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During his early years with the Rockefeller Institute in the 1930s, he did research on anemia and leukemia in Puerto Rico, and during World War II he worked for the United States Army helping to develop Chemical Warfare Services and related centers in several places. Research at the Institute led to developments in chemotherapy and treatment of reactions to mustard gas. During his early years with the Rockefeller Institute in the 1930s, he did research on anemia and leukemia in Puerto Rico, and during World War II he worked for the United States Army helping to develop Chemical Warfare Services and related centers in several places. Research at the Institute led to developments in chemotherapy and treatment of reactions to mustard gas.


In 1932 he was at the center of a controversy that questioned his character when a letter he had written disparinging ] was discovered and widely distributed by ],who accussed Rhoads with a United States plot to "exterminate" Puerto Ricans and linked the researcher to American imperialism. In the ensuing investigation, Rhoads said he had written his comments in anger and as a joke to a Boston colleague.<ref name="scribd.com">, ''American Literary History'', Volume 14. No. 4, Winter 2002, p. 720, Retrieved 12 December 2012.</ref> The Puerto Rican Attorney General and medical community found no evidence of his or the project giving any inappropriate medical treatment.<ref name="clear"/><ref>Starr, Douglas. "Revisiting a 1930s Scandal: AACR to Rename a Prize", ''Science'', Vol. 300. No. 5619, 25 April 2003, pp. 573 - 574</ref> In 1932 he was at the center of a controversy that questioned his character when a letter he had written disparinging ] was discovered and widely distributed by ],who accussed Rhoads with a United States plot to "exterminate" Puerto Ricans and linked the researcher to American imperialism. In the ensuing investigation, Rhoads said he had written his comments in anger and as a joke to a Boston colleague.<ref name="scribd.com">, ''American Literary History'', Volume 14. No. 4, Winter 2002, p. 720, Retrieved 12 December 2012.</ref> Puerto Rico's Attorney General as well as the medical community found no evidence of his or the alleged project giving any inappropriate medical treatment.<ref name="clear"/><ref>Starr, Douglas. "Revisiting a 1930s Scandal: AACR to Rename a Prize", ''Science'', Vol. 300. No. 5619, 25 April 2003, pp. 573 - 574</ref>


In 2002, the controversy was revived. The ] (AACR), which had established the Cornelius P. Rhoads Memorial Award years earlier and knew nothing of the earlier scandal,<ref name="LWW"/> commissioned a new investigation. It was led by ], emeritus professor at ] and a specialist in medical ethics. He concluded there was no evidence of inappropriate treatment, but the letter was so offensive that the prize should be renamed. AACR concurred and renamed the award, stripping the honor from Rhoads because of his ].<ref name="Science">, ''Science,'' 25 April 2003, pp. 573-574, Retrieved 18 December 2012.</ref> In 2002, the controversy was revived. The ] (AACR), which had established the Cornelius P. Rhoads Memorial Award years earlier and knew nothing of the earlier scandal,<ref name="LWW"/> commissioned a new investigation. It was led by ], emeritus professor at ] and a specialist in medical ethics. He concluded there was no evidence of inappropriate treatment, but the letter was so offensive that the prize should be renamed. AACR concurred and renamed the award, stripping the honor from Rhoads because of his ].<ref name="Science">, ''Science,'' 25 April 2003, pp. 573-574, Retrieved 18 December 2012.</ref>

Revision as of 13:57, 21 October 2013

Cornelius Packard Rhoads
Born(1898-06-20)June 20, 1898
Springfield, Massachusetts, U.S.
DiedAugust 13, 1959(1959-08-13) (aged 61)
Stonington, Connecticut, U.S.
CitizenshipUnited States
Alma materBowdoin College
Harvard University
AwardsLegion of Merit
Walker Prize
Clement Cleveland Medal Katherine Berkin Judd Award
Scientific career
FieldsOncology, pathology, hematology
InstitutionsRockefeller University
Worcester Foundation for Experimental Biology

Cornelius Packard "Dusty" Rhoads (June 9, 1898–August 13, 1959) was an American pathologist and oncologist, and the first director of the Memorial Sloan–Kettering Cancer Center. For his contributions to cancer research, he appeared on the cover of the June 27, 1949 issue of Time magazine under the title "Cancer Fighter."

