GOOD HEALTH NEWS REACHES THE WEST - Chapter 12

In the Western world, the dramatic story of the successes of GH3 therapy reached the general public before it attracted the interest of the medical profession. In the spring of 1958, a news program of the Columbia Broadcasting System showed a three-minute documentary on Prof. AsIan's work. This short film elicited only a few requests for further information.
My own interest in this therapy had begun when, quite by accident, I accompanied a friend to hear Prof. Aslan's first lecture in Karlsruhe in 1956. As a medical writer, I was of course fascinated by what she had to report-but the antagonism, disbelief, and skepticism surrounding me were highly contagious. I wrote nothing about Prof. AsIan's claims until I received a report from my friend of the great difference between her receptions at Karlsruhe in 1956 and 1957. In December of 1958, Coronet published my first writing on this therapy, in the United States in an article entitled "Old Drug Brings New Hope."
Inquiries began to pour in by the hundreds-to the magazine, to me, and even to the Institute in Bucharest. And these inquiries came not only from old men and women suffering from the very conditions described (and the families of such sufferers), but also from physicians, biochemists, and pharmacologists. . The original research papers on the subject were published in translation for medical practitioners and researchers by Consultants Bureau, Inc., in March of 1959.
At about this same time, the London Daily Mail published a series of five articles by a woman reporter who had gone to Bucharest to learn at first hand the value of this therapy. Her highly sensationalized articles aroused such great hopes and expectations on the part of the aged population of London, as evidenced by the thousands of letters received by the paper, that the series was concluded with a note from the paper's science editor, quoting an unnamed British doctor:

"Old people taken out of lonely or unhappy or disease-prone backgrounds and given expert attention and encouragement in cheerful surroundings often take on a new lease of life.
"Much of the evidence at Bucharest, say visiting experts, may be based on hearsay-patients' ages, previous conditions, and so on. "The same drug used by Prof Ana Aslan has been. tested in this country 'without any startling results'."

To which the science editor added:

"There is no scientific reason known to me why it should cause 'rejuvenation', one specialist told me. On the other hand reasons sometimes come after results, Knowledge of digitalis came after a general practitioner found that an infusion o foxglove did his heart patients good."

On March 14, 1959, a few weeks after the appearance of these articles, the well-known British medical journal The Lancet discussed the procaine therapy in an editorial. It said:

"The cause of the decline of vigor in mammals with age is unknown. There is no a priori reason why GH3, or many other uninvestigated substances, should not slow or even reverse this decline, and a substance which did so would quite possibly produce just the kind of non-specific benefit in a number of disorders which AsIan describes. The regrowth of pigmented hair in a man who claimed to be 110 years old, which AsIan reports, would in any case, like the validity of the age record, excite curiosity. But it is curiosity rather than enthusiasm that AsIan's treatment of her results is likely to excite. Her suggestion that procaine acts by in vivo (inside the body) conversion to p-aminobenzoic acid, and that this exercises a "trophic" action on the nervous system, does not carry instant conviction; moreoever, such an influence (or, in fact, any specific benefit from a drug administered to geriatric patients to control "aging") could be shown convincingly in one way only-by a double-blind trial in alternate matched cases, with subsequent comparison of objective signs and survival curves. All the published evidence so far depends on scientific medicine's chief methodological enemy-the testimonial use of case histories-and AsIan's treatment of these will depress those who know how often medical investigators have misled themselves in this way. There are very few old people who do not respond to rest, change, good hospital food, and, above all, raised morale-whether accompanied by injections of procaine or not. "This is not to say that the work of the Bucharest team is to be dismissed (they have evidently improved their patients in some way, if only by suggestion); and the desire to do something radical about old age is a creditable contrast to fatalism about the effects of age. If these workers were right, the findings would be important. But the facts can be established only by properly controlled trials."

In the United States, publication of the translated reports from Bucharest was not met with indignation, as was Prof. Aslan's first lecture at Karlsruhe. But the reception was, to put it most mildly, unenthusiastic. This lack of enthusiasm was not, as some have suggested, because the new therapy had been developed in a Communist country. It was because the methods of analyzing the results of the therapy fell so far short of American research standards. American researchers feared that the doctor &om Rumania who was making such extravagant claims for procaine therapy had fooled herself, as well as her patients, into believing that they felt and looked so much better.
But there was also a sober recognition that the reports by the Bucharest and German doctors should not be ignored. Prof. Chauncey Leake, who reviewed the translations of the Karlsruhe papers in the journal Geriatrics in October, 1959, said:

"In general, it would seem that the reports by Ana Aslan and her associates are interesting enough for further exploration. It would be hoped that she and her associates would publish more detailed case histories, together with a more complete statistical survey of the large number of cases which they must have accumulated by now. It would seem that careful and direct experimental studies on small animals should tell readily whether or not repeated procaine hydrochloride injections intramuscularly can delay the aging process, prolong life, and generally interfere with aging. It might be wise for results of studies of this sort to be well publicized before extensive premature clinical use of GH3 procaine hydrochloride in slowing the aging process. On the other hand, the safety of the drug indicates that cautious and well controlled clinical studies might yield results that would tell definitely whether or not any further use of the drug for these purposes is justified."

Little can be added to what has been so calmly and objectively pointed out by The Lancet and Geriatrics. Both medical journals have emphasized the necessity that the work Prof. Aslan began at the Institute of Geriatrics in Bucharest be subjected to the most careful investigation on as large a scale as possible, with the use of the most modern equipment available and the most rigid control standards devisable.