Down in Mexico they squeeze peach pits and apricot kernels to get laetrile--active ingredient: amygdallin--and they smuggle it across the U.S. border to patients in the States. A man named Ernest T. Krebs Sr., M.D., first administered the drug in the twenties and Dr. Krebs junior followed his father in 1951, and claimed he could effectively inject the stuff. Trouble is, laetrile breaks down into cyanide, and the Food and Drug Administration has never approved its use. The FDA also says that it can't allow the marketing of quack medicines.

What makes laetrile so in demand is what the Krebs claimed was its "antineoplastic" activity. That means it's supposed to shrink tumor growth, or as they say in medicine, cure cancer. People who are convinced laetrile will arrest their cancers sometimes manage to get around the FDA, and one particularly desperate man in Oklahoma City who won a case last month was granted a six-month supply of laetrile. The FDA is fighting the verdict.

Dr.M. Judah Folkman doesn't like to see his name associated in print with cures for cancer. No matter how obscure the reference, Folkman says, he is "deluged, absolutely deluged" with abject pleas for treatment, and the publicity is not worth the suffering it causes.

Folkman, Andrus Professor of Pediatric Surgery, is involved in cancer research at the Boston Children's Hospital that has been heavily publicized since the Monsanto Corporation invested $23 million for the right to patent any product of Folkman's research over the next 12 years. Harvard University and Monsanto negotiated the contract after Folkman sought to use the St. Louis firm's extensive tissue-culture equipment for work on his study of a large protein that, he hypothesizes, allows cancers to grow: Tumor Angiogenesis Factor (TAF).

Folkman published his findings slightly over one year ago, concluding that TAF is a protein that malignant tissue releases, instructing neighboring tissue to supply the budding tumor with a blood supply. Other pathologic conditions, as well as cancers, depend on the obedience of the victim in setting up an arterial supply to the lesion, or disease focus. What doctors speculate Monsanto is investing in is an agent or antibody that could block the action of the TAF protein. Such a pharmaceutical could be administered systematically upon diagnosis of a primary tumor, and the presence of the anti-TAF might insure that secondary and hidden tumor formations in other parts of the body would never gain the nourishment they need but die before reaching a half-inch in length.

Dr. Bert L. Vallee, Cabot Professor of Biological Chemistry, is included in Folkman's investigations because he is expert at research on molecular biology.

Those involved with cancer research at Harvard, however, note that much more than Folkman's heavily bankrolled investigation of TAF is proceeding well in the Medical area. Increasingly, basic scientists--those not concerned with the clinical aspects of medicine--have responded to the flood of federal funding for study of the disease since the National Cancer Act of 1971. Anatomists, cell biologists, microbiologists, pathologists, biochemists, biophysicists, and immunologists are basic scientists who have come to the field only lately, as it earned respect beyond its clinical aspect as a horrible, and usually incurable, rotting disease.

The artist's conception of the Dana Building that Dr. Emil Frei III has on his office wall closely resembles the actual building, which you can see out the window near the Children's Hospital, between Francis and Binney Streets in Boston. Frei is director of the Sidney Farber Center for the study of cancer, which will take up the new and angular black building that is a grim but gleaming testament to the gravity of the disease it was built for.

The new Dana building is funded largely by the National Cancer Institute, which just last week extended another $5 million to the Farber center for completion of the facilities. It is a Harvard teaching hospital and will have 100 beds for patients. The center is operating now on an outpatient basis, accepting about 25,000 visits a year from cancer patients.

Frei, professor of medicine, says that plans for the new center are proceeding "smashingly," and he gives equally glowing accounts of the progress cancer treatment is making and of the bold new field of "medical oncology." Frei is a lanky man with wisps of reddish hair and a sweeping white coat that somehow properly identifies him as a modern crusader, the image one senses he enjoys.

His own clinical research has been most successful recently with a program for the treatment of bone cancer, osteogenic sarcoma, by chemotherapy, or the administration of chemicals. The field that Frei extols--medical oncology--is the study of tumors, and it is neither clinical nor pure research by his definition. Rather, Frei explains, it is a field only now "coming to fruition," involving scientist from almost all disciplines, and concerned especially with the effects of radiation therapy and chemotherapy on malignancies. In the Farber Center, Frei boasts, "No man can be an island; optimal evaluation and treatment for cancer involves the multiple occupation of a number of clinicians."

While Frei brims with oliched pronouncements on the history of cancer treatment over the last ten years, he also recognizes the intense controversy in the medical community surrounding the glorification of the medical oncologist amid the wash of federal spending. "Progress and controversy," Frei wrote recently, "are handmaidens."

Problems arise, first of all, over the techniques of treatment. Both radiation therapy and chemotherapy are methods for the destruction of malignant growths in a live human being, and both can have extremely toxic side effects on the patients. Frei says that he feels limited by the federal laws that required detailed informed consent of the patients he would treat by these methods, and that it is hard to innovate with new drugs when the Food and Drug Administrations is very conservative about authorizing their administration to human beings.

"All patients tested with new drugs," Frei says, "are patients with incurable cancer and have received all known acceptable treatment." Testing new and unknown drugs on these individuals, he says, may be worthwhile if only for the hope it gives the patient. "Hope," he says, "is an extremely important factor." What's more, Frei explains, failure to innovate in the National Cancer Institute hospitals may only lead desperate patients to seek new and glorious treatments from quacks. Laetrile, Frei points out, only becomes more attractive in the absence of innovative drug programs.

The FDA requires extensive tests of a drug on animals before it will approve the chemical for human administration. Even that approval, however, is for very limited use until investigations prove the drug's effectiveness. Wayne Pines, a spokesman for the federal agency, says the FDA has approved 25 drugs for commerical distribution in the treatment of cancer, and has granted licenses for the experimental investigation of another 175 chemicals.