Dr. William Koch—a Pasteur Reborn—Cured Hopeless Cancers at a Striking Rate. The FDA Shut Him Down and Erased him from History.
Dr. Pierre Kory unearthed the story of the world-famous chemist who endured 40 years of persecution and multiple murder attempts to stop him and his radiation-free cancer cure forever.
President Richard Nixon launched the War on Cancer in 1971 with the promise of relegating malignancies to the annals of plague and smallpox. We all know the effort largely failed. But what if—trillions of dollars and millions of deaths later—we learned that we had a hugely promising treatment decades before?
The story of physician-scientist William Frederick Koch, PhD MD, suggests that organized medicine, government, and pharmaceutical makers want anything but a cure for the second leading cause of death in America.
Koch, hailed as the “modern Pasteur” and “the world’s greatest living chemist” by his peers, spent decades fighting those entities to bring his cancer research and promising cures to the world, dying in thoroughly unwarranted derision at eighty-two years old in 1967.
We had never heard of Koch before a doctor with a similar profile in medical daring, Pierre Kory, wrote about him in his Substack. During the pandemic, Kory, who is a colleague and friend, championed a safe, inexpensive drug called ivermectin and challenged covid vaccination, censorship, and policy. He, too, was vilified by media, medicine, and government. It mattered not that each man’s work—many decades apart—saved lives and could have saved many more.
Kory is on a mission we share: To call out the systematic suppression of life-saving medicines that cost little, are less toxic than common drugs, and often work better. Koch’s early twentieth-century work on his oxidative therapies—most famously Glyoxylide—is possibly one of the earliest miscast medical cures. Decades later, Dr. Stanley Jacob’s work on game-changing dimethyl sulfoxide, or DMSO, which Pfeiffer covered in two articles, would be another.
In researching the tragic story of a brilliant scientist who suffered professional assassination, Dr. Kory reported online allegations that Koch was murdered for his discoveries, after thirteen attempts on his life. Koch’s family does not believe he was killed; but they provided two letters in which Koch describes attempts on his life. They say there are others. One of the attempts, a devastating poisoning, may well have hastened his death, as did relentless efforts to diminish, silence, and stop him until his dying day.
Federal officials prosecuted him for fraud in two Federal Trade Commission civil trials and one Federal Drug Administration criminal trial. They failed to convict amid testimony supporting his theory that oxygen-enriched cells could actually burn off toxins and quell cancer and other diseases.
Failing to convict, an injunction was issued stopping Koch Laboratories from advertising and labeling his treatments, and Glyoxylide was banned. Koch was forced to move to Brazil in the 1940s, where the powers against him followed and again stymied his work.
Koch’s granddaughter, who wants to remain anonymous and will be called Estelle Clarke, is curator of some 50,000 pages of her grandfather’s publications, notes, and articles. She has built a website dedicated, on behalf of the close Koch family, to accurately depicting the medical legacy of a man whose discoveries were championed as early as 1913 by the Journal of the American Medical Association—until those findings challenged too many vested interests.
“I want him and his science told,” Clarke said in her first public statements about her grandfather. “He was one of the very first to be destroyed like this.”
Along with her grandfather’s triumphs, trials, and sorrows, Clarke said, attempts on his life were the stuff of family conversation as she grew up. At our request, Clarke shared excerpts of two letters in which Koch wrote of poisoning attempts, for which he apparently treated himself.
In one letter, dated July 3, 1957, Koch, then seventy-two years old, describes being poisoned during a medical conference in Cuba, after which he was rumored to have died. While lacking specific details, the letter suggests that Koch was convinced the source of the attack was a medical establishment that worked for decades to silence him and destroy his career. It reads:
“A great surgeon in Sao Paulo told me yesterday that he heard I had died from a heart attack. The fact is that the medics did expect me to pass away when I was poisoned on my last trip up to Cuba, etc. But although my heart was injured, I was too scared to let it go, and I took a shot before the damage was too great. I am not entirely well yet, however. That was a dose I want no more of! The fact that doctors are expecting me to be dead shows where the news came from first, and that I got a dose. I knew I was badly poisoned, but did not know that they shouted victory so soon, too soon.”
