Dr Anthony Lanza had quite an impressive career. Amongst many things, he discovered the cause of the lung disease, silicosis, and founded the discipline of industrial hygiene, making workplace environments more safe for employees. He was also a beloved teacher and researcher at New York University in the final years of his career. What a guy. But when he died in 1964, Dr Lanza's far less laudatory secret career came to light and he had a lot of haters.
Over the last 2 episodes of our asbestos series, we’ve heard about the miracle of asbestos and the horrors of asbestos. But when did we learn how bad the stuff was?
In Ancient Roman times, Pliny the Elder recommended not to buy asbestos mine slaves because they died pretty young. (Good advice I guess ??). So maybe they knew a thing or two back then. But let’s fast forward to more modern times because that’s when the health risks associated with asbestos started emerging in the academic and medical literature.
The first asbestosis death that was officially linked to asbestos exposure was in 1924. A few other asbestos-related deaths were happening around that time too so in 1929, asbestos companies commissioned our friend Dr. Lanza to run an industrial hygiene survey of several of their asbestos plants and factories.
After conducting a bunch of physical examinations and X-rays, Dr Lanza found that asbestosis was rife in the workers. But instead of gently breaking the news to them that they would die a slow, horrible death, he decided it was better to not tell them anything and instead tell the executives. Hmmm. Maybe not so nice.
Later, Dr Kenneth Smith was working at one of the big asbestos companies, Johns-Manville, and a bunch of workers with early signs of asbestosis came to see him. What did he do? Well, he told the company executives to hide the results from the workers, for their own good of course. And because he really cared about the worker’s well-being, he suggested the executives purchase a shredding machine to destroy any ‘confidential’ correspondence. Dr Smith then became the medical director at Johns Manville. He was a keeper.
So, by 1943, big asbestos companies knew that asbestosis was definitely a thing. But how bad was it? They decided to commission Dr Lanza again, but this time to do an animal trial.
The study showed that 81.8% of the mice they experimented on developed lung tumours upon asbestos exposure.
However, that study was considered inconclusive (81.8%!) and much too problematic to take to the public. Better destroy the study altogether and say everything’s fine. Just smile and wave.
A bit further down the track, the asbestos industry was forced to put warning labels on bags and crates of asbestos. And they did. In the smallest font they possibly could. And when sending crates of asbestos overseas, they just removed the warning label altogether.
It wasn’t until 1964, some 40 years after the official recorded death, at Irving Selikoff’s international conference on the Biological Effects of Asbestos that the link between asbestos exposure and cancer was firmly established.
And in 1978,18 years later, a series of documents from the asbestos companies came to light. They were described by a bunch of lawyers as being like the Pentagon papers for the asbestos industry, revealing studies they had done, what they knew about the dangers and what they had done to cover it up.
No doubt the asbestos executives regretted not buying a shredder.
previous episode mentioned:
SOURCES:
Defending the Indefensible, by Jock McCulloch and Geoffrey Tweedale
New Data on Asbestos Indicate Cover-Up of Effects on Workers, by Bill Richards in The Washington Post
Shooting the Messenger: The Vilification of Irving J. Selikoff, by Jock McCulloch and Geoffrey Tweedale in International Journal of Health Services
The Real Asbestos Horror Story, Spider Johnson
The silence: the asbestos industry and early occupational cancer research--a case study, in Am J Public Health
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[00:00:00] Will: In 1929, they commissioned Dr. Anthony Lanza to see if there is this new asbestosis and what's going on. He went and looked at all of the workers, did a physical exam, chest x rays. What did Lanza find? Large segments of the workforce. It was rife. Throughout all of their workforce is developing asbestosis. Key thing is, who did he tell?
[00:00:17] Rod: His mum?
[00:00:18] Will: Nah, I don't think so.
[00:00:19] Rod: His dog? Nobody?
[00:00:21] Will: More than that.
[00:00:22] Rod: Executives of certain large companies?