During his early years with the Rockefeller Institute in the 1930s, he did research on anemia and leukemia in Puerto Rico, and during World War II he worked for the United States Army helping to develop Chemical Warfare Services and related centers in several places. Research at the Institute led to developments in chemotherapy and treatment of reactions to mustard gas.

In 1932 he was at the center of a controversy that questioned his character when a letter he had written disparinging Puerto Ricans was discovered and widely distributed by Pedro Albizu Campos,who accussed Rhoads with a United States plot to "exterminate" Puerto Ricans and linked the researcher to American imperialism. In the ensuing investigation, Rhoads said he had written his comments in anger and as a joke to a Boston colleague. Puerto Rico's Attorney General as well as the medical community found no evidence of his or the alleged project giving any inappropriate medical treatment.

In 2002, the controversy was revived. The American Association for Cancer Research (AACR), which had established the Cornelius P. Rhoads Memorial Award years earlier and knew nothing of the earlier scandal, commissioned a new investigation. It was led by Jay Katz, emeritus professor at Yale Law School and a specialist in medical ethics. He concluded there was no evidence of inappropriate treatment, but the letter was so offensive that the prize should be renamed. AACR concurred and renamed the award, stripping the honor from Rhoads because of his racism.

Early life and education

Rhoads was born June 20, 1898, in Springfield, Massachusetts, as the son of a physician and his wife. He received his early education in Springfield, later attending Bowdoin College in Maine, where he graduated in 1920. In 1924, he received his M.D. from Harvard University, cum laude. Rhoads became an intern at Peter Bent Brigham Hospital, where he caught pulmonary tuberculosis. This sparked a lifelong interest in disease research.

Early career

After recovering from TB, Rhoads published a paper on the tuberculin reaction with Fred W. Stewart, who became a longtime colleagues. He taught as a pathologist at Harvard and did work on disease processes.

In 1929 Rhoads joined the staff of the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research, now Rockefeller University, where he worked for Simon Flexner. His early research interests included hematology and poliomyelitis. He worked at Rockefeller until 1939.

Puerto Rico

While working for the Rockefeller Institute, Rhoads was assigned in 1931 to a William B. Castle's anemia research commission at Presbyterian Hospital in San Juan, Puerto Rico. This was part of the Rockefeller Foundation's sanitary commission there (later the International Health Board). Castle's research interest was pernicious iron deficiency anemia, specifically that caused by the parasitic hookworm, which was endemic, as well as the related condition of tropical sprue. As recently as 2010, Nieto Editores reported that these conditions were a cause of high mortality in Puerto Ricans. The cause of tropical sprue has still not been identified, but since the 1940s, it can be treated with folic acid and a 3 to 6-month course of antibiotics.

Rhoads was sent to assist Castle and to perform a similar study in Cidra, in conjunction with the School of Tropical Medicine, which was doing similar work. He also collected polio samples for Flexner. Historian and ethicist Susan E. Lederer notes that in letters from this time, Rhoads sometimes refers to his patients as animals. For example, he wrote: "The exciting experiment now is the attempt to cause experimental sprue in humans. If they don’t develop something they certainly have the constitutions of oxen." Rhoads sought to experimentally induce the conditions he was studying in his patients rather than simply treat them.

Scandal

On 10 November 1931, while working in Puerto Rico, Rhoads got drunk at a party and left, finding his car had been vandalized. He went to his office, where he wrote and signed a letter addressed to "Ferdie" (Fred W. Stewart, a colleague in Boston). It included the following:

I can get a damn fine job here and am tempted to take it. It would be ideal except for the Porto Ricans. They are beyond doubt the dirtiest, laziest, most degenerate and thievish race of men ever inhabiting this sphere. It makes you sick to inhabit the same island with them. They are even lower than Italians. What the island needs is not public health work but a tidal wave or something to totally exterminate the population. It might then be livable. I have done my best to further the process of extermination by killing off 8 and transplanting cancer into several more. The latter has not resulted in any fatalities so far... The matter of consideration for the patients' welfare plays no role here — in fact all physicians take delight in the abuse and torture of the unfortunate subjects.