In a second letter, dated April 18, 1965, Koch, then seventy-nine, wrote that he was poisoned by a “carcinogen” while undertaking cancer research in Argentina.
“Before I was poisoned,” he wrote, “I was fairly young, in health activity maybe 50 or 60 yrs old. But that poisoning took off 40 pounds of good muscle, ruined my stomach liver and bowel, also spleen, and my efficiency is only one third of normal. I am recovering.”
The injury may well have played a role in his death two years later. But Clarke believes the stroke that killed her grandfather was also an outcome of a professional lifetime of “outrage, frustration, and sheer overwhelmingness in trying to speak truth and being marginalized.”
Koch died at his home in Rio de Janeiro in December 1967, in the presence of his wife, Yutta; a long-time doctor-friend; and family members. Clarke, who was fourteen years old at the time, had earlier visited her ailing grandfather, but had to return home to school.
“Were they trying to kill him?” Clarke said. “They had tried to kill him off and on.”
Two Doctors. Mirrored Menace.
Dr. Pierre Kory was determined to crack the hundred-year-old mystery. Why was Dr. William F. Koch considered such a threat? From shortly after World War I to the Vietnam War, the U.S. government spent millions of dollars unleashing the full force of the FDA, the FTC, the Attorney General, and the State Department, along with the American Medical Association, the Journal of the American Medical Association, and major media, to achieve a single goal: Stop Dr. Koch. His offense: Holistically curing cancer patients failed by major medicine and its new-found protocol of toxic—but lucrative—radium treatments and surgeries.
Why was a single doctor, quietly working in his Detroit chemistry laboratory and clinic, apparently the biggest menace to standard medical practice in the twentieth century? Why did someone try to poison Dr. Koch—and more than once?
According to Dr. Kory’s extensive research, Dr. Koch was effectively curing inoperable cancers as early as 1919 with a strict diet and one to five of his closely guarded shots of an anti-toxin he called Glyoxylide. The treatment worked to a remarkable extent, Kory said, without surgery or radiation and apparently without the devastating effects that modernized radiation, surgery, and chemotherapy wreak on the suffering today.
Kory’s interest was more than academic. He felt an eerily close bond with Dr. Koch, reminiscent of the German concept of “doppelganger,” a twin or mirror image from a different time. A century apart, both Dr. Kory and Dr. Koch were highly published professors at prestigious medical schools, Kory at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and Dr. Koch at the future Wayne State University in Detroit. Both men made breakthrough research contributions to their fields as young men—Dr. Koch in endocrinology and Dr. Kory in critical care medicine—that made them academic stars until their increasingly ambitious research, Koch to cure cancer and Kory to cure covid, cost them those academic careers.
Both were described by colleagues as physically imposing, scientifically rigorous yet highly emotional men unwilling to compromise either of the two Hippocratic Oath pledges taken by academic doctors—to enlarge the knowledge of medicine and to serve only the patient in front of them. Both were compared by sympathetic colleagues to Dr. Ignaz Philipp Semmelweis, whose career and life were destroyed in 1840s Vienna for innovating antiseptic procedures like handwashing before delivering babies, an iconic example, with Galileo, of how science punishes its pioneers.
Dr. Kory’s research led him to discover the extraordinary efforts the Koch family today is making to redeem their ancestor by presenting his research and scientific concepts on the origins of disease to the world. Kory spent weeks poring over the Koch website’s scientific publications and case studies, which he calls “a masterpiece of historical research.” The Koch family also included a side-by-side of the many critics of Koch’s work in an appeal to the scales of scientific knowledge and justice.
Kory discussed Dr. Koch’s remarkable success treating cancer in interviews with other doctors, cancer specialists, and biochemists. He spent hours interviewing a retired government scientist with high-level intelligence clearances who came forward anonymously with relevant witness to Dr. Koch’s hidden role in history.
Dr. Kory took a particular interest in cutting edge cancer treatments. Though Kory is not an oncologist but a pulmonologist, internist, and critical care doctor, as ICU chief at the University of Wisconsin hospital in Madison and Mount Sinai Beth Israel Hospital in New York City, he had often taken the lead with oncologists trying to save the sickest cancer patients from dying.
