The Cure: A Story of Cancer and Politics from the Annals of the Cold War (review)

This welcome book tells the extraordinary story of a purported cancer cure, that reveals much about Soviet medicine and science during the Cold War. The "cure" had its origins in the research of Grigorii Roskin (1892-1964), a protozoologist, who in 1923 became interested in tumor transplantation—as a means of tackling certain questions within cytology and the histology of cancer, and later in search of a cure for the disease. At the time, the major treatments available for cancer were surgery and radiotherapy. Roskin, however, took a different path: interested in the possibilities of biotherapy, he began to study the idea that the trypanosome that causes Chagas' disease—Trypanosoma cruzi—might be used to tackle cancer. By the 1930s, experimental research indicated that the toxin produced by T. cruzi inhibited the growth of transplanted mouse cancers. Clinical trials on patients proved promising, but the creation of a stable, standardized, clinically usable preparation was beyond his skill.

Then in 1939 Roskin went on holiday and met, fell in love with, and later married Nina Kliueva (1899-1971), who, as it turned out, had the skills necessary to take the project forward. Trained as a bacteriologist in Rostock-on-Don, Kliueva had moved to Moscow where she developed a particular ability in vaccine development. Within a short time she and Roskin began collaborating on the development of a vaccine based on the trypanosome. They undertook this task in their spare time, perhaps hoping to obtain convincing proof of the efficacy of their putative cancer cure before applying for support.

The German invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941 interrupted their research. Kliueva and Roskin were evacuated to the Urals, where Kliueva worked on vaccine development in relation to war needs. They returned to Moscow in 1943, and revived their earlier interest in cancer. This work was aided by institutional changes within Soviet science, the optimism about biomedical research following penicillin, and the opening of Soviet science to international contacts. Such developments allowed Kliueva and Roskin to obtain a new supply of T. cruzi from abroad (their earlier supply having been lost after their evacuation from Moscow) and to gain funding and laboratory space—but what brought them to national prominence was the attempt by Lev Veber (the director of the Mechnikov Institute of Infectious Diseases, where they worked) to claim credit for their research. Kliueva and Roskin's attempts to thwart Veber were fought out in the Politburo. Their victory resulted in their gaining additional research space, a degree of institutional autonomy, and substantial press publicity. The press campaign over what was known as "preparation KR" (or just "KR") brought not just national but also international attention—and then the next round of troubles started.

The Soviet press campaign coincided with attempts in 1946 by the Soviet and American authorities to build scientific bridges between their two nations. In this context, reports about KR filtered across the Atlantic, and the U.S. embassy in Moscow received a flood of requests from desperate Americans seeking this "cure." At the same time, KR attracted attention from the American National Cancer Institute (NCI), which had also become interested in the possibilities of biotherapy. Kliueva and Roskin had undertaken some clinical trials, and with promising results—but a host of technical questions remained to be solved, and it was not clear what the results meant. Whatever the technical problems, the Americans were very interested in finding out more about KR, which resulted in the fateful handover of a copy of Kliueva and Roskin's book explaining the drug. With relations between the United States and the USSR cooling, in January 1947 Politburo member Andrei Zhdanov called Kliueva to account for the release...