was effective in preventing the recurrence of cancer after a tumour was removed. By the 1940s, accounts of Bogomolets’s endeavours had reached America and researchers got into the game. There were reports of ACS inhibiting the growth of cancer cells in vitro, but a clinical trial in Hodgkin disease failed to affect a cure. Some cancer patients reported improved appetites and a reduction in pain, but such outcomes are commonly seen with placebos. Rheumatism also failed to respond to ACS treatment.
Pathologist Dr. Reuben Straus at Cedars of Lebanon Hospital in L.A. was especially intrigued by Bogomolets’s claim that wounds and fractures heal more quickly in patients treated with ACS. In a disturbing experiment, the legs of 56 rabbits were broken under anesthesia and placed in a cast. Some of the rabbits received a small dose of ACS, some a large dose, and others acted as a control group receiving small or large doses of normal goat serum. After two weeks, the animals were sacrificed, their fractured legs amputated and X-rayed.
The fractures in animals treated with the small dose of ACS healed much more rapidly than the controls, while the ones that received the large dose showed delayed healing.
Orthopedic surgeon Dr. Vernon Thompson followed up on the rabbit experiments by treating 172 human fracture cases with small and large doses of ACS. Obviously, these were accidental fractures. Here too, X-rays revealed somewhat faster healing with low doses of ACS but the statistical significance of the data was questionable.
Interest in anti-reticular cytotoxic serum waned after Dr. Harry Goldblatt, who received his medical degree from 91ÉçÇř in 1916, was given a grant in the late 1940s to prepare and study the effects of ACS. After reviewing the results of 3,500 patients treated at various centres, he concluded that “it is not a cure for anything.”
Stalin seems not to have benefited from Bogomolets’s “longevity injections.” He died in 1953 at the age of 75. Not a moment too soon, given that he was responsible for cutting short the life expectancy of millions of his people.