After the pandemic, he founded a telehealth clinic with a specialty in supplemental cancer care using repurposed pharmaceutical drugs and supplements based on the thousands of scientific papers supporting the metabolic theory of cancer. This theory was first put forth by 1931 Nobel Prize winner Otto Warburg and recently advanced by Kory’s colleague and mentor Dr. Paul Marik, with encouraging results. As it happened, the forgotten and obscured Dr. Koch was one of the earliest pioneers of the now increasingly popular metabolic theory of cancer, and demonstrated its great promise again and again.
Dr. Kory was astounded by Dr. Koch’s hundreds of case studies of cancer cures. Hundreds of physicians in the US, Canada, and other countries used Koch’s therapies, reporting success. The Christian Medical Research League assembled hundreds of clinical reports and findings supporting Glyoxylide as a therapeutic agent. Esteemed academic doctors—from surgeons at Vanderbilt University to a celebrated oncologist at Louvain University in Belgium—testified to Koch’s healing breakthrough, published with him, and attested to Koch’s honesty and openness to discuss his work and improve it despite being denied funding or venues for more research.
Many people facing death and declared incurable by the Mayo clinic and other top hospitals returned to health after Koch’s treatment, and with striking speed. In his 1929 book Cancer and Its Allied Diseases, updated in 1933, Koch reported that as a general rule he could cure approximately three out of four cancer cases that came to see him first, even in hopeless cases, while, as he told a collaborating doctor, twenty percent of cancer cases that came to him showed no improvement.
“Stomach, liver and rectal cancers clear up the quickest. Uterus cancer responds slightly more slowly,” Koch wrote. “Squamous cell carcinoma responds about one-half as fast as stomach cancer.” With patients who were previously given radium or X-ray treatments, the damage to the cells was so severe, “one cure to two failures is all that can be expected, whereas in the class of cases where no interfering treatments have been used, three cures to one failure should be obtained.”
After weeks of research, Dr. Kory concluded that Dr. Koch was ahead of his time and in many ways ahead of our time, too. He was relentlessly persecuted as a charlatan for his cancer cures because Glyoxylide worked—and it showed enormous, almost unimaginably disruptive promise, so the government and AMA made sure the Koch Treatment could never be established in large clinical trials.
Koch’s Glyoxylide treatment “was likely transformative and highly effective, often but not always curative, based on numerous case testimonies and the AMA’s attempts to ‘steal his therapy’ as well as evidence from congressional hearings and the lies promulgated by the FDA,” Kory said. “It was so effective it led to lots of attacks on him given the threat it posed to business interests in medicine at that time.”
The decades of attacks on Dr. Koch have shadowed his family for generations.
‘The Modern Pasteur’
In June 2012, when Koch’s namesake son died at ninety-one, he was hailed for many years of public service to a small South Florida town where, as mayor, he helped build a hospital. The obituary gave no hint of his stellar lineage, listing his parents only as William Frederick and Luella Koch (William Sr.’s first wife, who died in 1937).
The vilification of Dr. William F. Koch has taken a toll on his family: The labels of charlatan and quack; the snide 1948 Time magazine piece that said the name Koch “rhymes with joke;” the humiliating arrests; and the twin trials alleging false, and ultimately unproven, claims about his medicines. The campaign to suppress his discoveries was so extreme that the authors of the 1949 book The Birth of a Science initially considered titling it Mass Murder.
“We are a very, very, very tight family,” said Clarke. “We watched my parents get hurt and burned. My dad watched his dad. It was not an easy cross to bear. People can feel overwhelmed.”
No wonder. Here was a man, with both a PhD and a medical degree who taught histology and embryology, and—before he was thirty—had reported a breakthrough in the science of endocrinology. He was called “the modern Pasteur,” by Dr. William Hale, research director of Dow Chemical Company. He did “epoch-making work,” said Dr. A. R. Mitchell, an AMA board member in 1924.
But as we reported with DMSO, Koch’s Glyoxylide may have had too many implications, too many uses. Beyond treating cancer—as DMSO does—Koch’s method worked against other diseases, including several that devastated dairy herds. The headline of a 1948 Canadian article called it “A System of Treatment that is Destined to Revolutionize Medical Science.” That “system” was then banned in the United States, where legislators in Michigan were demanding it.
