The hero of our story is a mouse, a.k.a. the "Swiss Albino" mouse that has been a fixture in research laboratories for years. It’s the generic white mouse with pink eyes that have unwittingly aided our understanding of disease processes and how to treat them — with one notable exception — arthritis. As it turns out, this mouse is the mouse that roared. And, it does not get arthritis! The story of how this particular mouse aided in the discovery of Cetyl Myristoleate, which one day may be heralded as the most important nutritional discovery of the 20th century, seems to border on the miraculous. If you’re one that has trouble with miracles, then you might, at least, accept the fact that the discoverer worked with a degree of intuition that borders on the extraordinary. Let me share Harry W. Diehl’s story. Harry W. Diehl was a research chemist who worked at the National Institutes for Health (NIH) in Bethesda, Maryland. Our government employed him for over 40 years, and during his time there, he was responsible for isolating and identifying over 500 chemical compounds. His specialty was in sugar metabolism and one of his most notable discoveries, prior to Cetyl Myristoleate (CM), was a method of synthesizing 2-deoxydextroribose, a sugar used in the preparation of Dr. Jonas Salk’s oral polio vaccination. "The story starts in the late 1950’s when a neighbor and friend of Harry’s developed a particularly dreadful form of arthritis called rheumatoid arthritis." This was a time prior to the discovery of many of the very powerful immune suppressive and corticosteriod drugs that we have today to treat this condition and after amputation of several of his limbs, his friend was left unable to care for himself and unable to support his family. As Harry watched his friend’s condition deteriorate over several years, he became quite overwhelmed with his inability to help. I’m sure that his feelings were significantly compounded by the fact that he worked in the same building as the chemists who were researching treatments for arthritis. Harry was quoted once as saying, "Here I am working at the National Institutes for Health, and I’ve never seen anything that was good for curing arthritis!" So he decided to go on a personal quest to find something that would help his friend. Unfortunately, his friend passed away before Harry’s discovery of Cetyl Myristoleate, but all of his hard work was not done in vain. As of today, hundreds of thousands of individuals have found profound and sometimes-permanent relief using CM to address the symptoms related to many degenerative arthritic conditions and other conditions related to aging. It’s now 1962 and Harry decides to set up a laboratory in his own home. As any good researcher knows, to study any condition he must be able to experimentally induce that disease somehow in laboratory animals. He started by bringing home several boxes of mice, Swiss albino mice to be exact, and soon injected them with a toxin that is known to very quickly cause the symptoms related to arthritis. This particular toxin, mycobacterium butyricum, also known as Freund’s adjuvant, produces an antibody response resulting in symptoms of inflammation, pain, and restricted joint ranges of motion. He soon discovered that these mice did not respond as expected and tried injecting them in various other locations to get these mice to develop arthritic symptoms, all to no avail. Diehl said, "I tried every way that I could to give those mice arthritis, but they just would not get it." Frustrated, he contacted
a friend of his in California who was doing some similar research and
asked him if there was something that could be done differently to get
these mice to respond. This fellow researcher wrote back and said, "If you or anyone else can give mice arthritis, I want to know about it, because I’ve found that mice are 100% immune to arthritis."
Harry’s journey lasted over two years. He worked weekdays late into the night, all day on weekends, and every spare moment of his time delving into mouse chemistry. It was a long, tedious job, working on his own in his spare time, but Harry finally found the factor — Cetyl Myristoleate — that protected mice from arthritis. As he said, "It didn’t come on a silver platter to me, but after years of chemical sleuthing and just old-fashioned chemical cooking, I found it!" On thin layer chromatography of macerated mice, Harry noticed a mysterious compound, which he later identified as CM. At this point, Harry needed to prove that it was the CM that protected mice from arthritis. This stage of experimentation started with laboratory rats, which are susceptible to Freund’s adjuvant induced arthritis. His research is quite involved and I’m not going to go into all of the detail, but for those of you who want to dig a little deeper, he published his research in the March 1994 issue of the Journal of Pharmaceutical Sciences, Volume 83, No. 3, pages 296-299. From Harry Diehl’s work, several important inferences can be made:
From Harry W. Diehl’s work, comes our "Super Mouse" — powerful enough to slay the fiery dragons of arthritis! Well, as you can imagine, Harry was very excited at this point and applied for a "use patent" on May 3, 1976, using CM to immunize against and relieve the symptoms of inflammatory rheumatoid arthritis. He was granted the patent (#4,049,824) on September 20, 1977, and he immediately approached the pharmaceutical industry with his amazing discovery. Unfortunately, presumably because we cannot obtain a product patent on a naturally occurring compound, none of the pharmaceutical companies were interested in his product. Being a scientist and not a marketing person, Harry knew of no other way to bring CM to the public, and consequently his discovery sat on the shelf collecting dust until 1991 when he, himself, developed arthritis. With advanced age, Harry developed osteoarthritis, also known as degenerative joint disease, in his hands, knees, and the heels of his feet. Being the discoverer of an exceptional arthritis treatment, what do you think that Harry did to treat his arthritis? Well, as most of us would do, he went to his treating physician! His doctor tried the usual treatment of non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs, which led eventually to the use of corticosteroids. After limited effects, his doctor said that he could no longer prescribe the cortisone and Harry was left, as many of us are, with no other direction to go. Harry said, "At this point, I thought about my discovery, and I decided to make a batch and use it on myself." He isolated some myristoleic acid from some butter and mixed it with cetyl alcohol and made his own CM. Harry said that he topically applied the CM to his painful joints and applied a 10% DMSO (dimethyl sulfoxide) solution, as a carrier, on top of the CM. His joints became completely pain free at the end of ten days and he remained symptom free for over five years with no further applications of the CM! Can you believe it, all from the lowly mouse! |
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