Post contributed by Ansley (Crow) Smoll, winner of the AHC’s 2026 Undergraduate Research Award for her project “The Morality of A.C. Ivy: How One Man’s Stance on Medicine Explains the Largest Scam in Cancer History.”
History often asks for a clear distinction between heroes and villains. Doctor Andrew Conway Ivy makes that distinction difficult.
When I first encountered the story of A.C. Ivy in my History of Cancer course with Dr. Hosanna Krienke, he seemed like a walking contradiction. He was a respected physician, a leading medical researcher, and even one of the doctors associated with the development of the Nuremberg Code following WWII. Yet only a few years later, he became one of the most vocal supporters of Krebiozen, an unproven cancer “treatment” that was later revealed to be fraudulent.
In only a few years, Ivy went from being a man who (quite literally) wrote the book on medical ethics to a spokesperson for a snake-oil cancer drug. His outspoken defense of Krebiozen cost him his reputation, and even those who knew Ivy during his lifetime struggled to understand his actions.
That contradiction was what caught my attention. As someone majoring in psychology, I’m fascinated by human behavior—particularly how people justify their actions. It’s easy to dismiss historical figures as irrational or unethical when we already know how the story ends, but I found myself disbelieving that narrative. As I learned more and more about Ivy, it seemed unlikely to me that the man was a scammer or a fraud.
With this question in mind, I was led to explore A.C. Ivy’s collection in the American Heritage Center. Like many students, I had never really done research with primary sources before. The historical research I was most familiar with was that of books and journal articles. While those sources provided valuable context, the materials in the AHC’s library showed me a whole other side of the story.
Reading Ivy’s papers felt very different from reading about him in a textbook. Within boxes of files, I found everything from his books and unpublished papers to letters and thank-you notes. As I worked through the collection, I expected to find the moment where Ivy apparently abandoned the ethical principles that had defined his career. However, that moment never came. Instead, I found remarkable consistency within the man’s writings.
The more I read, the more I realized that Ivy’s support of Krebiozen was not a sudden departure from his beliefs but an extension of them. At the core of his beliefs as a Researcher and physician, Ivy held several principles. He believed doctors had a moral obligation to do whatever they could to help their patients. He argued that every treatment carried some degree of experimentation due to the fact that no physician could ever promise a cure. Lastly, and perhaps most importantly, he thought that if a doctor sincerely believed a treatment might help, then withholding it from the patient would be unethical.
Although nobody can claim definitively to know Ivy’s reasoning, it seems likely that it was these ethical stances that led him to defend the sale of Krebiozen. He staunchly believed that there was a possibility Krebiozen could help these people, and therefore withholding the drug from them (even if only for modern clinical trials and testing) would be unethical and ultimately useless.
That doesn’t mean Ivy was right. History has shown that Krebiozen was not the breakthrough its advocates hoped it would be, and Ivy’s reputation never fully recovered from his involvement. But understanding why he defended it transformed the way I viewed the story. Through researching Ivy, the disgraced scam-backing doctor, I found Ivy, the strictly principled man who was blinded by his own moral code.
That shift in perspective became the central argument of my research project. Instead of asking whether Ivy was a hero or a villain, I argued that his role in the Krebiozen controversy is best understood through the moral framework he had spent decades developing. His story illustrates that good intentions, even when deeply sincere, are not always enough. Ethical convictions can still lead people astray if they are not balanced by evidence, accountability, and a willingness to question one’s own assumptions. I am deeply grateful to the AHC for giving me the resources to conduct my research. Thanks to them, I was able to use Ivy’s story as a lens for larger questions about ethics, psychology, and medicine—questions that remain just as relevant today as they were in Ivy’s lifetime.