So too were important people around the world.
In July 1939, Dr. Koch wrote from London telling his family he was treating a man with advanced cancer who “is very close to old Queen Mary & she comes to see him.”
Hand-written on the letterhead of a former royal residence called Grosvenor House, Koch described similar obstacles to the ones he faced at home.
“They are incensed at the medics here for the medics got a law passed prohibiting the use of our stuff and all else but surgery Xray radium,” he wrote. “It’s as bad here as U.S.A. … If this one recovers, I am made and so is the treatment. But this is a bad case, Xray etc.”
The passage reflects Koch’s abhorrence of using radiation to treat cancer, which was enshrined in Britain’s Cancer Act of 1939. The law forbids advertising non-approved cancer therapies, while also funding the burgeoning National Radium Trust.
“My grandfather said, ‘You may kill the cancer, but you’ll kill the person before you kill the cancer,’” she recalled. “He saw what they were doing. He knew there had to be a better way to work with the body rather than destroy the body.”
‘A Marked Man’
In 1919, amid Koch-inspired acclaim and controversy, the Wayne County Medical Society in Detroit gave Koch four weeks to prove his treatments worked. It was an ill-fated endeavor “that decided the issue forever in official medical circles,” according to the 1977 book The Cancer Blackout, by Nat Morris. He called Koch “a marked man.”
Koch was given seven “hopeless cases” who had undergone surgery and/or radium treatments and were destined to die. A committee made up “largely of surgeons and roentgenologists,” would rule on the study, according to a 1926 editorial in a publication called The Medical Press.
Seven years later, it said, at least two of the “hopeless” patients were still alive, “a remarkable result (that) should merit attention.” Morris’s book said at least three patients survived; the rest could not be located for follow-up because the committee stopped the study over disagreements with Koch.
The dispute arose when Dr. Koch believed the committee was unnecessarily delaying assistance to terminal patients, who he began treating in his attempt to save lives. The patients were then summarily discharged by the hospital; a few found their way to Koch for follow-up care.
“Today nearly a hundred physicians are convinced from personal observation that cancer is being cured by Koch’s synthetic antitoxin,” the 1926 editorial said. “This Journal has published the case reports of nearly 50 cured cases, many of them of the worst forms of cancer.”
There were many such testimonials for Glyoxylide, which was injected, sometimes just once, in a protocol that included a strict diet and other forms of health maintenance. Those reports did not help its future.
“It became dangerous for physicians to endorse the Koch method, for they were immediately threatened with loss of their academic and professional standing in the medical profession,” Morris wrote. Surgeons at Tulane University and Vanderbilt University “reported good results but were coerced into discontinuing the use of Koch’s preparations.”
Among the people who stood up for Koch was Dr. Willard Dow, president of Dow Chemical, whose laboratory studied the chemical underpinnings of Koch’s theory and shared his enthusiasm for using it as a “medical cure.” In a 1946 letter, Dow wrote:
“Our intention all the way through has been to try to get at the truth of this whole matter, and whether it is Dr. Koch or somebody else, we would take the same attitude to try to prevent an innocent man from being crucified. We cannot understand what the Food and Drug Administration is driving at for the reason that all our information to date would indicate Dr. Koch has been exonerated…
“He has had no trouble in proving his points, but the government has spent a tremendous amount of money to try to prove he is wrong. It almost sounds as if a certain group is attempting to persecute him unjustly.”
‘The Data is the Life’
“Koch’s Glyoxylide is a fraud of the first order, a quack remedy devoid of therapeutic value, foisted upon the public by a man unfit to practice medicine,” the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) wrote in 1927, fourteen years after lauding him. That year, The New York Times piled on: “Dr. Koch’s secret remedy is a quack’s dream, a potion so absurd it insults the intelligence of both doctor and patient.”
Once the AMA spoke, the great twentieth century newspapers turned into trained lackeys just like the mainstream media is today on alternative cures, singing their relentless one-note chorus. Los Angeles Times, 1935: “William F. Koch, the quack…” Time magazine, 1942: “William Koch, the Detroit quack…” The Washington Post, 1950: “William Koch, America’s most notorious cancer quack...” Koch’s New York Times obituary, 1967: “Dr. William F. Koch, dead at 82, leaves behind a quack empire built on water and wishful thinking, a blight on medicine’s honor.”
