The Fatherees also explored alternative options, from acupuncture to homeopathy, osteopathy, and even faith healing. Almost every new option brought initial excitement, then disappointment. “It’s very common when you start a child on a new drug or introduce some kind of new therapy that the child will do well for weeks or months,” says Jim Owens, assistant professor of pediatrics and neurology at Baylor College of Medicine. “We call it the honeymoon period. It wears off, and the seizures come back.”

George and Azita “were just so helpless,” recalls George’s classmate and friend, attorney David Brown. “They felt like there was nothing they could do.” The couple drew strength from their love for each other and their religious faith and tried to maintain a sense of normalcy in their lives. “They didn’t make you live it for them,” says friend Lisa Schenk, who recalls Azita giving Clayton mouth-to-mouth during a seizure one night at dinner, then returning to the conversation.

But despite George and Azita’s best efforts, by the spring of 2004, Clayton was in a quasi-vegetative state. “I didn’t understand how he was still surviving,” says George’s mother, Debi Fatheree. George and Azita were convinced that he would soon require a feeding tube. Then, through a holistic doctor, they heard about a last-ditch hope: A psychiatrist named William Rader who, through a clinic in the Dominican Republic, was offering a $25,000 human fetal stem cell therapy unavailable in the United States.

It sounded too good to be true. Described by Rader as painless, taking less than an hour, and with no known side effects, the treatment involves intravenously injecting fetal blood stem cells and subcutaneously injecting brain stem cells. Rader claims that the results are potentially miraculous: “The Fetal Stem Cell searches out, detects and then attempts to repair any damage or deficit discovered, as well as releases growth factors which stimulate the body’s own repair mechanisms,” he says. From Alzheimer’s to paralysis to ulcerative colitis, the list of diseases Rader says he can alleviate or cure makes stem cells sound like the panacea for humanity’s ailments. “We’ve had children who are blind and deaf that can actually see and hear [after the treatment],” Rader says on a video posted on his website—though none of those children appear on that video. Because of such claims, Internet bulletin boards are full of anguished postings from people who are paraplegic, who have epilepsy, who have loved ones suffering from Lou Gehrig’s disease, all wondering if Rader can help.

Rader, who is in his late sixties, would not answer questions for this article, and at one point during its reporting, Rader called an 02138 editor and appeared to threaten him. “I have people that I’m able to contact and have them deal with you,” he said. “I’m not just a regular doctor.” His biography is difficult to document. Rader graduated from the State University of New York at Buffalo School of Medicine in 1967 and has been licensed in California as a physician and surgeon since June 1968. He once ran “Rader Institute” clinics to treat eating disorders, and in the early 1970s, he worked at an alcohol treatment center called the Western Institute of Human Resources in Long Beach Calif. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, Rader served as an on-air psychiatrist for KABC-TV, a news station in Los Angeles. He was also a consultant for two episodes of the 1970s television sitcom All in the Family, and for a time was married to actress Sally Struthers, who played Gloria on that show.

Rader apparently learned about stem cell therapies by undergoing stem cell treatments, possibly intended to halt aging, at Dr. Alexander Smikodub’s Cell Therapy Clinic of National Medical University and Embryonic Tissues Center (also known as EmCell) in Kiev, Russia. According to Smikodub, Rader visited “about 10 times” between 1995 and 1997 and “underwent several courses of stem cell therapy.” Via e-mail, Smikodub said that Rader was intrigued by stem cells. “He tried to become our partner and investor, and many documents were signed … In May 1997, he demonstratively terminated our relations without having fulfilled any of his obligations.”

Early this decade, Rader launched the Cutting-Edge of Medical Invention Foundation, a nonprofit group that described itself as pursuing AIDS research. Earlier this year, Rader claimed in an interview with KABC to have found a cure for AIDS using stem cells. “I either am psychotic, a compulsive liar, or I am telling the truth,” he said. While he performs his stem cell treatments under the aegis of a company he started called Medra, he has also reportedly conducted business through firms called Mediquest, the Czech Foundation, and Dulcinea Institute.

Many if not most stem cell researchers and neurologists flatly reject Rader’s treatment. “The basis for this kind of therapy is a very misguided approach, thinking that stem cells have magical curative ability and that if you took a stem cell and injected it under the skin or intravenously, it would cure any of a series of illnesses,” says Dr. Arnold Kriegstein, who heads the Institute for Regeneration Medicine at the University of California at San Francisco. “This is not based on any kind of literature, any peer-reviewed scientific report of efficacy. There is no reasonable mechanism to explain how it could work.” The unknowns are as basic as the nature and origin of the cells Rader uses, whether they have been tested for contamination, and whether the body accepts or rejects them.

In the late 1990s, according to Fia Richmond, Rader treated three brain-injured children who were unresponsive to conventional treatments. One was an 11-year-old boy named Rory, whose mother “thought he was being more responsive,” after Rader’s treatment, recalls Richmond, who saw the child months later. “He always tended to tilt his head to one side, and she felt he was moving it to midline. I did not see a change.”

Richmond took her son, Palmer, to Rader in the summer of 1999. Instead of improving, though, Palmer started having seizures after the treatment, and it was months before the boy returned to his prior condition. “There were a lot of variables,” including a urinary tract infection from which Palmer was suffering, Richmond says now. “There was no control.”

Other patients thought they saw signs of improvement. A father named Kevin Caprio noticed that, after Rader’s treatment, his brain-injured daughter, Courtney, “went and looked for a chair to sit down in rather than just sit on the floor,” according to Dr. Dianne Caprio, his wife. Caprio, a dentist, says Rader assured her that, for the $25,000 fee, her husband could bring Courtney back as many times as needed. But he added a $1,000 “nurse’s fee” for the second visit, then upped it to $2,500. The Caprios stopped visiting.

“I asked at one point for a breakdown of what was actually in the IV,” Caprio says. “He never gave it to me. And there was never any follow-up.”

Still, Caprio admits, “there were no guarantees.” And now, “there’s always the lingering thought that maybe there was something in that IV that is harboring inside Courtney’s body and may not manifest itself for years to come.”

The Fatherees consulted experts and searched for clinical studies showing that stem cells had successfully been used to combat epilepsy; they found none. Still, afraid that they would otherwise lose their son, the Fatherees decided to talk to Rader.

“We had a lot of [initial] questions,” George says. “He satisfied very few answers. He was secretive and wouldn’t let us talk to other patients.”

Saying that stem cells might agitate Clayton’s brain, Rader refused to treat the boy until Clayton stopped holding his breath during seizures. In spring 2004, Clayton did stop holding his breath, and Rader agreed to let the Fatherees speak to a former client, a woman from Texas. “We listened to this mom who told a story about her child who had been brain damaged at birth,” George says. “[The parents] got stem cells for him every six months, and she saw tremendous developmental improvement. Listening to her words and her emotion … you couldn’t make this up.”

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