The paper Cultural Properties and Pathogenicity of Certain Microorganisms obtained from various Proliferative and Neoplastic Disease was first published in 1950, a team effort by Virginia Wuerthele-Caspe (Livingston-Wheeler’s name from a previous marriage), Eleanor Alexander-Jackson, John Anderson, James Hillier and Roy Allen.
In this they described how they cultured pleomorphic organisms from human and animal neoplasms, and that these could not be cultured from normal controls. When inoculated into experimental animals, the cultured organisms induced characteristic pseudocaseous lesions.
An important paper was published in 1966 by Dr Eleanor Alexander-Jackson who had been working for some time with the Rous virus. She had isolated many times and over many years a highly pleomorphic, gram variable Mycoplasma from the blood and tumours of Rous virus infected chickens and from other sources of the virus.
Dr Alexander-Jackson postulated that the Rous virus was ‘the virus size stage and virus like form of a single type of pleomorphic intermittently acid fast organism with a Mycoplasma transitional L phase, belonging under the order Actinomycetales’.
Livingston-Wheeler, in conjunction with Alexander-Jackson in 1970 and later with her husband Afton Livingston in 1972, published papers on their culturing of organisms with filterable cycles and acid-fast cycles.
Livingston-Wheeler established her first cancer clinic in San Diego in 1969 and produced an autologous vaccine utilising her Progenitor cryptoceides organism for the treatment of cancer patients. Her later husband, Owen Webster Wheeler, developed a malignant lymphoma of the neck in 1972, and he chose to treat it only with the vaccine. The lymphoma was reportedly gone in six months (Livingston 1977).
The possible association between bacterial endocarditis and colorectal carcinoma was raised in 1973 by Dr Daniel Roses and Dr Arthur Localio, following their investigation into three patients presenting with bacterial endocarditis and carcinoma of the colon or rectum (Roses 1974). Each patient was treated with antibiotics for endocarditis followed by surgical removal of the carcinoma.
A causal link between the two conditions must be considered as speculative, but the authors suggested that in patients with no history of heart disease, the concurrent development of these diseases certainly warrants further research.
Between the late 1970s and early 1980s Dr Alan Cantwell, a dermatologist who considered Dr Livingston-Wheeler somewhat his mentor, began to publish on the presence of pleomorphic organisms he had found in breast cancer, lymphoma, Hodgkin’s disease and pre-AIDS Kaposi’s sarcoma (Cantwell 1981, 1982, 1997).
Professor Lida Mattman’s knowledge of cell wall deficient bacteria and of the strange group of divergent organisms called Mycoplasmas has been invaluable to most researchers interested in this field. Although not the first to work with cell wall deficient bacteria, Professor Mattman’s work has added greatly to the body of information on this phenomenon.