Vandiver Brown to Manfred Bowditch Asking Saranac to Finish Gardner's Report (1946)

A one-page letter of November 12, 1946, from Vandiver Brown, Johns-Manville's secretary, to Manfred Bowditch, field director of Saranac Laboratory, with copies to Ernest Muehleck of Keasbey & Mattison and Sumner Simpson of Raybestos-Manhattan. Writing for "the group who advanced certain sums of money" for Dr. Gardner's asbestos dust experiments, Brown asked whether others on the staff could "assemble the accumulated data and prepare a final report." He pointed Bowditch to his letter of November 20, 1936 and Gardner's reply, which said the results were "the property of the contributors" and that manuscripts were "to be submitted for approval before publication."

What it shows

Dr. Leroy Gardner died on October 24, 1946. Three weeks later Vandiver Brown wrote on the sponsors' behalf to secure the report and to remind Saranac Laboratory of the terms of his 1936 letter and Gardner's acceptance: the results belonged to the companies and nothing was to be published without their approval. He noted that the work, planned for three years at $5,000 a year, had run two years longer, and that Gardner's "Outline of Proposed Monograph on Asbestosis" of February 24, 1943 showed his thesis was "fairly well matured" (the 1943 outline, which reported lung cancer in asbestos-dusted mice).

In Johns-Manville's index

Johns-Manville's attorneys indexed the Sumner Simpson Papers. Their index describes this document as follows:

Asks whether other members of the Saranac staff (other than Gardner) could assemble the experimental data and complete the final report. Informs that the results of these experiments are the property of the underwriting group, as outlined in V. Brown's letter dated 11/20/36.

Related documents

• Vandiver Brown to Leroy Gardner Authorizing the Saranac Asbestos Experiments (1936)
• Leroy Gardner to Vandiver Brown Accepting the Terms of the Saranac Asbestos Experiments (1936)
• Manfred Bowditch to Vandiver Brown Promising Word on Gardner's Report (1946)
• Sumner Simpson's Secretary to Vandiver Brown Acknowledging Gardner's Outline of a Monograph on Asbestosis (1943)

About this copy

This is document 05646 of the Sumner Simpson Papers, as numbered in the collection's index.