[00:00:24] Will: That's it. Yeah. He told the bosses, but not the workers. He wrote to them and said, It's of course understood that this report is confidential, and will be given no publicity by us except with the consent of the firms concerned.
[00:00:35] Rod: Oh, the wonder of the passive. It is of course understood. But we all agree,
[00:00:39] Will: they didn't put it in the press or the news media or anything like that, but they also kept it secret from the workers themselves. So literally they've checked these workers to see how much asbestosis there is in the workers and they've gone, well, they don't need to know it.
[00:00:58] Some people die at the right time. You know, no one wants to die, but sometimes, occasionally, sometimes people just happen through natural causes to kick the bucket at a time that is very fortunate for them. You see, when Dr. Anthony Lanza died in 1964, the New York Times could write an obituary about him that lauded his career.
[00:01:20] Rod: Did it start with, died at the right time?
[00:01:22] Will: Weeeh! Oh, we Weeeh! So, no, it lauded his career. He was called, weirdly, the Dust Eater.
[00:01:31] Rod: Oh God there's a niche for everyone.
[00:01:32] Will: He had like four different careers and he had some big achievements. Like his first one was he was the discoverer of the causes of the lung disease, silicosis.
[00:01:42] Rod: So it'd be better to be known as Anthony Lanza, the discoverer. Like what do you call the dust eater? But couldn't I be the discoverer? Cause I'm known as a discoverer of at least something.
[00:01:50] Will: I think he was the person that said dust, not so good. And then, and this is like early in his career, he made a little suction device that goes on to a mining drill to suck out the dust while you're doing it. He was also the founder of the discipline of industrial hygiene, which is like, no, it's not.
[00:02:08] Rod: You dirty fuckers have a shower. No, I won't. I'm an industrialist.
[00:02:11] Will: It's making your factories a little bit more better for your workers.
[00:02:15] Rod: So the forerunner of occupational health and safety, which became workplace health and safety, which is probably something else now.
[00:02:20] Will: Yeah. And I think actually the industry associations are often still called industrial hygienists. In fact, he came out to Australia for a little while and founded the discipline both here and in America. In World War II he was like a weird, well, still industrial hygiene, but detective, a lot of the workers in the munitions factories were dying. No one knew why. And he worked out, Oh, it's inhaling the vapors of TNT.
[00:02:42] Rod: Holy shit. I've breathed in bomb gas. Why did it kill me? TNT vapor.
[00:02:48] Will: Yeah. So in, in whatever factory, there was like 400 people dying a year. He said, don't huff the TNT gas.
[00:02:55] Rod: What you're going to do when you clock on is hold your breath.
[00:03:01] Will: So he reduced deaths from like 400 a year down to zero.
[00:03:04] Rod: That's quite a reduction.
[00:03:05] Will: And after all of this, you know, he had this long career. He was a beloved teacher and researcher at New York university in his final years of his career.
[00:03:13] Rod: Beloved teacher. That's what I'm going to put on my tombstone. I don't care if it's true. Beloved teacher.
[00:03:19] Will: But when Anthony Lanza died in 1964, some other news was just coming to attention. It was the link between asbestos and cancer was getting real public knowledge. Just a few years later, when people heard about this and said, I have that cancer. I don't want that cancer and I'm angry at people and started suing some of these asbestos companies. Anthony Lanza's far less laudatory secret career came to light. Welcome to The Wholesome Show.
[00:03:57] Rod: A podcast that brings to light everything, everything in the whole of science.
[00:04:02] Will: We do. The Wholesome Show is me, Will grant.
[00:04:05] Rod: And not him, Rod Lamberts. Everything. Not some stuff. Everything. Not even 98%. We'll get there eventually. Whole fucking lot.
[00:04:13] Will: We'll bring it all to light.
[00:04:13] Rod: Episode 9012. We've done it.
[00:04:16] Will: Finally brought it all to light. That is our goal and our promise to you.
[00:04:18] Rod: The entire whole exposed.