As he dug into Koch’s long-buried life and career, Dr. Kory grew increasingly outraged as he discovered “a very, very different story” buried underneath half a century of “cancer quack” propaganda. It was as if Kory was reading his own story, reliving the countless emails and notes from patients all over the world who recovered from covid using ivermectin—a drug that won scientists who developed it the Nobel Prize—only to hear in the media it was “horse paste” and Dr. Kory was a charlatan.
Dr. Koch was framed by twentieth century media as a dangerous “quack doctor;” Dr. Kory was branded as a deplorable twenty-first century “misinformation spreader.” Both men felt their safety at risk because of their discoveries, life-saving treatments, and advocacy. But Kory said his experience “pales” compared to the threats and attacks on Dr. Koch.
While Dr. Koch’s remarkable success healing hopeless cancer patients astonished Kory, it outraged him when he discovered the relentless persecution of Koch for following the most fundamental medical ethics. As an intensivist, Dr. Kory was trained, and trained hundreds of medical students in teaching hospitals, to try whatever worked in the intensive care unit to spare a life from death in the moment, the dramatic work of intensivists in the specialty that treats the last-chance dying and who the French call “re-animators.” Data from large clinical trials offers helpful new knowledge to the practitioner, but in the ICU “the data is the life,” as Dr. Joe Varon, Kory’s colleague, once said.
The voices of Dr. Koch’s saved cancer patients sound across the century like an opposing Greek chorus, some after gruesome treatments that were then, and still are, employed by medicine.
Case No. 96, summer, 1923: “Mr. G. a 55-year-old Buick plant worker in Detroit, went to the University of Michigan Hospital with a painful growth diagnosed as tongue cancer, universally deadly then. The growth was removed and “radium applied” four times, followed by “the cautery”—a brutal burning and searing of bleeding cancer tissue by hot irons, etc. practiced since the ancient Egyptians, but by the 1920s “modernized” to use a hot electric coil or burning knife.
After treatment the cancer exploded in the tongue, neck, and pharynx, with severe hemorrhaging. Mr. G could barely talk or swallow and lost 40 pounds before he found Dr. Koch. “First antitoxin was given April 11, 1925,” second antitoxin May 12, 1925,” Koch writes in his 1929 book. “By September 1925, cure was completed. Patient back to work at the Buick plant. Gain of nearly 55 pounds in weight.”
Case No. 98, June 1923: “Mrs. R,” 57, was diagnosed with cancer of the uterus at the Mayo clinic. Radium and X-ray treatments were given, she lost 50 pounds, and Mayo surgeons told her husband the cancer was incurable. Dr. Koch discovered a large mass filling her abdomen, her vagina and clitoris distended and deformed, red pigment all over her body. “Antitoxin was given and recovery took place rapidly, gained in weight…The whole cancer mass had disappeared in six months and perfect health was re-established.”
Infant Judy, August 1948: Surgery showed that a tumor had invaded 85 percent of baby Judy McWhorter’s liver, a biopsy confirmed malignancy. She was three months old and her stomach was so distended she had struggled for weeks to breathe. “They told us there was nothing they could do to save Judy’s life,” according to an affadavit signed by her parents. She was given three weeks to live.
Lacking hope, on September 18, 1948, Judy received her first injection of Dr. Koch’s Glyoxylide, which was then the subject of a new and highly critical Time magazine article; their own doctor’s advice was that it would be “useless.” On November 11, 1949, a panel of physicians and surgeons saw Judy and said there was “nothing wrong with her.” Reads the McWhorter letter: “A more surprised group of doctors would be hard to find when they first saw a rosy healthy child rolled out before them after having read a clinical summary of her case.”
Her parents brought the child, plump and smiling and “cute and blonde at 17 months,” to a Texas meeting of the American Cancer Society. Doctors who expected her to die were astonished at her good health and neither took credit for her recovery nor could explain it.