The unmailed letter was found after Rhoads had left the project, by "Luigi Baldoni, a lab technician, who turned it over to Pedro Albizu Campos," president of the Puerto Rican Nationalist Party. Albizu Campos sought publicity, sending copies of the letter to the League of Nations, the Pan American Union, the American Civil Liberties Union, newspapers, embassies, and the Vatican. In addition to distributing the letter to the media, Albizu wrote his own, charging that the US was trying to exterminate Puerto Ricans, which was published in the Porto Rico Progress. He also attacked American imperialism.

Upon learning of Rhoads' letter, James Beverley, the acting Governor of Puerto Rico, said the letter was a "confession of murder" and "a libel against the people of Puerto Rico", and ordered an investigation. Rhoads, by then back in the United States mainland, released an official response to the media and the governor. He insisted that he was joking in his letter, which was intended to be confidential, calling it a "fantastic and playful composition written entirely for my own diversion and intended as a parody on supposed attitudes of some American minds in Porto Rico," explaining that nothing "was ever intended to mean other than the opposite of what was stated." Rhoads offered to return to clear things up, but never did. The inquiry concluded that Rhoads did not commit the acts included in his letter.

Rhoads and his work were investigated by the Attorney General Ramon Quinones, with review of medical aspects by Dr. P. Morales Otero, representative of the Puerto Rico Medical Association, and Dr. E, Garrido Morales, representing the Commissioner of Health. They took testimony by several of Rhoads' patients as well as his colleagues. They reviewed the case files for the 257 patients treated by Rhoads and the Rockefeller Commission, including the 13 patients who died. They found no evidence of the crimes described in Rhoads' unmailed letter. The Attorney General and medical community joined in absolving Rhoads of the Nationalist charges that he was part of a US plot to exterminate Puerto Ricans.

Confirmed in Lederer's 21st century account, "records at Presbyterian Hospital in San Juan, Puerto Rico, where Rhoads had performed his research, revealed no patients in the young pathologist's care had died under suspicious circumstances." Additionally, the investigators were "unable to confirm Rhoads's other claim (omitted in Time 's account) that he had transplanted cancer into several patients.'" Rhoads was subject to separate investigations ordered by the acting American governor of Puerto Rico James R. Beverley and the Rockefeller Institute, and "neither...was able to uncover any evidence that Dr. Rhoads had exterminated any Puerto Ricans."

During the investigations, Ivy Lee, who handled public relations for the Rockefeller family, and a team at the Institute, began a campaign to defend Rhoads' reputation. Lee had access to pre-published versions of the articles of both The New York Times and Time on the controversy. He persuaded Time to eliminate the words "and transplanting cancer into several more", from its published version of the letter. Also, based on the positive testimony of some patients, The New York Times reported that "Patients Say Rhoads Saved Their Lives." Rhoads had already returned to New York, and after the Attorney General's report and that of the Rockefeller Institute, the scandal quickly faded away. In 1950, however, when Puerto Rican pro-independence activists Oscar Collazo and Griselio Torresola tried to assassinate President Truman, one of them cited Rhoads' letter as motivation for becoming a militant.

Reaction to the Rhoads scandal and controversy was mixed, in part due to the Rockefeller campaign. His colleagues did not believe Rhoads's spin that his letter was a "fantastic and playful composition...intended as a parody." His superiors, on the other hand, dismissed the incident as a case of local ingratitude. Time magazine headlined the incident as "Porto Ricochet"; Douglas Starr suggests they meant that Rhoads's humanitarian work in Puerto Rico had come back to bite him.

New York and World War II

Rhoads became director of Memorial Hospital in 1940, succeeding James Ewing, a noted oncologist. Ewing had written about cancer transplantation in 1931.

In 1941 Rhoads studied radiation and leukemia.

During World War II, Rhoads became involved with the Chemical Weapons Division of the U.S. Army. He went on to establish U.S. Army chemical weapons laboratories in Utah, Maryland and Panama. For this work, he won the Legion of Merit in 1945.

