Virginia Livingston Wheeler M.D. quotes
Virginia Livingston Wheeler M.D.

I spent the next two years becoming more familiar with orthomolecular medicine in general and the work of Dr. Livingston-Wheeler in particular. I learned that Dr. Livingston-Wheeler had more than forty years experience in medicine and that while a Professor of Microbiology at Rutgers University and the University of San Diego her work had been applauded at major scientific meetings from Rome to Paris to New York; that her scientific papers and articles had appeared in prominent sci­entific journals; and that she was listed in several Who's Who of science and medicine.
In June of 1982, I was fortunate enough to meet William Gladstone, president of Waterside Productions, a literary agency based in Del Mar, California. Mr. Gladstone is a good friend of Dr. Livingston-Wheeler's and was looking for a seasoned medical writer to help bring her message to the American public. With three medical books to my credit along with seven others, I was given the opportunity to collaborate on the writing of this book.
I soon found myself engrossed in what I now consider to be one of the most exciting and significant medical breakthroughs of the twentieth century. After many hours of conversation with Dr. Virginia and her husband and colleague, Dr. Owen Wheeler, after extensive interviews with her patients, days spent at the clinic, and reviews of hundreds of their patients' medical charts, I am convinced that Dr. Virginia's work is as important as the work of Louis Pasteur, Madame Curie, or Salk and Sabin.
If you are reading this book because you have cancer, you are about to discover a treatment program that puts the odds of surviving to live a healthy, comfortable, productive life in your favor. If you do not have cancer, you are about to discover a program that will diminish the likelihood that you will ever suffer from this dreaded disease. Along the way you will learn the compelling story of Dr. Virginia's lifetime of medical research to find a cure for this treacherous disease.
Edmond G. Addeo Mill Valley, Calif.  (The Conquest of Cancer: Vaccines and Diet. Introduction)


"Billions of DOLLARS have been misspent over the years in the attempt to prevent or cure cancer. Despite these billions of dollars and the fact that the possibility for cure has existed for decades, cancer is on the increase. Why? It has been known for more than fifty years that cancer is an infectious dis­ease. A mysterious virus has been sought in sophisticated research laboratories across the country, yet still hasn't been found.
These are strong statements. I intend, with this book, to show that they are true. After years of neglect by the cancer establish­ment, I have decided to bring my case for the conquest of cancer to the American public. There is a vaccine against cancer and it is available to anyone.
    Early in this century, Dr. Peyton Rous demonstrated that 90 percent of the chickens for sale in New York City were cancerous. He defined the poultry infection as caused by an unknown microbial agent that passed through a special filter designed to hold back bacteria but not viruses. The filtrability of this "cancer agent" led to the erroneous belief that a virus was responsible for cancer, but my research has confirmed that this is not true.
    Various discoveries made over the course of my career have led to the conclusion that cancer is caused by a bacterium, which I have formally classified as Progenitor Cryptocides. Moreover, this bacterium can be isolated and cultured, and a vaccine can be made from it that can help your immune system keep cancer suppressed and, if it appears, can help fight it off. This disease is definitely transmissible to man from animals, and because the cancer-causing microbe also already exists in our bodies from birth, it is immuno-therapy that is the single most powerful anti-cancer program for all kinds of cancers. ......
    .....As with most important discoveries, it seems, it was quite by accident that I discovered the positive identification of the microorganism that causes cancer. A school nurse had asked me to look at a worrisome condition she had, a disease that greatly resembled leprosy. In the infectious disease ward of the hospital in Brooklyn where I had interned, I had seen many different kinds of infectious diseases, among them leprosy, and I had taken a keen research interest in this field. This woman had ulcers on her fingers, hardening of the skin, and a perforation in her nasal septum. She had no sensation of hot or cold on the affected areas. These symptoms are characteristic of leprosy, but her own doctor had diagnosed her condition as scleroderma, which is a hardening and rigid thickening of the skin.