[00:04:20] Will: So listener to you might be aware, this is part three of my deep dive into asbestos. If this is where you're starting I told you, told people a little while ago about the miracle of asbestos, how weird and wonderful it actually was, and then a little bit more about why it became so hated. Now I'm going to tell a story about when we learned that it was terrible because there's two parts to this story. There's the inside story and the outside story.
[00:04:49] This story is a vast story and it is jam packed with heroes and villains. Yeah. And so if I don't mention your favorite villain or hero in this story, it's not due to lack of trying, it's just there's so many villains here.
[00:05:04] Rod: I have a lot of asbestos, heroes and villains.
[00:05:06] Will: If you do want to dig deeper there's this awesome book by Jock McCulloch and Jeffrey Tweeddale, defending the indefensible. It's covers it all of it.
[00:05:12] Rod: That was the one thing missing was thank you for smoking. What was it? It was guns, tobacco, alcohol, asbestos.
[00:05:18] Will: They really could have done people have known as long as we've been using asbestos, that asbestos is not good.
[00:05:26] Rod: Really? You mean on a grand scale?
[00:05:28] Will: Yes. On a grand scale. So definitely not asbestos fiber will lead to mesothelioma or to asbestosis. But there'd be some dying.
[00:05:36] Rod: Mesothelioma hadn't been invented when asbestos was first used.
[00:05:39] Will: You know, it probably hadn't. And actually, probably if you think about it, people didn't get mesothelioma in the ancient times because it takes a few decades to develop. Pleny the the elder in ancient Roman times, he'd say, you know, don't be buying the asbestos mine slaves. They tend to die pretty young.
[00:05:56] Rod: Serious.
[00:05:56] Will: That's what he said. Don't be buying them. They're not the good slaves. All I'm saying is probably a Roman mining slaves life expectancy enslaved person was not huge. And so it's unlikely they ever got to a stage where they could develop mesothelioma.
[00:06:12] Rod: We don't know if this kills you cause all the other shit did
[00:06:14] Will: Like all the other shit, like being a slave in the Roman empire is going to get you pretty quick.
[00:06:19] Rod: This is the first time I really thought about it, but it might be that slavery is not awesome for the people enslaved. You blow my mind, man.
[00:06:25] Will: Okay, more to the point. Yeah. Let's go to the 19th century, 20th century, because that's when reports start emerging like isolated bits in academic literature and medical literature about health risks associated with asbestos. Cause that's at the time when people started going from, it's a fun novelty to hey, this has got industrial users all over the place.
[00:06:44] We can use it in our magic costume, but also in our walls and our insulation and our pipes and things like that. Some of the early stories is like 1900, a doctor in the UK, Montague Murray. He testified about fibrosis in the lungs caused by asbestos dust. asbestosis, the disease was named in like 1914 and then the first death of it like pointed to not saying it was the first death, but like this is the one where the first one they go, yep, this is asbestosis. She died of it. 1924
[00:07:13] Rod: Oh my god. 100 years ago.
[00:07:16] Will: And if you remember the story I told you last week, the mine that they opened in Western Australia at Wittenoom, they, they first started mining 1937 and didn't close till 1966. So, so let's just say,
[00:07:29] Rod: no, you're being unfair the news to come from Europe to Australia. 28 years.
[00:07:33] Will: Slow boat. Very slow.
[00:07:34] Rod: So they started mining 26 years after it was the death. It's fine. It's fine.
[00:07:39] Will: But the link with cancer, which is the mesothelioma it's different from asbestos, took a bit longer to establish partly because it was rarer and partly because it just took longer to develop.
[00:07:49] And so people didn't see it until the 1960s. So the first real knowledge of these cancers caused by asbestos came about in the 1960s. There was J. C. Wagner in South Africa. He found asbestos fibers like in in a big tumor, like the mesothelioma tumor. He's like, That's gross.
[00:08:08] Rod: Is that a coincidence? You have a tumor and there's fibers in it.
[00:08:12] Will: Yeah. And it was the blue asbestos fibers. Like you can pull them out and you can see they're blue. And it's like, well, that's still there.
[00:08:18] Rod: It doesn't decay much, does it?
