Wilburn Ferguson

Wilburn H. Ferguson was an American alternative-medicine practitioner, nurse, and Seventh-day Adventist missionary. He is best known for his claims to have found a cure for cancer from the substance used by the Shuar ethnic group of Ecuador in their traditional practice of headhunting. However, mainstream scientific institutions have never verified his claims about the substance's supposed curative properties, and it has not been developed into any contemporary medical treatment.

Personal life Ferguson was born in 1905 in Shawnee, Oklahoma and raised in National City, California.

Education Ferguson controversially described himself as a doctor, despite only having an honorary degree from the University of Cuenca and not having completed an associate degree.

After that, he moved back to California and began working on further testing of the substance at an organization called the World Life Research Institute, run by a scientist named Bruce Halstead.

A later attempt to secure funding from the British government was unsuccessful, after a committee that was reviewing his application for funding concluded that he was only treating secondary infections rather than the cancers themselves. During this time, Ferguson was located in Guayaquil, Ecuador, where at least one patient from the United States showed up hoping to be cured of cancer. The patient reportedly reported improvement but still died shortly thereafter. Subsequently, he was contacted by Merck and the National Cancer Institute, but after the failure of those tests he also lost much of his Ecuadorian support after the administration of Galo Plaza left government.

After Bourke B. Hickenlooper toured Ferguson's lab in Sucúa, he attempted to help him get funding by setting up the Ferguson Research Foundation but was ultimately unsuccessful. Lambro had bought the rights to Ferguson's story, which he had looked to sell to a Hollywood movie studio under the name of Tsanza. This text's relation to Ferguson's autobiography The Son of Fergus is not clear. Ferguson and Lambro eventually lost this case because Tom Schulman was able to demonstrate that the story of Medicine Man was instead based on his longstanding friendship with the conservationist Daniel Janzen.

Legacy Ferguson later reportedly tasked an entrepreneur named Charles Mazinter with trying to find other partners to develop the solution into an accepted medical treatment, as Ferguson was now too old to do that himself. Mazinter reportedly contacted a corporation called ILEX that was trying to develop cancer drugs and discussed a deal, but the two parties were never able to reach one; the exact circumstances are still disputed. Further analysis by Mazinter and Ferguson's son-in-law Nico Sangurima has apparently hinted at a specific plant in Ecuador being the key to the solution, but the name of that plant has not yet been publicly revealed. There are no known current trials going on to further analyze Ferguson's solution.