Rhoads became involved in a project using mustard gas for cancer treatment, leading to development of a drug called mechlorethamine or Mustargen. He became interested in total body irradiation, which led to early work on chemotherapy.

He has been accused of involvement with the radiation experiments performed on prisoners during World War II. Pedro Albizu Campos complained of having received involuntary radiation treatment while held as a prisoner after conviction of crimes.

Post-war

Rhoads is credited with developing Kettering into a medical center. From 1945 until 1953, Rhoads was director of Memorial's Center for Cancer and Allied Diseases. While there, he remained involved with Department of Defense radiation experiments through 1954 at Sloan Kettering. In 1953, Rhoads became director of the newly merged Memorial Sloan–Kettering Cancer Center, helping develop it as a full medical treatment center. He also was an adviser to the United States Atomic Energy Commission regarding nuclear medicine.

Rhoads continued to work at the Memorial Sloan–Kettering Cancer Center until his death. He died of a coronary occlusion on August 13, 1959, in Stonington, Connecticut.

Revival of controversy

In 1982, Puerto Rican social scientist and writer Pedro Aponte-Vázquez found new information at various archives, which he felt raised doubts about the investigations. Most prominent among his findings was a 1932 letter that Governor Beverly had written to the Rockefeller Foundation's associate director stating that Rhoads had written a second letter "even worse than the first" and which, according to Beverley, the government had suppressed and destroyed. Rhoads's superior had conducted a close investigation of the 13 patients who died under Rhoads's tenure but found no evidence of wrongdoing. Aponte-Vázquez urged the Puerto Rico Department of Justice to reopen the case, but it refused as Rhoads had been dead for so long.

In 2002, Edwin Vazquez, a biology professor at the University of Puerto Rico, contacted the American Association for Cancer Research (AACR) about the incident and demanded that Rhoads's name be removed from the award. Others also contacted the AACR, including Puerto Rico's Secretary of State Ferdinand Mercado. Revival of the issue attracted a fresh wave of publicity. The AACR, which said it had not known of the earlier controversy, commissioned an investigation led by Jay Katz, a bioethicist from Yale University. Katz said, "there was no evidence of Dr. Rhoads' killing patients or transplanting cancer cells, the letter itself was reprehensible enough to remove his name from the award." The AACR agreed with his conclusion.

Eric Rosenthal of Oncology Times characterized the case as the AACR having to "deal with the embarrassment of having history catch up to modern-day sensibilities." In 2003 the AACR renamed the award, stripping the honor from Rhoads posthumously. The AACR indicated that the new name would be retroactive and past awardees would receive updated plaques.

Representation in other media

  • Aponte-Vázquez continued his campaign, self-publishing a book in 2012 entitled The Unsolved Case of Dr. Cornelius P. Rhoads: An Indictment; he writes on this topic via his blog and personal website.
  • In 2006, the Puerto Rican political satire comedy group, Los Rayos Gamma, performed a parody of Rhoads with Jacobo Morales portraying a Cornelio Rodas as an insane, Frankenstein-like scientist bent on the elimination of Puerto Ricans.

