Medicine: The Doctor & His Ethics

Andrew Conway Ivy, who ranks high among U.S. physiologists and still higher as a vice president of the University of Illinois and booster of its medical schools, was on the spot last winter. For 18 months, he had been doing hush-hush research with a drug named Krebiozen which seemed to have helped a few cancer patients for a while. He wanted to go on and find out whether Krebiozen was really valuable, and that would take years.

But Krebiozen is no ordinary drug. It is a secret concoction from the blood of horses, made after the animals have been given a secret “stimulator.” The maker of Krebiozen was an emigrè Yugoslav researcher named Stevan Durovic, who worked with the financial backing of his rich brother Marko. The Durovics were in the U.S. on visitors’ visas which were about to expire. They were threatening to finish their work abroad, slap Krebiozen on the market.

Blocked Channels. To win an extension of the Durovics’ U.S. visas, Dr. Ivy felt that he had to reveal the possible importance of the work they were doing. He could not do this through the usual medical channels because the job was far from finished and, anyway, medical journals would have rejected reports on a “secret remedy.” Dr. Ivy took his dilemma by the horns, told a press conference about Krebiozen, and started a first-class foofaraw (TIME, April 9).

Slowly, the mills of the Chicago Medical Society began to grind—with a formal complaint that Ivy’s conduct was unethical. One committee after another studied the charge, called Dr. Ivy in for consultation. Many of Ivy’s most admiring colleagues shook their heads sadly over his action. “Ivy’s really stuck his neck way out,” they said, or, “He’s courageous but foolish.”

Ivy could get little information from Durovic about the “secret” of Krebiozen; the little that Ivy got, he passed on promptly to the medical society. It was enough, he argued, to take Krebiozen out of the “secret remedy” class; the society’s committeemen disagreed. Meanwhile, the A.M.A. reported on its own investigation of 100 patients treated with the drug: only two benefited even for a short time, and 44 died (TIME, Nov. 5). The A.M.A. rejected it as a treatment.

“No Ambiguity.” Last week the Chicago Medical Society found Illinois’ Ivy “guilty of unethical conduct,” and suspended him from membership for three months. “It was regrettable,” said the society’s council, “that Dr. Ivy would associate himself with a drug whose physical and chemical properties were kept a secret. This was a specific violation of medical ethics . . . There is nothing ambiguous about these ethics . . . One principle . . . reads: ‘The prescription or dispensing by a physician of a secret medicine … of which he does not know the composition, or the manufacture or promotion of [its] use, is unethical’ . . . Any physician who violates this principle is doing a grave and pathetic disservice to humanity . . .”

Not so, snapped Dr. Ivy. “The spirit of the ethic … is to prevent a physician from attracting patients and making money by saying he has a secret remedy. In the case of Krebiozen, the drug has been given without charge during our investigations. No one has made any money, or attempted to attract patients. Regardless of the decision of the society, I am not guilty of a breach of medical ethics.”

The Chicago Daily News commented sensibly: “Dr. Ivy undoubtedly had used bad judgment in participating in a rather flamboyant publicity buildup for the ‘secret’ drug . . . The offense was not of such a degree as to warrant suspension . . . Dr. Ivy’s eminence both in medicine and education is too well-founded to be seriously affected by a minor error on his part, no matter how much the Chicago Medical Society may exaggerate it.”