HEROES and VISIONAIRIES ~ JOHN BEARD

HEROES and VISIONAIRIES - FIRST of MANY
We are going to add one hero per week to this site. We have often seen that visionairies displayed in magazines are those folks who step up to the plate with their wallet for an advertorial - a big ego boosting photo and a few simple gushy paragraphs. We are starting this series with rarely heard-about visionairies who have given us much and who have passed on (so no dubious reasons for our desire to want to share this information). Next week we are focussing on Dr. Kelley and then Dr. Enderlein.

JOHN BEARD - trophoblasts and cancer
November 2nd, 2008, was the 150th anniversary of the birth of John Beard. The name may not mean much to you: after all, there are five John Beards in the Wikipedia, but none of them is this particular Beard. "Our" John Beard was a British embryologist who devised the trophoblastic theory of cancer and its offshoot, enzyme therapy. I have long been fascinated with his work and have written about him from time to time. In July 2007, when I realized the sesquicentenary of his birth was looming, I wrote to the editors of Integrative Cancer Therapies, suggesting a special issue in Beard's honor.

They had just done a special issue on milk thistle, which had turned out well, and so they accepted my suggestion and invited me to be guest editor. Now, 350 emails and almost as many drafts later, the issue is about to appear. It will be the first time a peer-reviewed, PubMed-listed medical journal has ever focused entirely on Beard's life and work.The biggest problem in accessing it, as with most medical journals these days, is the price. A single print issue costs $50. An individual subscription is $155.

I hope, sometime in the coming year, to present this same information in a more accessible (and less expensive) format. But if you have the means and interest, I encourage you to subscribe to I.C.T. After all, not many peer-reviewed journals would agree to take on this type of project and see it to completion with a very high level of professionalism!

As guest editor, I had certain goals for this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.

    * I wanted to tell the story of John Beard's life in an accurate and interesting way, with an additional timeline of events.
    * I wanted to document the evolution of his written work with the first complete bibliography ever compiled of his more than 100 scientific articles.
    * I wanted to tell what happened to his ideas - especially the enzyme treatment of cancer - from the time of his death in December, 1924 to the present-day.

And that's exactly what I have done. In doing so, I believe I have cleared up many of the mysteries about who John Beard was, and corrected some long-standing misconceptions about the man and his life. Of course, I had some resources that were not available to earlier writers. Not only am I within driving distance of one of the world's greatest medical collections, the U.S. National Library of Medicine, I also had the benefit of some new and powerful online research tools.

Equally important, I wanted to cover the full scope of modern research on Beard's thinking. The way I did this was to solicit articles on the following:

      1. The theoretical aspects of Beard's ideas on trophoblasts and how they relate to modern-day theories of primordial germ cells, from Angela Burleigh of British Columbia Cancer Research Centre, Vancouver BC, V5Z 1L3, Canada
      2. Basic cell-line research on the effects of proenzymes on cancer cells, from Josef Novak, PhD, of the Joan Holmes Memorial Research Laboratory of Bucknell University, PA
      3. Animal studies on enzymes and cancer from Martin Wald, MD, of Charles University, Prague, Czech Republic
      4. Human clinical trials on an integrative program including enzymes from Josef Beuth, MD, of the University of Cologne, Germany

In addition, Keith Block MD, editor-in-chief of Integrative Cancer Therapies, has provided an illuminating introduction. In this way, we "covered the waterfront" of concerns from the theoretical to the highly practical question of what effect dietary enzymes actually have on cancer patients. Our contributors are all reputable academic researchers at major institutions. It was also important to me that they hail from four different countries, showing the international nature of this work.

This special issue will pop up whenever anyone searches for information about trophoblasts and cancer, their relationship to germ or stem cells, or the enzyme treatment of cancer. It will no longer be possible for scholars in the field to plead ignorance about the contribution of this founding father of integrative medicine.

John Beard, a figure who hailed from deep inside the 19th century, thus enters the 21st century in a major way.
.......