“Once Termed Hopeless Case,” read the headline in the Fort-Worth Star Telegram. “Doctors Convinced Little Judy Overcame Cancer Ailment Herself.” These cases, and many more stretching across forty years, inspired Estelle Clarke to try to bring her grandfather’s work to light and redeem his reputation.
A Painful Journey to Truth
Describing him as “a genius with a photographic mind,” Clarke saw her grandfather’s prescience up close. As a child, she and other grandchildren were not permitted to have maraschino cherries or red hot dogs because he believed the dyes in them were unhealthy. Ironically, the FDA only banned red dye #3 in January of this year.
A century ago, Koch spoke out strongly against the unhealthful effects of what he called “processed foods.” He did not want his grandchildren vaccinated with live attenuated polio viruses, which later were discovered to sometimes become virulent.
And forty years before the 1964 Surgeon General report, Koch was outspoken about the harm of cigarettes. He declined in the 1920s to write for the Journal of the American Medical Association because of what he saw as conflicts of interest, including its early ties to tobacco money. His family believes that was the start of the journal’s assault on his work by the editor Morris Fishbein.
Telling this history was at times painful for Clarke, whose voice broke as she recalled doctors and patients who were threatened if they testified on behalf of her grandfather. In Brazil, Koch’s work at a hospital ended when the institution’s pharmaceutical supplies faced delays if Koch remained on staff, she said. “The U.S. is mighty globally, Clarke wrote in an email, “but Big Pharma and Organized Medicine is even more powerful than governments.”
Clarke remembered a man, who she thought was “the greatest brain in the universe,” welling up several times as he reflected on the battle that was his professional life. “I think he would tear up and think that he failed,” she said. “He was a very large, strong man with the softest demeanor.”
Koch’s banishment meant that the young Estelle saw her grandfather only at intervals on visits to Brazil. He would sit her down on a stool in his laboratory and let her watch him work, the great scientist glancing over fondly every now and again. She imagined him thinking he would make her much smarter in the process.
In the June 7, 1948 Congressional Record, Sen. William Langer of Michigan said Koch’s work deserves “the attention of everyone who is interested in the health of the American people.” He entered into the record the Canadian article on the miraculous results seen by Canadian dairymen. From the article:
Comparisons are odious, but Dr. Koch has been described by authorities as “the world’s greatest living chemist”; “the discoverer of a new science which charts the future course of the medical profession”; “one who cannot be bought, coerced, or intimidated”; “a Christian gentleman of courage and distinctive attainments”; and “a man of amazing capacities.”
In was Easter 1965 when Koch wrote the letter to his family from Argentina describing the poisoning that left him in an impaired state at age 79. With his usual undaunted optimism, he vowed to keep fighting and signed off the letter, “With my best love.”
Dr. Koch kept researching and treating cancer patients until his death two years and nine months later, in December 1967.
Said Clarke, “He got into science because he watched his father die of cancer. He was just a man that wanted people not to suffer the way his father suffered.”
By all accounts, organized medicine would not let Dr. William F. Koch do that.
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Thanks for the good discussion, folks. Your recognition of the larger implications of this historical injustice is why we do these articles. My next piece will be on off-patent treatments for cancer that need to be considered by medicine. The often toxic and hugely expensive pharma model simply fails too many and adds to human suffering. Stay tuned. I hope to get this written soon.
My father died of cancer just over 23 years ago.
He was 65. The cancer had started almost 20 years earlier.
He had all the usual surgeries and radiation, but thankfully not chemo as his particular tumour was considered irresponsive to chemo.
When “slash and burn” (surgery and radiation) did not work as well as hoped, doctors would just roll their eyes and say there is nothing more they can do. Top oncologists in the UK and USA.
I distinctly remember their great faith in modern technology saying that "cancer will never be cured, but be managed, like diabetes". This was the best to hope for, approached tangentially as more advanced therapies are introduced, they said.
I was his medical escort during those last years, coordinating with the doctors.
I would repeatedly ask them what the cause of his cancer could have been. No useful replies.
I studied the medicine, but at that time, had no access to the alternatives.
Covid opened up so much, by exposing so much.
A bit painful – and angering – for me to read something like this article now, and think of what could have been.