http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/19/health/lee-w-wattenberg-who-saw-cancer-fighters-in-foods-dies-at-92.html 2014-12-19 06:37:02 Lee W. Wattenberg, Who Saw Cancer Fighters in Foods, Dies at 92 Dr. Wattenberg, a University of Minnesota researcher hailed as the “father of chemoprevention,” found weapons in chemical compounds in broccoli, cabbage, coffee and garlic. === Dr. Lee W. Wattenberg, a medical researcher who helped jump-start the field of The cause was complications of In 1966, Dr. Wattenberg published a landmark paper in the journal Cancer Research that reviewed 36 years of animal studies on the effects that certain compounds had on the development of cancer. The paper laid the framework for understanding how these compounds work. His interest was in helping to prevent cancer, and in a “About two-thirds of all cancers are preventable,” Margaret Foti, the association’s current chief executive, said in the statement. “Because of Lee Wattenberg’s dedication to and belief in the promise of cancer prevention, the field has taken its rightful place as one of the most important areas of cancer research.” Dr. Wattenberg, a professor at the University of Minnesota for 60 years, theorized that there are many thousands of chemicals that can inhibit cancer-causing compounds. These chemicals work by stimulating natural enzymes that the body uses to detoxify cancer-causing chemicals before they reach susceptible cells. If these invaders have already reached the cells, cancer-fighting chemicals can sometimes slow and even stop what might otherwise be an irreversible process. “The story in the future will be in prevention,” Dr. Wattenberg said in a 1996 interview with The Globe and Mail of Toronto. “We would like to develop agents that hit early in the cancer process, to prevent the damage.” He found that the preservative known as B.H.A. (for butylated hydroxyanisole), an antioxidant used as a food additive, can block many carcinogens. He showed that cabbage, brussels sprouts, cauliflower and broccoli inhibit the development of carcinogens. He isolated a compound in garlic that decreased “by a factor of three” the chances that animals injected with cancer agents would develop that cancer. He found two chemicals in coffee that neutralize free radicals, which are harmful chemicals commonly implicated in the onset of cancer. A.A.C.R., the cancer research association, also credited Dr. Wattenberg with pioneering the use of aerosols to deliver drugs to cancer cells in the lungs. In 2000, when Dr. Hanspeter Witschi, a professor of toxicology at the University of California, Davis, reported finding nine chemicals that slow cancer, he pointed out that Dr. Wattenberg had laid the groundwork for finding two of them. “He has been working in chemoprevention for 30 years or so,” Dr. Witschi told The Globe and Mail, “and he showed three or four years ago that you can prevent lung-tumor formation in mice.” Much of the experimental work with chemicals that inhibit cancer has been limited to animals because of the problems inherent in infusing humans with substances whose effects over many years remain unknown. But the field has produced notable successes. One is tamoxifen, an Not every attempt to thwart the onset of cancer has worked. Dr. Wattenberg told The New York Times in 1979 that carcinogen inhibitors could be unpredictable. Some may actually promote the action of certain carcinogens while blocking others. Timing, he said, was critical: The drug phenobarbital, for example, suppresses cancer when given before exposure to the carcinogen, but it fosters the development of cancer if administered after exposure. Dr. Wattenberg and others once hoped that Lee Wolff Wattenberg was born in Manhattan on Dec. 22, 1921, and graduated from the City College of New York. His brother, Albert, a physicist who worked with Enrico Fermi on the first controlled release of Dr. Wattenberg earned undergraduate and medical degrees from the University of Minnesota. During the Korean War, he served in the Army and was assigned to do research at what was then Walter Reed General Hospital in Washington. He then joined the Dr. Wattenberg received many honors, including in 1996 the A.A.C.R.- In addition to his daughter Elizabeth, Dr. Wattenberg is survived by his wife of 70 years, the former Esther Ginsberg; another daughter, Anne Wattenberg; two sons, Mark and Binks; eight grandchildren; and a great-granddaughter. His son Richard and daughter Lynn Woolf died before him. Elizabeth Wattenberg said that her father had remained undaunted when one of his hypotheses did not pan out; he was always eager to try the next thing. She remembered him once asking his wife if he could dry a bushel of brussels sprouts in the clothes dryer to prepare them for experiments. She said yes.