Vorwald, Durkan and Pratt, "Experimental Studies of Asbestosis" (1951)

The published account of the Saranac Laboratory's asbestos dust experiments, by Arthur J. Vorwald, Thomas M. Durkan and Philip C. Pratt, in the January 1951 issue of the American Medical Association's Archives of Industrial Hygiene and Occupational Medicine. A footnote explains that the studies were begun more than twenty years earlier by the late Dr. Leroy Gardner and were nearly finished when he died in October 1946, and that the paper "presents for the first time a complete survey of the entire experimental investigation." Among its conclusions, aluminum hydroxide "failed to neutralize the fibrosing action" of long-fiber asbestos, and asbestos dust had "no more than a mildly unfavorable effect" on tuberculosis in guinea pigs. It closes by thanking "the group of companies of the asbestos industry whose generous financial support made this investigation possible."

What it shows

This is the end of the Gardner experiments that J-M and other asbestos companies had paid for since the 1930s. The draft report went to the sponsors in 1948 and 1949 (Saranac report to Johns-Manville, 1949), and Vandiver Brown had asked that its discussion of cancer be left out (Brown to W. T. Kelly, 1948; Durkan sends the report without its cancer section). The published paper does not discuss cancer.

In Johns-Manville's chronology

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

Final report re Gardner study published in AMA Archives of Industrial Hygiene and Occupational Medicine, "Experimental Studies of Asbestosis" on January 1951.