Vandiver Brown to J. P. Woodard on Approval Before Publication of Saranac Results (1950)

A one-paragraph memo of November 15, 1950, from Vandiver Brown, Johns-Manville's attorney, to J. P. Woodard, headed "Saranac Experiments - Publication of Results," answering Woodard's memo of November 10. Brown accepts that the publication clause Woodard had quoted goes "about as far as we can reasonably expect a learned or scientific institution to go." He adds that J-M had "never intended to suppress information," and that when it had insisted on advance "approval" of publication, "we have had in mind that we might possibly wish to defer release until we could make such defensive moves as might be appropriate and available to us."

What it shows

This is J-M's lawyer's own account of why the company had required approval before research it paid for could be published: to give itself time to prepare its defenses before results came out. It closes an exchange that began with Brown's complaint that a new Saranac Laboratory proposal gave J-M only a right of review (Brown to Woodard, November 7, 1950) and Woodard's search for a model clause (Woodard to Brown, November 10, 1950), as the Quebec asbestos producers prepared to fund Saranac's study of asbestos and lung cancer (minutes of the November 7 Saranac meeting). Brown had earlier asked that cancer be left out of the Saranac asbestos report (Brown to W. T. Kelly, 1948).

In Johns-Manville's chronology

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

On 11/15/50, Brown responds to Woodard's memorandum of 11/10/50 regarding publication of Saranac test results. Brown states that he assumes that the paragraph quoted by Woodard is "about as far as we can reasonably expect a learned or scientific institution to go. We, of course, have never intended to suppress information obtained as a result of experiments financed by us, and on the occasions when we insisted that there be no publication without our advance 'approval,' we have had in mind that we might possibly wish to defer release until we could make such defensive moves as might be appropriate and available to us."

Related documents

• Vandiver Brown to J. P. Woodard on Dr. Vorwald's Aluminum Hydroxide Proposal and Publication Rights (1950)
• J. P. Woodard to Vandiver Brown on Publication of Saranac Test Results (1950)