The Story of Ernest Adlands - aka Dr. Dread

Born in 1863, Bronislawa Sklodowska of Warsaw Poland showed great academic ability by the age of 17, and after marrying Sir Francis Adlands of Lancastershire England, began to study at Warsaw's clandestine Floating University. They had a son, Ernest in 1882 and the family moved to Paris in 1890 where Bronislawa studied physics at the University of Paris.

Bronislawa was soon followed by her sister, Marie Sklodowska-Curie to which the young Ernest took an immediate interest in her work with physics and her discovery of radioactive isotopes. He became an avid student of Professor Curie, working in a lab as an assistant to French physicist, Henri Becquerel. Ernest earned his doctorate at the University of Paris and his controversial research using polonium as medical treatments for disease led Dr. E Adlands to flee Paris in 1911 for the United States where he married and settled in the quiet back-country near the village of Davison, Michigan.

The doctor built a clinic and several small isolated laboratories on the property and, during the next several years, experimented with numerous subjects from plants, animals and microbes, to human subjects with mental illness and disease. His belief was that by blasting certain diseased cells or portions of the brain, their physiology would be altered, potentially curing the subject or even making it stronger. Several of these experiments led to the death or malformation of the subjects, while others studies appeared quite promising.

In 1924 while working in his microbiological laboratory and using a machine that he constructed to focus and concentrate the highly radioactive properties of polonium he discovered a method whereby he could alter the cells being destroyed by the "elementary bodies of plague," (now known as viruses) making them stronger and resistant to the disease. Dr E. Adlands consequently began trial studies treating lesions on plague patients with considerable success. According to reliable sources, a documented 177 out of 214 patients that came to the clinic were successfully cured with the controversial treatment. It is uncertain what became of the remainder of the subjects as those documents have been lost.

He was reportedly in the process of publishing his work in October of 1927 when the Doctor was suddenly and mysteriously struck ill with a deep fever that altered his mind to the point of madness. In an effort to treat the quickly overpowering disease, the Doctor used his radiation device upon himself to which he almost immediately became enraged, maliciously killing two other assistants with a scalpel and impaling his wife with a fire poker.

His young son, who had witnessed the killings, trapped the Doctor behind a closed door with a wooden chair and summoned for help. Rumor has it that when the constable arrived and opened the door, the mindless doctor charged from the room and attacked the constable by ferociously biting through his shoulder and neck, causing him to bleed profusely, dying within minutes. The son fled with the bloodied doctor chasing him through the woods. A nearby farmer, who was hunting for ducks at the pond, saw the commotion and shot the doctor in the back, killing him instantly.

As Mrs. Adlands lay dying, she pleaded that the doctors work be "continued for the greater good of man." Out of fear of contamination, the laboratory was burned to the ground by local authorities that very day. Sifting through the smoldering remains, the son recovered only a few scrap documents from the debris. After the burial of his parents, the son placed the recovered notes and diary into a storage trunk that was left on the property, then changed his name and slipped away into anonymity. The documents were rediscovered when the homestead was eventually razed and a new establishment was founded to carry on the research into Dr. E Adlands discoveries. Here, at Disease Research & Engineering, Atomic Division, we believe these scrap documents and drawings hold the key in rediscovering the methods Dr. E. Adlands used, and have the potential for changing the way all disease is treated in the future.