He was born September 6th, 1896 in Bucharest, Romania. His father was a physician and his mother, the daughter of a diplomat. At the age of 24 he received his doctorate in medicine and surgery and became licensed. Thereafter, he became a professor/instructor at the Medical Clinic of the University of Bucharest. He began his research on lipids (fats and fatty acids) and cellular metabolism in the mid-1920s, resettled in France in 1936, and had five major papers on lipids and pain and cancer deposited by the Pasteur Institute into the eminent National Academy of Sciences. During World War II, his work with the French Resistance was followed by relocation to Mexico, and from 1941-1945, he continued his research and opened a 100 room free clinic staffed by other doctors in exile, and local physicians.

In 1946, he was invited to the U.S. by Dr. George Dick, from Chicago University medical school. In 1947, he moved to Manhattan, earned his medical license by challenge examination, founded the Institute of Applied Biology, and worked there as a scientist and physician until his death this year.

In 1961, the D. Van Nostrand Company (Princeton, NJ), published Dr. Revici's 772-page textbook, Research in Pathophysiology as Basis for Guided Chemotherapy, with Special Application to Cancer. This book represented some thirty years of his research. Immediately, The American Cancer Society placed Dr. Revici's therapy on its infamous list of "unproven methods" and blacklisted him. In addition to his monumental text, he authored over thirty scientific articles on the treatment of cancer. Dr. Gerhard Schrauzer, professor of biochemistry at the University of California at La Jolla, publicly credited Dr. Revici for "having discovered pharmacologically active selenium compounds," and is quoted as saying, "I came to the conclusion that Dr. Revici is an innovative medical genius, outstanding chemist, and a highly creative thinker. I also realized that few of his medical colleagues would be able to follow his train of thought and thus would be all too willing to dismiss his work."

Dr. Revici'is quoted as saying, "There are simply no two cancers which are alike, just as no two individuals are alike. We are fully entitled to consider my approach not only a highly beneficial treatment which can be offered now for this disease, but even a major step nearer to the solution of the problem of the therapy of cancer. When correctly applied, it can, in many cases, bring under control even far advanced malignancies."

Dr. Revici's therapy is based on fundamentals of human biochemistry. He believed that health resulted from a balance between two dynamic forces in all living organisms, catabolism (breaking down), or anabolism (building up). If either of these forces predominates for a longer than normal period of time, disease can occur. The human immune system, he also believed, operates in four successive phases when dealing with foreign invaders or imbalances:

1. The Enzyme Phase - the breaking down of foreign substances by enzymes
2. The Lipidic Phase - either fatty acids or sterols are produced
3. The Coagulant Antibody Phase - antibodies gather at the site of the foreign substance
4. The Globulinic Antibody Phase - the foreign substance is fully neutralized and rendered harmless.

Dr. Revici observed that cancer results when the body's defense system is arrested in the lipidic phase, so that fatty acids or sterols abound and promote the development of cancer. His idea regarding therapy was simple, to find out which process was predominating and to then guide therapy to reverse it. Because of his early work with lipids, Dr. Revici developed many compounds and was probably the first to discover non-toxic chemotherapeutic agents which could selectively cross the cell membrane of tumors. Sulfur and selenium, he stated, were the most effective in cancer prevention. He invented approximately 100 different medicines and patented many of them. In fact, he developed non-toxic forms of medicine from just about the entire periodic table, from substances like mercury, lead, beryllium, copper, zinc, nickel, selenium, sulfur, and many more. He formulated a compound of a bivalent negative selenium molecule and a molecule of fatty acid, enabling him to deliver by injection, 1 gram or 1 million micrograms of selenium daily, in a totally non-toxic form (more than 200 micrograms is considered toxic when taking selenium orally). The lipid-bound selenium travels through the bloodstream in tact and goes to tumor sites or sites with tendencies toward cancer, which have an affinity for lipids (and in fact are comprised heavily of lipids), chemically binds to the lesions, thereby delivering the medicine exactly where it needs to go. His formulas even cross the blood-brain barrier, making them effective against brain tumors as well.

So, with his "guided lipid" therapy, he found two basic patterns of imbalance with cancer patients stuck in the lipidic phase mentioned earlier, anabolic, or sterol predominance (hormones like estrogen, progesterone, and adrenal hormones), and catabolic, or fatty acid predominance, and the goal was to normalize the state of dis-ease by giving the body what it needed to balance it. It is important to note that conventional chemotherapy often fails to kill all of the cancer cells, making those cells that persist more resistant to further therapy. Often we hear how doctors try one, then another, and another different chemo. Whereas Dr. Revici's therapy could be administered to kill or diminish tumors, its basic use is to fine-tune and correct the metabolic processes that allowed the cancer to take hold in the first place, a much more effective approach. The chief substances used successfully over his 73 year medical practice in the treatment of thousands of patients with cancer consisted of a core group of his compounds - fatty acids, sterols, extracts of animal tissues, and minerals incorporated in lipids.

As his work continued, always honoring and acknowledging each person's biochemical individuality, he named his therapy "biologically guided chemotherapy." He used a urine pH test to determine if the patient's body chemistry was balanced. Urine tends to become acid during the day as metabolic processes accelerate, and alkaline as the anabolic phase predominates at night. A simple urine test can show if a person is cycling properly between these two phases, and therapy is adjusted accordingly.

Going a little deeper into Dr. Revici's philosophy, his theory guiding diagnosis and treatment he named, "Biological Dualism." The two forces "pre-dating" catabolism and anabolism are electrostatic (positive and negative charges tend to annihilate each other) and quantum (opposes annihilation by creating organization). Therefore, electrostatic forces relate to entropy, or the loss of order, and quantum forces relate to an increase of order, or what he called "negentropy." So catabolism relates to entropy, and anabolism relates to negentropy. In illness and degenerative conditions, there is always a predominance of either catabolic or anabolic states. Dr. Revici was also one of the first, if not the first practitioner to implement the body's own innate timing mechanism in delivering medicine. Anabolic and catabolic agents were to be taken in correspondence with the body's anabolic and catabolic phases.

His understanding of this dynamic antagonism between these two ubiquitous forces (electrostatic and quantum) placed him far ahead of his contemporaries in the early part of this century. This distinguishes him as the first medical researcher to unite the field of physics, blending classical Newtonian and modern quantum physics with human biochemistry and medicine, upholding the now more evident "macrocosm within the microcosm."

His life and his work, and his incredible longevity and productivity stand as a testimony to what he believed, researched and practiced. There were many patients whom he saw who were unable to pay him. He still made house calls at the age of 100, and his patients called him at home. He preserved and prolonged in tact the lives of many patients declared terminal and hopeless by conventional doctors. He was a scientific genius who came to America to escape persecution in Europe only to be faced with thirty years of harassment, revocation of his medical license in 1993, which was returned to him last November, less than two months before his death. His non-toxic chemotherapy has been successfully used for forty years. His work deserves much more attention and incorporation into mainstream medicine. Let us hope that cancer sufferers will seek out and find the doctors who are carrying on his phenomenal work.

For more information please contact:

Institute of Applied Biology
26 East 36th Street
New York, NY 10016
Telephone: (212) 685-0111

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