Now a bit about who John Beard was and why this topic is so important.

John Beard (1858-1924) was the first individual in history to point to the similarity – he would have said identity -- of cancer and the trophoblastic tissue that arises in the early days of pregnancy and eventually forms the placenta. Today, this similarity is a commonplace among embryologists. A 2007 review concluded: "Trophoblast research over the past decades has underlined the striking similarities between the proliferative, migratory and invasive properties of placental cells and those of cancer cells." i Some embryologists now refer to trophoblast as a "pseudo-malignancy." ii,iii   Beard said as much 100 years ago, although his prior claim on this discovery is not always acknowledged by present-day researchers.

Beard made other outstanding contributions to the life sciences. He was the first to describe the evolution of the nervous system of elasmobranch fishes. He demonstrated the morphological continuity of germ cells in several vertebrate species. He co-discovered the large, transient sensory cells of the spinal cord, still known as Rohon-Beard cells. He was also the first to propose that the corpus luteum was responsible for the inhibition of ovulation during pregnancy and was among the first to describe programmed cell death, or apoptosis. He was the first to describe the thymus as "the parent source" of the lymphoid structures.

Thus, by any reckoning, John Beard deserves to be included among the leading biologists of the late 19th and early 20th century. He won a major award from the French Academy of Sciences and was nominated for the Nobel Prize. Today, when Beard is on occasion memorialized, it is for his progressive ideas on the nature of cancer. He has rightly been hailed as a forerunner of the present-day theory of the cancer stem cell (CSC). He is also the father of enzyme therapy. He pointed out that the initiation of fetal pancreatic function coincided with a reduction in the invasiveness of trophoblast, which otherwise might progress to clinical cancer (i.e., choriocarcinoma). Based on the above propositions, he recommended the therapeutic use of pancreatic enzymes in treating cancer and other diseases. This therapy created a worldwide controversy in his day. Although rejected at the time, it prevailed and has entered the world of complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) today. The New York Times predicted as much 100 years ago, when it editorialized on October 9, 1909: "In spite of the present condemnation of trypsin, there is still a large chance that time will tell another story." And so it has.

In this special issue, I have had the great pleasure of tracing the details of Beard's life through the twists and turns of historical research. Beard was born in Redding, a suburb of Manchester, England, on Nov. 2, 1858. It was a time of enormous intellectual ferment. Darwin's Origin of Species came out in the following year. Although Beard's father and grandfather were workers in the local cotton mills, Beard himself had higher ambitions as well as opportunities. His big break in life was that, after his biological father's death, his stepfather sent him to an excellent private school to study. He continued his studies locally, then at the University of Manchester with Prof. Arthur Milnes Marshall, in London with Darwin's disciple, T.H. Huxley, and finally in Freiburg, with Prof. August Weismann. He earned his Ph.D. from the University of Freiburg and later received an honorary Doctor of Science (DSc) from Manchester.

For two decades, Beard mainly studied the elasmobranch fishes (sharks, skates and rays). After spending 20 years in basic embryological research, he published several seminal articles on the cancer problem. How he got from shakes and rays to human cancer is the main subject of my biographical article.

Although some people thought Beard was simply an intellectual fence-jumper, if not an outright cancer crank, there was a logical reason for drawing conclusions about cancer from the study of fishes. Beard detected a separate nervous system in some of these fishes, which emerged and then died away in the course of development. This led him to postulate that there was an "alternation of generations" in animals, even in mammals. Eventually this led him to the theory that the trophoblast was itself a kind of "asexual" growth that accompanied the growth of the sexual embryo. He later identified this trophoblast as identical to cancer, and speculated that pancreatic enzymes would be cancer's natural antagonist.

References:

...more on Palph Moss, PhD., the author of this piece and his work and website in the article below this one.

by Ralph Moss, Ph.D.
CancerDecisions®
PO Box 1076, Lemont, PA 16851
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