Was the literature "corrupted"?

Our plain-English summary of Was the literature "corrupted"?, by P.C. Pratt (American Journal of Industrial Medicine, 1992).

The study

• Author: P.C. Pratt
• Journal: American Journal of Industrial Medicine
• Published: 1992;22(4):609-13
• Type of article: Comment, Historical article, Letter
• Read it: PubMed · Publisher

In plain English

This is a letter to the editor, not a research study. The author, a coauthor of a 1951 Saranac Laboratory paper on experimental asbestosis, responded to a 1991 letter by Hardy and Egilman, which said that animal evidence of asbestos as a lung carcinogen had been left out of the published literature. The author stated that the lung lesions in 20 mice exposed to asbestos dust between 1938 and 1940 were benign adenomas, not cancers, based on the author's own reexamination of the slides. The author added that the experiment had no unexposed control mice. The author said these flaws made the mouse findings unpublishable, which is why they were left out of the 1951 paper. The author also reported that Dr. Gardner's notes recorded no excess of lung tumors in exposed cats. A later controlled experiment with mice of known strains was also described. At a 14-month interim report in 1952, exposed mice showed a trend toward more adenomas than controls, but the difference was not statistically significant at the 0.05 level. The author did not know what happened to that study afterward and said it was never published. The author concluded that no one at the Saranac Laboratory misrepresented these findings.

We wrote this plain-English summary from the full article with the help of AI, and a second AI model checked each sentence against the article. It is not the authors' wording; the abstract and the article are their own account.

What the study did and found

• Design: Letter to the editor (commentary responding to a 1991 letter by Hardy and Egilman); no new data
• Who was studied: No human population. The letter discusses Saranac Laboratory animal experiments: 20 mice exposed to asbestos dust from 1938 to 1940 with no controls, several cats, and a later controlled experiment in mice of known strains (interim report May 1952, after 14 months of exposure)
• Exposure: Inhaled asbestos dust in laboratory animals; the letter does not name the fiber type
• Main results:
  • The author reexamined the microscopic slides from the original 20 exposed mice and judged the lung lesions to be adenomas, not cancers
  • The original mouse experiment had no control animals: 20 mice were exposed and no comparable mice were kept in normal air
  • The author and Dr. Vorwald agreed that these flaws made the mouse findings unpublishable, so they were omitted from the 1951 paper
  • According to Dr. Gardner's notes, cats exposed to asbestos dust showed no excess of lung tumors
  • In the later controlled mouse study, the 14-month interim report showed a trend toward more frequent adenomas in exposed animals than in controls, but the difference was not statistically significant at the 0.05 level
  • The second study was never published and may not have been completed
• The authors' conclusion: The author concluded that no one at the Saranac Laboratory misrepresented the experimental findings or corrupted the literature, and that blaming the asbestos tragedy on these events is not justified
• Limitations the authors state:
  • The author stated having no knowledge of what happened to the second mouse study after the interim report, and only suspected that the records went to Dr. Vorwald

Topics

The National Library of Medicine indexes this study under subjects our site covers: Lung cancer.

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