"Ashamed to Put My Name to It": Monsanto, Industrial Bio-Test Laboratories, and the Use of Fraudulent Science, 1969-1985.

One of the most well-documented episodes of scientific manipulation and overt fraud was the scandal involving Industrial Bio-Test Laboratories (IBT) in the 1970s and the chronic toxicity tests it conducted on behalf of Monsanto that ultimately led to the indictment and conviction of employees of IBT and the Monsanto Corporation. IBT, at the time the nation's largest private laboratory, served a range of industries and government agencies. IBT conducted about 22 000 toxicology studies for scores of corporations, representing between 35% and 40% of all tests conducted in private labs in the country. IBT has been justly condemned for its fraudulent activities in the 1970s, but no one has looked at the relationship between the corporate funders of IBT's research and its fraudulent practices. We use previously secret corporate documents that detail the role of IBT's largest customer, Monsanto, which used fraudulent data to influence government. This material, revealed through legal discovery proceedings now under way regarding polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) and Roundup, show the long-lasting impact of Monsanto's behavior on efforts to regulate large corporations as well as on the long-term effects on human health. (Am J Public Health. 2023;113(6):661-666. https://doi.org/10.2105/AJPH.2023.307247).

A Short History of Occupational Safety and Health in the United States.

As this short history of occupational safety and health before and after establishment of the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) clearly demonstrates, labor has always recognized perils in the workplace, and as a result, workers' safety and health have played an essential part of the battles for shorter hours, higher wages, and better working conditions. OSHA's history is an intimate part of a long struggle over the rights of working people to a safe and healthy workplace. In the early decades, strikes over working conditions multiplied. The New Deal profoundly increased the role of the federal government in the field of occupational safety and health. In the 1960s, unions helped mobilize hundreds of thousands of workers and their unions to push for federal legislation that ultimately resulted in the passage of the Mine Safety and Health Act of 1969 and the Occupational Safety and Health Act of 1970. From the 1970s onward, industry developed a variety of tactics to undercut OSHA. Industry argued over what constituted good science, shifted the debate from health to economic costs, and challenged all statements considered damaging.

"Nondetected": The Politics of Measurement of Asbestos in Talc, 1971-1976.

The recent lawsuits against Johnson & Johnson have raised the issue of what and when talcum powder manufacturers knew about the presence of asbestos in their products and what they did or did not do to protect the public. Low-level exposure to asbestos in talc is said to result in either mesothelioma or ovarian cancer. Johnson & Johnson has claimed that there was "no detectable asbestos" in their products and that any possible incidental presence was too small to act as a carcinogen. But what exactly does "nondetected" mean? Here, we examine the historical development of the argument that asbestos in talcum powder was "nondetected." We use a unique set of historical documents from the early 1970s, when low-level pollution of talc with asbestos consumed the cosmetics industry. We trace the debate over the Food and Drug Administration's efforts to guarantee that talc was up to 99.99% free of chrysotile and 99.9% free of amphibole asbestos. Cosmetic talc powder manufacturers, through their trade association, pressed for a less stringent methodology and adopted the term "nondetected" rather than "asbestos-free" as a term of art.

Monsanto, PCBs, and the creation of a "world-wide ecological problem".

For the past three decades, we have written on the history of occupational and environmental health, authoring books and articles on lead poisoning, silicosis, asbestosis, and angiosarcoma of the liver, among other diseases. One book, Deceit and Denial, focused specifically on the chemical and lead industries. Because of the rarity of historians who study this history, we have been asked to testify on behalf of workers who allege harm from these industrial materials and by state, county, and local governments who seek redress for environmental damages and funds to prevent future harm to children. In about 2010, we began testifying in law suits brought by individuals who claimed that they had suffered from cancers, specifically non-Hodgkin's lymphoma, because of polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) in their bodies. At that time, we wrote a Report to the Court about industry knowledge of the dangers of PCBs to workers and the environment. More recently, we have been approached by attorneys representing government agencies on the West Coast of the United States which are seeking funds to abate PCB pollution in their ports, bays, and waterways. The focus of these lawsuits is the Monsanto Corporation, the sole producer of PCBs in the United States from the 1930s through 1977. Through these law suits, an enormous trove of previously private Monsanto reports, papers, memos, letters, and studies have been made available to us and this paper is the result of our examination of these hundreds of thousands of pages. The documents from this collection (with the exception of privileged materials that Monsanto has not made public, and upon which we have not relied) are available on www.ToxicDocs.org , the website we have developed with Professor Merlin Chowkwanyun of Columbia's Mailman School of Public Health. (Almost all of the references that are from this collection can be accessed by readers by clicking on the reference hyperlink.) This monograph is adapted from a report to the court that was originally produced for litigation on behalf of plaintiffs in PCB lawsuits. We are grateful to the Journal of Public Health Policy for publishing this detailed examination of these documents and we hope it will stimulate further research into this important, and now public, archive of industry records.

ToxicDocs (www.ToxicDocs.org): from history buried in stacks of paper to open, searchable archives online.

As a result of a legal mechanism called discovery, the authors accumulated millions of internal corporate and trade association documents related to the introduction of new products and chemicals into workplaces and commerce. What did these private entities discuss among themselves and with their experts? The plethora of documents, both a blessing and a curse, opened new sources and interesting questions about corporate and regulatory histories. But they also posed an almost insurmountable challenge to historians. Thus emerged ToxicDocs, possible only with a technological innovation known as "Big Data." That refers to the sheer volume of new digital data and to the computational power to analyze them. Users will be able to identify what firms knew (or did not know) about the dangers of toxic substances in their products-and when. The database opens many areas to inquiry including environmental studies, business history, government regulation, and public policy. ToxicDocs will remain a resource free and open to all, anywhere in the world.

"Ain't Necessarily So!": The Brake Industry's Impact on Asbestos Regulation in the 1970s.

Canada is proposing a ban on asbestos, and the US Environmental Protection Agency has listed it among the first 10 materials it is investigating under the new Toxic Substances Control Act revisions. However, this effort is currently running up against enormous industry and political opposition. Here, we detail the activities in the early 1970s of the Friction Materials Standards Institute, an industry trade association, to stifle earlier attempts to regulate asbestos use in brake linings, one of the oldest and most obvious sources of asbestos exposure to mechanics, among others. (Am J Public Health. 2017: 1395-1399. doi: 10.2105/AJPH.2017.303901).