Honors

References

  1. "Medicine: Frontal Attack." Time. June 27, 1949.
  2. ^ Susan E. Lederer, " 'Porto Ricochet': Joking about Germs, Cancer, and Race Extermination in the 1930s", American Literary History, Volume 14. No. 4, Winter 2002, p. 720, Retrieved 12 December 2012.
  3. ^ "DR. RHOADS CLEARED OF PORTO RICO PLOT", New York Times, 15 February 1932
  4. Starr, Douglas. "Revisiting a 1930s Scandal: AACR to Rename a Prize", Science, Vol. 300. No. 5619, 25 April 2003, pp. 573 - 574
  5. ^ Rosenthal, Eric T. "The Rhoads Not Given: The Tainting of the Cornelius P. Rhoads Memorial Award", Oncology Times, 10 September 2003. Volume 25. Issue 17. pp. 19-20. Retrieved 17 December 2012.
  6. ^ (News Focus: ETHICS.) Starr, Douglas. "Revisiting a 1930s Scandal, AACR to Rename a Prize", Science, 25 April 2003, pp. 573-574, Retrieved 18 December 2012.
  7. ^ "Cornelius Packard Rhoads 1898–1959". CA: A Cancer Journal for Clinicians. Wiley Online Library. 2008-12-31. Retrieved 2013-02-07.
  8. THE EFFECT OF CATAPHORESIS ON POLIOMYELITIS VIRUS, P. K. Olitsky, C. P. Rhoads, and P. H. Long, September 1, 1929 // JEM vol. 50 no. 3 273-277 The Rockefeller University Press
  9. INTRADERMAL VERSUS SUBCUTANEOUS IMMUNIZATION OF MONKEYS AGAINST POLIOMYELITIS F. W. Stewart and C. P. Rhoads J Exp Med. 1929 May 31; 49(6): 959–973.
  10. http://www.nasonline.org/publications/biographical-memoirs/memoir-pdfs/castle-wb.pdf
  11. The Changing Clinical Picture of Tropical Sprue. Norman Maldonado. Revista de Hematologia. (Hematología 2010;11(2):95-98) April — June 2010. Retrieved 17 December 2012.
  12. Cook GC (1997). "Tropical sprue: some early investigators favoured an infective cause, but was a coccidian protozoan involved?". Gut. 40 (3): 428–9. PMC 1027098. PMID 9135537. {{cite journal}}: Unknown parameter |month= ignored (help)
  13. ^ Susan E. Lederer, "Porto Ricochet": Joking about Germs, Cancer, and Race Extermination in the 1930s", American Literary History, Volume 14, Number 4, Winter 2002, pp. 720–746
  14. ^ Starr, Douglas. "Revisiting a 1930s Scandal: AACR to Rename a Prize", Science, 25 April 2003. Vol. 300. No. 5619. p. 574-5.
  15. Susan E. Lederer. "Porto Ricochet": Joking about Germs, Cancer, and Race Extermination in the 1930s. American Literary History. Volume 14. Number 4. Winter 2002. p. 720.
  16. ^ The Rhoads Not Given: The Tainting of the Cornelius P. Rhoads Memorial Award. Rosenthal, Eric T. Oncology Times. 10 September 2003. Volume 25. Issue 17. pp. 19-20. Retrieved 8 January 2013.
  17. “Patients Say Rhoads Saved Their Lives.” New York Times 2 Feb. 1932:19.
  18. ^ Starr, Douglas. Revisiting a 1930s Scandal: AACR to Rename a Prize. Science. 25 April 2003. Vol. 300. No. 5619. p. 574.
  19. "Postirradiation Changes in the Levels of Organic Phosphorus in the Blood of Patients with Leukemia", Cancer Research
  20. ^ Packard, Gabriel (29 April 2003). "RIGHTS: Group Strips Racist Scientist's Name from Award". Inter Press Service. Retrieved 7 September 2013. {{cite web}}: Italic or bold markup not allowed in: |publisher= (help)
  21. Goozner, Merrill. 2004. The $800 Million Pill: The Truth Behind the Cost of New Drugs. p.172
  22. [http://ecommons.library.cornell.edu/bitstream/1813/18863/2/Rhoads_Cornelius_Packard_1959.pdf "Cornelius P. Rhoads", ECommons, Cornell University Library
  23. , US Department of Defense
  24. ^ "SERVICE FOR DR. RHOADS; Memorial for Sloan-Kettering Director Here Tomorrow", The New York Times
  25. "New Hope is Held Out for Cancer Cure", Daytona Beach Morning Journal, 16 June 1948, Retrieved 17 December 2012
  26. Starr, Douglas. Revisiting a 1930s Scandal: AACR to Rename a Prize. Science. 25 April 2003. Vol. 300. No. 5619. p. 573.
  27. "Cancer Body to Probe Claims that Scientist Killed Subjects", IPS News
  28. Collado-Schwartz, Ángel, editor; "El humor como expresión cultural", La Voz del Centro II, Fundación La Voz del Centro, 2006

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