[00:08:20] Will: No. And then in 1964, which was that fateful date when Tony Danza died, Irving Selikoff held an international conference bringing together all of the literature they got and at this point they're like, okay. Like, scientifically, asbestos is causing these cancers. So that's just the point at which we knew. So take that date, 1964. Now, after that kicked off a, like a many decades legal fight, legal, political, scientific fight. Weirdly, there were people blaming anti asbestos hysteria on the space shuttle Challenger. You know, when that exploded people like that was caused by anti asbestos hysteria. You know, you stopped us from using asbestos in the space shuttle therefore it exploded.
[00:09:00] Rod: I thought they were trying to claim that it exploded and spread asbestos before that.
[00:09:03] Will: No. They were like, asbestos is so good. Would have kept the space shuttle up. Similarly, asbestos is so good. Would have kept the world trade center up if we weren't forced to.
[00:09:11] Rod: Well, yeah, but we all know that, but the space shuttle thing, that's a ridiculous conjecture.
[00:09:15] Will: In 1978, 18 years after the cancer link was firmly established, a series of documents came to light. Now these were described by a bunch of lawyers as like the Pentagon papers for the asbestos industry. There are a lot of people suing the asbestos industries at this point, because they knew about the cancers and they're like, give us some of your internal documents. And the asbestos industry is like...
[00:09:36] look, I did a dive through these documents and there's way more that I can possibly do now, but Oh my God it's some damning stuff. And so what I want to do is just go back through the things that the asbestos industry knew early on, what they did, what they talked about. And it's like, Oh, you fucking cartoon villains.
[00:09:56] Rod: Write it down. It'll be funnier that way.
[00:09:58] Will: So most of them they're letters between like, the big corporations that ran asbestos in America. So they're like John's Manville or Raybestos. And like they, they had a lot of the juicy stuff, some studies that they had done, what they knew about the dangers and a little bit about how they covered it all up
[00:10:16] Rod: forgot to tell people. I got distracted.
[00:10:19] Will: Well, seeing as there is definitely evidence of not oops in them, you go with no. Okay. So it kicked off like in the 1920s. This is when some of the deaths started happening of asbestos workers. So there was that 1924 death of asbestosis. And the companies are like, Oh maybe we should find out what's going on here.
[00:10:37] Rod: And then not tell anyone. Found it.
[00:10:40] Will: You'd be shocked about the whole, and then not tell anyone. Oh, well, look, I think the thing is it was not concern. Sadly, it was, they didn't want to be sued.
[00:10:50] Rod: So that is concerned just for something else. Okay.
[00:10:53] Will: Concerned for their money, not concerned for their workers. In 1929, they commissioned Dr. Anthony Lanza, our guy at the beginning, the famed dust eater to run an industrial hygiene survey of several of their plants, the factories making the asbestos to see if there is this new asbestosis and what's going on. He went and looked at all of the workers, did a physical exam. Not all of the workers, but a lot of the workers chest x rays. What did Lanza find? Large segments of the workforce. It was rife throughout all of their workforce is developing asbestosis. I don't have the numbers. You'll know why later
[00:11:29] Rod: because we don't want to get killed.
[00:11:32] Will: bUt the key thing is who did he tell?
[00:11:34] Rod: His mum?
[00:11:34] Will: No, I don't think so.
[00:11:36] Rod: His dog?
[00:11:37] Will: No.
[00:11:38] Rod: Nobody?
[00:11:39] Will: More than that.
[00:11:39] Rod: Executives of certain large companies.
[00:11:41] Will: That's it. Yeah. Yeah. He told the bosses, but not the workers. He wrote to them. He said, it's of course understood that this report is confidential and will be given no publicity by us except the, with the consent of the firms concerned.
[00:11:54] Rod: Oh, the wonder of the passive. It is of course understood, but we all agree.
[00:11:58] Will: So they kept it outsiders. They didn't put it in the press or the news media or anything like that, but they also kept it secret from the workers themselves. So literally they've checked these workers to see how much asbestosis there is in the workers and they've gone, well, they don't need to know it.
