Draft for v3 Horrobin’s Ghost: Did We Overlook a Cancer Cure? Editor, Back in 2003, your obituary of David Horrobin stirred quite the pot. You called him “the greatest snake oil salesman of his age” in the BMJ, which prompted a flood of over a hundred furious letters, a stern word from the Press Complaints Commission, and a rather sheepish half apology a few weeks later. It was all a bit of a mess, really. You’d taken aim at a man who spent his life prodding the edges of conventional medicine with ideas like evening primrose oil, and the backlash suggested you might have overstepped. Horrobin’s ghost seems to linger still, peering over our shoulders with a faint smirk, wondering if we’ve missed something rather important. Perhaps a cancer cure, even? Let’s start with Dan Burke, who in 1997 published a paper in Cancer Research that turned a few heads. He found an enzyme called CYP1B1 showing up in every type of cancer he tested, from breast to lung to prostate to colon, yet it was nowhere to be found in healthy tissue. Quite the discovery, that. A few years later, in 2002, Gerry Potter picked up the thread in British Journal of Cancer. He showed that this CYP1B1 enzyme takes natural plant compounds, salvestrols he called them, things like resveratrol from grapes, and turns them into something called piceatannol. This piceatannol isn’t just a fancy name, it’s a substance that seems remarkably good at making cancer cells give up the ghost. Then there are these intriguing reports from the Journal of Orthomolecular Medicine, stretching from 2007 to 2012, tucked away because the journal’s been booted from MEDLINE’s respectable circles. They tell of people with late stage lung cancer watching their tumours shrink, melanomas fading away, prostate cancers hitting pause, dozens of cases where patients swear by these salvestrols. No big randomised trials yet, true, but the stories keep piling up, a murmur growing too loud to brush off. The idea here is simple enough: salvestrols could work against all sorts of cancers because CYP1B1 is everywhere cancer is. Nature might have slipped us a rather clever trick. Now compare that to abiraterone, another of Potter’s creations. This one targets a different enzyme, CYP17, and it’s all about choking the life out of prostate cancer by cutting off its supply of androgens. In 2012, a trial called COU-AA-302 had to stop early because it was working so well, patients on abiraterone were progression free for 16.5 months compared to 8.3 for those on placebo, and their survival stretched from 30 months to 35. The researchers couldn’t in good conscience let the placebo group miss out any longer. Johnson & Johnson had already bought the rights for £970 million back in 2009, and now it pulls in £3 billion a year. Not bad for a drug that only bothers with prostate cancer. Salvestrols, though? They’re waved away as “snake oil,” a label Horrobin would recognise all too well, and left to gather cobwebs. One might reasonably ask why. Could it be because you can’t slap a patent on a plant and call it a day? This isn’t a one off. Take mistletoe, for instance. The NIH’s Complementary and Alternative Medicine lot have papers showing it’s helped people with breast cancer and pancreatic cancer live an extra year or two, according to a 2013 study in BMC Cancer. But because there was no control group, no one left to suffer for comparison, they shrugged and said it doesn’t count. Seems a tad odd, doesn’t it? Letting people live is apparently fine, but proving it by letting others die is the gold standard? Abiraterone’s trial stopped because it was unethical to withhold it, and there’s a similar tale with scorpion venom for brain cancer, glioblastoma to be precise. A 2010 report in Neuro-Oncology showed patients stretching past two years when six months was the norm, and they stopped that trial too, letting everyone have a go at the stuff. Yet salvestrols and mistletoe are told to sit in the corner until they’ve got the right paperwork. Here’s a thought: there’s no peer reviewed study proving water puts out fire, yet every fire brigade in the land manages just fine. Why do we demand nature jump through hoops Pharma’s darlings can skip? PubMed’s a sprawling mess, 36 million papers and counting, with Ioannidis telling us in PLoS Medicine back in 2005 that 70 to 90 percent of it might be nonsense anyway. Into that chaos, the Journal of Orthomolecular Medicine was quietly shown the door 25 years ago, and Medical Hypotheses, Horrobin’s little project, got the same treatment later on. Meanwhile, fungicides have been stripping salvestrols out of our fruit for decades, and cancer rates have climbed obligingly along. You’d think the BMJ might raise an eyebrow at this, but it seems awfully fond of the pharmaceutical purse strings to bother. That 2003 piece on Horrobin wasn’t just a jab, it was a habit. Back in 1890, the Patent Medicine crowd took a decent idea like snake oil, mucked it up with rattlesnake sludge instead of the proper omega 3 rich water snake brew, and when it flopped, they pointed fingers and shouted “fraud” at anything they couldn’t bottle for profit. Linus Pauling, the chap with two Nobels to his name, once said we ought to work with nature, not against it. Horrobin took that to heart, and salvestrols might just be the proof. Perhaps it’s time to fish the Journal of Orthomolecular Medicine back into PubMed, let CYP1B1’s science have a fair crack at the whip. Horrobin’s ghost is watching, and one suspects he’s chuckling at the thought: must we always stifle what we can’t stick a price tag on? Yours with a knowing nod, [Your Name] [Your Credentials/Affiliation, if any] March 12, 2025