Leroy U. Gardner, Report of the Director of the Saranac Laboratory for 1940 (1940)

The 1940 report of Dr. Leroy Gardner, director of the Saranac Laboratory for the Study of Tuberculosis, on the year's work, seven printed pages (7 to 13) from the laboratory's annual report. Writing as the country turned to war production, Gardner surveys the laboratory's research on silica, dust and lung disease and its diagnostic work. On asbestos he reports that a study of its solubility "is beginning to shed light" on why different animals respond differently, and that "in another year a long series of experiments will have been concluded which demonstrate the pathogenesis of asbestosis."

What it shows

The asbestos experiments Gardner expected to finish "in another year" were the ones paid for by Johns-Manville, Raybestos-Manhattan and other asbestos textile companies under their 1936 agreement with him (the agreement). In May 1940 Vandiver Brown complained that Gardner was already publishing conclusions from that work without the sponsors' approval (Brown's letter). Gardner died in 1946 with the report still unwritten.

The report also describes an inhalation experiment showing "the apparent lack of pulmonary damage from exposure to glass wool dust," whose fibres, "unlike that of asbestos," tend to form felt-like masses. Gardner writes that it would be cheaper to find out why some quartz dusts seem harmless "and exempt the management from maintaining the expensive refinements of dust control," and warns of "an alarming tendency" to read disease into X-ray shadows. The laboratory performed 74 autopsies that year, under Dr. Arthur J. Vorwald.

About this copy

The copy has only pages 7 to 13 of the printed report: the director's report ends on page 13. For the laboratory's 1938 report, see the 1938 report.