[00:12:13] Rod: You go into that column and you go into that column. What's the F stand for? Fine. It stands for fucked. Okay cool.
[00:12:21] Will: Later, another doctor who really is the cartoon villain, Dr. Kenneth Smith, he was working at one of the big companies, Johns-Manville, and he said, a lot of the workers have come to me and they've got early signs of asbestosis.
[00:12:33] Seven of them in that town or whatever, he told the bosses, not the workers. And then said, you probably want to keep this quiet, don't you? You wouldn't want to panic your workers.
[00:12:42] Rod: Yeah. Cause panic leads to all that avoiding the problem thing.
[00:12:46] Will: It does. And he said to the company executives, you should hide the results from your workers, even though the workers came to him. You should hide the results from the workers. As long as the man is not disabled, it's felt that he should not be told of his condition so that he can live and work in peace and the company can benefit by his many years of experience.
[00:13:04] Rod: He's not evil. He's doing it for them. He wants them to stay peaceful. No, we're not going to tell him why. For their own good, for their own good. That's don't want to upset.
[00:13:12] Will: So they'll be at peace then they won't be worried by the thing that is killing them.
[00:13:15] Rod: They're slowly being mangled internally until they cough up their own toenails and die.
[00:13:19] Will: That company then gave him a job and made him the medical director as the company, because they knew that he wouldn't tell the workers what had caused their condition and he'd keep it all.
[00:13:30] Rod: So in the duty statement, he said, yes, don't tell anyone affected personally what's going on.
[00:13:35] Will: So it became company policy there at Johns-Manville leaving sick workers completely uninformed as their health degraded. At the same time, at the same time, there was a a third doctor who spoke to Anthony Lanza and said, you're seeing all this asbestosis. Shouldn't they be warned that asbestos is hazardous to their health? And Lanza said, I doubt if the hazard is sufficient to justify warning posters.
[00:14:02] Rod: Calm down, sweetheart. Also. They wouldn't understand. If you told them they wouldn't understand.
[00:14:07] Will: Well, he's like, this is especially true in view of the extraordinary legal situation. And it's like, we couldn't warn them that this would be dangerous.
[00:14:16] Rod: Did the third doctor go? Oh, okay. Fair enough.
[00:14:22] Will: I think that third doctor said I'm not involved anymore.
[00:14:25] Rod: I'm gonna go and work for Big Tobacco because they have morals.
[00:14:28] Will: There was a nice one so, the boss at Johns-Manville was really pretty happy with the whole don't tell the worker thing. He was like, this is great. And supposedly this is in a later deposition, an employee at the company remembers saying to their boss, Mr. Brown, do you mean to tell me you would let them work until they dropped dead? The CEO said, yes, we save a lot of money that way monsters.
[00:14:53] So by the early 1930s, they knew there was a whole chunk of asbestosis in their workers. I keep thinking it's early 1930s. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So remember, keep that date 1964 is when things start turning, but the early 1930s, they know there's a whole bunch of asbestosis and they're keeping literally the chest x rays secret from the workers. They're not putting up signs to, to warn them and they're keeping it.
[00:15:17] Rod: You're coughing too much. What you need is smoke camels, nine out of 10 doctors.
[00:15:23] Will: It is the same era as the nine out of 10 doctors. So the next thing that they did, as well as trying to understand, okay, do the workers have problems caused by asbestos is let's work out what the effect is of asbestos in like, let's do an animal trial.
[00:15:37] Mice. So again, they commissioned Anthony Lanza to run a trial, expose a whole bunch of mice to varying rates of asbestos dust. 1943, this is 20 years before that 1964 public understanding, their studies showed that 81. 8 percent of the mice developed lung tumors.
[00:15:58] Rod: So not all of them. It's iffy, it's iffy.
[00:16:04] Will: Within a short period, like it's like they're all getting cancers.
[00:16:08] Rod: Not all.
