Draft Manville Letter to Health and Human Services Secretary Richard Schweiker Attacking Dr. Selikoff's Work and Credentials (1982)

A three-page unsigned draft letter dated October 4, 1982, to Richard Schweiker, U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services, attributed to G. Earl Parker, Manville's senior vice president for law and public affairs. It credits Dr. Irving Selikoff's 1964 study of insulation workers with alerting "the asbestos industry and the world" to a serious health problem, then says his work lacked academic discipline: "X-rays were overread; disease was diagnosed where none existed." It reports that Selikoff "appears also to be lacking a basic medical diploma," enclosing his 1941 New Jersey license application and a letter from a Scottish college saying it had no record of his degree.

What it shows

The draft names a study by Epidemiological Resources, Inc., which relied on Selikoff's work, as "an important factor in my company's decision to file under Chapter 11," and says that "a whole body of scientific inquiry is now in the shadow of a very dark cloud." It asks the Secretary to commission a panel to review all of the asbestos work of the Mount Sinai Environmental Sciences Laboratory under Selikoff and to take the lead in finding a way to compensate "those who have been affected by this tragic legacy of our industrial past." Six weeks after its bankruptcy filing, Manville was preparing to ask the federal government to question the research on which much of the asbestos science and the projections of future disease rested. For that research, see Selikoff Studies and Selikoff, Churg and Hammond's 1964 paper.

In Johns-Manville's chronology

Johns-Manville's own chronology of what the company knew describes this document as follows:

Draft letter by G. Parker (J-M) to the Honorable Richard Sweicker (Secretary, Department of Health and Human Services) dated 10/4/82, attacks the accuracy of Dr. Selikoff's studies and questions the credentials of Dr. Selikoff. On page 2, G. Parker reports that Dr. Selikoff "appears also to be lacking a basic medical diploma and credentials for the practice of medicine." He requests that Sweicker commission a panel of experts to review Dr. Selikoff's work and exhorts Sweicker to "take the lead in marshalling the immense resources of the industrial, medical, labor and government complex to resolve the issue of providing compensation to those who have been affected by this tragic legacy of our industrial past."