Ernst T. Krebs Jr.
individual · San Francisco, California
FINANCIAL CONFLICTS
Directed the John Beard Memorial Foundation, through which he promoted laetrile; a 1962 federal criminal prosecution fined both the foundation and Krebs, while placing Krebs on probation under injunction-like conditions; Krebs was separately convicted specifically over laetrile in 1973, for practicing medicine without a license and falsely representing it as a cancer cure while dispensing it, and jailed for six months in 1980 for violating probation from that 1973 case. TIME reported in 1976 that Andrew R. L. McNaughton was the key figure in federal charges concerning an alleged cross-border operation and had financial links to one of Tijuana's two laetrile-manufacturing plants; the report said the operation supplied an estimated 10,000 patients a day.
INTERVENTIONS PROMOTED
NOTES
Ernst Theodore Krebs Jr. (17 May 1911 - 8 September 1996) was a self-described biochemist who, working with his physician father Ernst T. Krebs Sr., branded a semisynthetic apricot-kernel compound “Laetrile” and marketed it in the United States from the early 1950s as an anticancer drug. His only doctoral degree was an honorary award from an unaccredited Bible college. A 1962 federal prosecution fined him and his John Beard Memorial Foundation and placed him on probation under injunction-like conditions; a 1973 California conviction specifically over laetrile, for practicing medicine without a license and falsely representing it as a cancer cure, followed, and Krebs served six months in jail in 1980 after violating that conviction’s probation terms. He died in San Francisco in 1996 at 85.