    The nurse didn't have leprosy, but out of sheer curiosity I made some smears of the nasal lesion and of the ulcers on her fingers. I stained them with Ziehl-Neelsen stain, which is customarily used to identify leprosy and tuberculosis. To my astonishment I saw under the microscope the same kind of microorganisms that are seen in leprosy. The microbes were red-staining, or "acid-fast." Although the nurse didn't have leprosy, I had found in her an acid-fast microorganism that was neither the lepra bacillus nor the tubercle bacillus. At the time, I called it sclerobacillus and reasoned that it must be the causative agent in scleroderma and possibly other diseases. I then treated the nurse with some medications that are used in treating leprosy. To my gratification her lesions began to heal.
    When I began to treat other patients with scleroderma and Raynaud's syndrome the same way, they, too, healed. My curiosity was further aroused. So I set up a research laboratory in our basement at home where I studied this strange microor­ganism that I had discovered to be acid-fast and pleomorphic (assuming many different shapes) but definitely not the lepra or tubercle bacillus.
    Subsequently, I met Dr. Eleanor Alexander-Jackson, who was doing significant work with tuberculosis, and who was studying the pleomorphic forms of that particular microbe. I started to visit her regularly at her laboratory at Cornell University, and we worked together closely on pleomorphism in scleroderma and other collagen diseases such as lupus erythematpsis and erythema nodosum. (These collagen diseases cause a conspicuous altera­tion in connective tissues, in which the malformation of cells is involved.)
.....I found that when I inoculated animals with this acid-fast microbe, many of them developed cancer. I thought this was extremely unusual and decided to find out more about cancer. Through numerous medical contacts I was able to obtain small pieces of tumors and make literally thousands of slides from them. I was astounded to find that when I applied the Ziehl-Neelsen stain, the identical appearing microbes were present in all cancers.
        I decided then to go directly into the operating rooms and get tissues that had no possibility of contamination. I haunted the local hospitals in New Jersey and New York         City and stained tissue after tissue. I used the most rigid techniques for sterility and yet time and again found the same microbe in every single slide I prepared. Moreover, when I cultured this microbe from tissues and patients' blood and injected it into mice, many mice developed cancer or a related collagen disease.
    I was almost speechless with amazement. I knew that a number of scientists had claimed that cancer was caused by a microbe—Doyen in France, Mori in Italy, and many others—but they didn't know it was acid-fast and were told by their peers that it was just a contaminant and didn't signify anything important. I was just a lowly school doctor who now wanted to proclaim to the medical world that cancer was caused by a microbe, an acid-fast bacillus, and I could demonstrate it. I published a few papers in local professional journals, such as the New Jersey State Medical Journal, but couldn't get the attention of the major periodicals.
   ......That was about forty years ago. I have decided that this story, and the story of the remarkable success rate we are having at our clinic in San Diego, must now be told to the American public. The immunotherapy treatments we have employed to help in the recovery of many hundreds of cancer victims are the result of almost half a century of extensive research and clinical practice and are now ready to be made available to as wide a public as possible.
    Because the microbe I independently discovered to be acid-fast and etiologically related to cancer is a bacterium, and not a virus as conventional medicine insists, and because I involve diet heavily in the immunotherapy program we have developed, the conventional body of the American Medical Society and the American Cancer Society have not yet recognized our work at the clinic. However, we are working in close cooperation with dozens of local surgeons and specialists in the cancer community, and hundreds of physicians in America and abroad have sent their patients to us and seen them return home on the road to recovery. It is because of these wonderful results that I have decided to publish the whole story.   
    Despite technological advancements in surgery, radiation, and chemotherapy—the three "approved" cancer treatments— your chances of avoiding cancer have not been improving. Americans continue to smoke cigarettes, embrace nutritionally bank­rupt diets, drink fluoridated water, breathe polluted air, and contaminate the surf we swim in, the bays and seas that give us our fish, and even the land on which we grow our food with hundreds of environmental pollutants. In fact, those three tra­ditional therapeutic treatments for cancer, in many cases, may even shorten your life. The obvious reality is that they do nothing to help you prevent the disease from striking in the first place.