[00:16:09] Will: Well, you are giving the voice to the bosses. So the researcher here is saying the question of cancer susceptibility now seems more significant than I had previously imagined. I think 81. 8 percent . The bosses said, yeah, that's inconclusive. 81. 8 isn't enough. It's inconclusive. So it would be problematic to go public with this level
[00:16:32] Rod: because we'd look like idiots. Our concern is not looking like we're doing bad science.
[00:16:37] Will: So this was circulated amongst all of the big companies.
[00:16:39] Rod: Brave in itself, really?
[00:16:41] Will: Well, it weirdly, they had like numbered copies. You know, when you're circulating secret documents, you do the canary trap by changing little typos and stuff like that. If a copy goes public, then you go, you know, which one it was.
[00:16:51] Rod: The only trap on wherever is the honeypot. That's the only one I ever fall for.
[00:16:54] Will: Anyway, they're all like, get rid of all of the cancer stuff and let's have a fully sanitized version, go public.
[00:16:59] Rod: That's why they needed a hygienist.
[00:17:01] Will: All of the cancer stuff. And and then destroyed all the old copies of the research. So they knew that it was prevalent amongst their workers, asbestosis, at least was, they knew that it was causing cancer, this is in mice models, you know, you know, what do you do with it?
[00:17:16] Rod: Excuse me? Inconclusive mice models.
[00:17:19] Will: This is what I love. There's a bunch of things they deliberately did, weird cartoon villain type things. So there was a practice where if a minor in Canada got sick with asbestosis, they'd send them across to the border because they could, there was a compensation regime in Canada, but they'd move them to America.
[00:17:36] Rod: How'd you like to go to Delaware?
[00:17:37] Will: Free trip to a place where you can't sue us.
[00:17:40] Rod: We didn't mention that until you moved. Can I come back to Canada? No,
[00:17:43] Will: eventually the industry, this hadn't come to light yet, but the industry was forced to put warning labels on bags and crates of asbestos. It's amazing how they made all of the warning labels literally in the smallest font they possibly could.
[00:17:58] Well, one eighth inch, which is like three mil or something like that. It's large enough to be completely legible yet does not shout caution from the rooftops.
[00:18:06] Rod: You don't want that from a warning.
[00:18:08] Will: Also, in their warnings if they were being exported from America they, company policy was that warnings would be covered over or sanded off depending on, you know, if it was a crate, they'd be sanded off and literally cover over the wood. And then this is where they combined the beautiful bit of 1950s racism. I do not believe we should raise problems with people who are more primitive than we are.
[00:18:28] Rod: Good call because you know what? It confuses their tiny brains. What if we warned you some of the things you were doing were hazardous in a way that woo, it involves a thing called, you probably never heard of this, the sciences. Far out. I mean, well done though, for calling on all the resources at their disposal to really make this work for them.
[00:18:49] Will: And so the final bit, this is just the final bit. And look, maybe I'll tell you the story about what they did after it became public
[00:18:57] Rod: but there's going to be an appendix episode. There must
[00:18:59] Will: final, my final favorite little note that was in in all of these memos that came to light was one by that Kenneth Wallace Smith. Smith was the cartoon villain doctor who said we shouldn't give the x rays to people and we shouldn't tell them that they're sick. And he suggested, and I think this was coming out in the 1960s. So then the memos come right up to when people are finding out. I suggest the purchase of a shredding machine. To destroy completely all copies of correspondence, which you do not wish to retain. I believe that it is highly essential that all copies of correspondence of such confidential nature should be thoroughly destroyed.
[00:19:36] Rod: Did he preface it with in my medical opinion?
[00:19:38] Will: I love the idea. In your secret memos, we should get a shredding machine comes to light. You know, you're fucked. You know, you're fucked.
[00:19:46] Rod: Doctor, what's your opinion? What's your advice on this? Shred everything.
[00:19:53] Will: They knew they were fucked. They knew they had covered it up for all of this time. And they knew there was a shit fight brewing in the wind.
[00:19:59] Rod: Did they manage?
[00:20:01] Will: I'll tell you more about that later.
