History and Science on Trial

In Fall 2002, Deceit and Denial: The Deadly Politics of Industrial Pollution, was published jointly by the University of California Press and the Milbank Fund as one in a series that addressed a variety of aspects of health policy. Briefly, the book looked at questions regarding how two industries, the lead industry and the chemical industry, reacted when faced with information regarding the potential dangers of their products to human health during the twentieth century.

The history of the lead and vinyl industries offers clear insight into why the relationship between the public and big business is so strained today. Despite the potent evidence of the dangers of their products, these industries hid information, controlled research, continued to market their products as safe, and attempted to influence the political process in order to avoid regulation.

The book was unusual in a number of respects, including the fact that a number of the chapters on the two primary cases were based on documents historians rarely if ever use in critical evaluations of corporate behavior. These documents were internal company correspondence, memos and minutes of meetings of both the lead and chemical industry trade associations and some of their member companies. The extensive cache of documents we gathered had become available during the previous number of years through legal proceedings in cases involving injured children, consumers and workers.

Lawyers for some of the largest chemical companies in the world are particularly concerned about two chapters in Deceit and Denial that detail how, in the early 1970s, the industry planned to deceive the government about industry’s own findings that VCM caused cancer in animals exposed to relatively low levels of exposure.

Gerald Markowitz has been retained in a number of cases where the families of workers who have died as a result of their exposure to vinyl chloride and has been deposed for many days by lawyers for Monsanto, Airco, Dow, Union Carbide, Goodyear, Goodrich, and Shell among others large corporations. This is a legitimate part of the legal process. But in addition, the press and the foundation that supported our work were subpoenaed for all of their records concerning our book, their relationship to each other and the peer review process. Following this, five of the eight outside peer reviewers were also subpoenaed to provide all of their records related to the book and to appear at depositions for questioning by company lawyers (This has been written up in the Chronicle of Higher Education.

In addition to these highly unusual, if unprecedented, intrusions into the academic peer review process, the chemical industry hired Philip Scranton, Professor of History at Rutgers in Camden, to write an expert report about two of the chapters and to attack our professional standards, ethics and integrity.