    Breakthroughs in the past ten years have pointed the way to a biological cure for cancer, one based on preventing the onset of the disease from the beginning. The keystone of these break­throughs has been enhancing the individual's immune system with proper diet and vaccines. My research for the causes of cancer led me to believe in the "strong diet = strong immunity" concept of disease prevention. For the last fourteen years I have been achieving remarkable results with human cancer patients by using immunotherapy techniques to help their own bodies ward off the tumors and literally destroy them. These immuno-therapy techniques include the formulation of an autogenous vaccine (i.e., a vaccine made from specific microbes in the pa­tient's own body fluids or tumors), a strict high immunity diet, and high doses of certain important anti-cancer vitamins (such as vitamins A, C and E) as well as other nutrients. This entire concept is immeasurably strengthened by the fact that Progenitor Cryptocides produces choriogonadotropins (CG), an essential hormone, in the test tube. I made this discovery in 1970, and it is now confirmed worldwide. In 1977 the fact that a microbe produces CG in nature led to the approval of genetic engineering by the government.
    Therefore, while much in this book will seem new to you, it has already stood the test of time—in some cases twenty-five or thirty years of continuous experimentation—which even in the most conservative of circles should be enough evidence to begin investigating the results.
    No matter what stage of cancer you or a loved one has, immediate implementation of the Livingston Anti-Cancer Diet can help strengthen your immune system and fortify you in the battle against your disease. Change in diet alone may not cure you. But it can make a vital difference in the course of the cancer. More importantly, for those of you who have not yet been stricken, a variation of the diet which we call the Livingston Cancer Prevention Diet can be a strong safeguard against coming down with this dread disease.
You will not find our clinic in San Diego or our immuno-therapy methods on the approved list of the American Cancer Society. This is because, nutritionally speaking, traditional medicine is only now stepping out of the Middle Ages. Let us not forget that it took almost 250 years to convince surgeons to wash their hands before entering the operating room.
    People continue to die of cancer, yet the techniques we have developed at our clinic have enabled many so-called terminal cancer patients to reverse their diseases and even live out the rest of their lives free of tumors and pain. Many respected physicians, surgeons, and university scientists have visited the clinic and been impressed with the results. Many others are duplicating our work at their own hospital laboratories and university research centers. Several great institutions, such as Duke University, have invited us to present seminars on our work. However, the A.M.A. and the American Cancer Society officially have not recognized us, even though we do, in fact, employ the conventional modalities of radiation, surgery, and chemotherapy when they are indicated, but only when indicated and not as a matter of routine. Further, radiation and chemotherapy are used only in carefully controlled doses.
    It is astounding to me that a "respected" group of scientists and physicians on the National Research Council of the National Academy of Sciences published in June 1982 a National Cancer Institute-sponsored report (Diet, Nutrition and Cancer, National Academy Press) on the relationship between diet and cancer and simply asked Americans to eat more food containing vitamins A and C. Not once did the report suggest vitamin supplements or that perhaps the food the typical American eats does not have the high level of nutrition it is supposed to have. The report suggested "a reduction" of the intake of red meat, but it didn't report that a large number of slaughtered cattle are infected with cancer. Nor did the report mention the percentage of commercial chick­ens which have visible cancer when slaughtered.
I believe an alarmingly high percentage of commercial chick­ens, in the range of nine out of ten, have the pathogenic form of the cancer microbe, and it is transmissable from the hen to the egg to the chick. Chapter Nine will examine this further, but for now the point is that the very idea of avoiding some foods totally and eating more of other foods to prevent and even cure cancer is anathema to the American medical establishment. This overall attitude toward new ideas and the reluctance to accept clinical results as a stimulus for further investigation is not much different from the attitude under which Louis Pasteur was hooted off the stage at the Academy of Sciences in Paris for suggesting that milk be boiled before it was given to children because it had infectious "microbes" in it.
    The biological approach to cancer prevention and treatment should be, but is not, accepted by those who specialize in radia­tion and chemical treatment, as an enhancement and detoxifi­cation of the side effects of their own methods. I honestly don't know why these practitioners don't accept it—perhaps it has something to do with the vested interests of the medical estab­lishment. Others contend it's merely the result of inertia and the outmoded approach to medical instruction that is still predom­inant in medical schools. Or, perhaps, it is because in modern America technological methods receive the most attention in scientific journals and government funding.
