Dr. Irving J. Selikoff, Deposition on Written Interrogatories in Tomplait v. Combustion Engineering (1968)

The 42-page transcript of Dr. Irving J. Selikoff's deposition on written interrogatories, taken for the plaintiff on March 4, 1968, at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York, in Claude J. Tomplait v. Combustion Engineering, Inc., et al., Civil No. 5402 in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Texas, Beaumont Division; Selikoff signed it on January 23, 1969, and it was filed on March 25, 1969. Having reviewed Tomplait's chest X-rays from Orange Memorial Hospital, taken from 1963 to 1968, Selikoff testified that they were "entirely characteristic of extensive pulmonary asbestosis" and showed "considerable progression of the lung scarring over the five-year period." Asked what the industry could have known, he said that "a clear and important association between the exposure to asbestos dust and the development of asbestosis was defined in the United States as well as in other parts of the world during the early 1930's."

What it shows

Selikoff listed the literature from Cooke (1927) and Merewether and Price (1930) through the Public Health Service study of 1938 and said it "has been available to the entire scientific community" for all of the roughly 25 years Tomplait had been an asbestos worker, though "I do not know what was available to the asbestos manufacturing industry." The only industry author he could name was Dr. Kenneth W. Smith, Johns-Manville's medical director, for a 1955 paper on "Pulmonary Disability in Asbestos Workers." Cross-interrogatories came from Gustin-Bacon, Combustion Engineering with R and I Refractory and Insulation, and a group of defendants including Owens-Corning Fiberglas, Johns-Manville and Fibreboard. To them Selikoff said that currently available respirators "cannot be worn continuously or for long periods of time," and that "the best method to guard against the inhalation of asbestos fibers would be to use materials that contain no asbestos fibers." The rest of the case is in The Tomplait v. Combustion Engineering Case File (1962-1969) See also Asbestosis.