I must also state here that I fully expect controversial reaction to our program and that, indeed, I have grown accustomed to it. I graduated from medical school when there was severe dis­crimination against women in the medical profession. Ever since then, controversy has followed my work.
    The microbe I discovered to be acid-fast and classified as Progenitor Cryptocides is a bacillus that is a first cousin to the bacilli that cause tuberculosis and leprosy. I believed then, and have proven repeatedly, that this P. Cryptocides bacillus is the causative agent of cancer—all cancers. This microbe is present in all of our cells, and it is only our immune systems that keep it suppressed. When our immune systems are weakened, either by poor diet, infected foods, or old age, this microbe gains a foothold and starts cancer cells growing into tumors. This im­mune system principle is the entire basis for our program in San Diego. The microbe is an obligate symbiant, meaning that it is contained within the normal cell in symbiosis, emerges after injury during the healing process, but when not immunologically and nutritionally controlled it produces neoplastic cells. It is a function of the normal cell but reverts to a pathogenic state, a bacterial revertant, when uncontrolled.
    Although the experiments in our laboratories and our clinical successes have repeatedly demonstrated the importance of good nutrition in preventing and treating cancer through immuno-therapy, only recently has this concept begun to be accepted in the medical community. (I say "begun" because many competent physicians today are using nutrition in their treatments but are still considered "out of the mainstream.") While I know the in­formation in this book will be repeated in the years to come as younger researchers duplicate our work, the traditional medical community is only in the early stages of exploration. In essence, 1 have a forty-year headstart on them, and the benefits of my research are here for you to put into practice today.
    Such "new findings" showing that good nutrition is essential for immunity to cancer will, I'm sure, continue to appear. After all, the connection between what you eat and your level of resistance to cancer and other diseases has already been established, especially by Dr. Linus Pauling and several others (Cancer and Vitamin C, by Pauling and Dr. Ewan Cameron).
    Our research is still in progress, and we are discovering new things every year. Our treatment program is such that it can be modified each time new information has been tested and verified. None of our treatments harm the body, as radiation and chemotherapy do. The diet program we recommend, although capable of being improved, is the most advanced nutritional ap­proach to immunotherapy available today. The autogenous vac­cine we have developed appears to immunize our patients against the very disease that brought them to our doors. When necessary, we do combine our biological approach with surgery, radiation, and chemotherapy. We prefer that our patients avoid these treat­ments before they come to us, but often they come to us after having been so heavily treated that their immune systems are all but destroyed, and their tumors are far advanced. Indeed, some of the patients have come into the clinic barely able to walk and yet have returned home only weeks later on the road to recovery.
I do not claim to have all the answers, nor do I have a corner on the science of immunotherapy. But we at the clinic have dedicated our lives to helping others, and we continue to treat patients with all stages of cancer. We realize, though, that we can help even more by sharing our findings with others through­out the world. That is why our doors are open to everyone; our facilities and laboratories may be visited by any qualified re­searcher, oncologist, or scientific organization.
    We have tried to present this book in a highly communicative fashion, with the scientific principles involved easily understand­able to the lay reader. I have chosen a professional writer with knowledge of medical science as a collaborator. While some technical terms are unavoidable in discussing cancer and its causes, we have tried to simplify the terminology as much as possible. When appropriate, we will define words and concepts paren­thetically throughout the narrative. We've also included a glossary of important terms and phrases. I encourage you to refer to it frequently.
After reading this, I hope you will understand one thing: Having cancer doesn't mean you are automatically going to die of it. I hope you will understand the essentials of our biological approach to combating and controlling this frightful disease. Fol­low the guidelines of our cancer prevention diet, and you will greatly diminish your own chances of getting cancer. To those who already have it, I can only promise you that hundreds have already discovered that their tumors have diminished or disap­peared completely after they embraced our immunotherapy pro­gram and anti-cancer diet.
Since cancer appears to be an immune deficiency disease based on definite inadequacies of such nutrients as the retinoic acids, on specific components of vitamin A as well as on many other complex dietary factors, no other treatment program today offers so much hope and promise in preventing and curing cancer."--- Virginia Livingston Wheeler M.D. (The Conquest of Cancer: Vaccines and Diet Ch 1.)