by Dan Fagin
14. The forty-five-year-old man’s case is one of many described in two journal articles written much later about the bladder cancer epidemic at the Cincinnati Chemical Works: Richard G. Wendel, Ulrich R. Hoegg, and Mitchell R. Zavon, “Benzidine: A Bladder Carcinogen,” Journal of Urology 111 (May 1974): 607–10; and Mitchell R. Zavon, Ulrich Hoegg, and Eula Bingham, “Benzidine Exposure as a Cause of Bladder Tumors,” Archives of Environmental Health 27 (July 1973): 1–7.
15. The century-long history of the link between dye manufacture and bladder cancer and the dye industry’s reluctance to acknowledge it in Cincinnati and elsewhere are vividly described in David Michaels, “Waiting for the Body Count” and “When Science Isn’t Enough.” It is also briefly described in Michaels, Doubt Is Their Product (Oxford University Press, 2008), 25–28.
16. By 1952, British researchers had identified 341 dye workers in that country who had developed bladder cancer since 1921—a cancer rate about thirty times higher than what would be expected among men in the general population. See Robert A. M. Case et al., “Tumors of the Urinary Bladder in Workmen Engaged in the Manufacture and Use of Certain Dyestuff Intermediates in the British Chemical Industry,” British Journal of Industrial Medicine 11:75 (1954): 75–104.
17. In one oft-cited story, a scientist from a British dye company visiting DuPont’s Deepwater factory asked his DuPont counterpart why he was so sure benzidine was not the source of the bladder cancers at the plant. The DuPont scientist reportedly replied: “We here know very well that benzidine is causing bladder cancer, but it is company policy to incriminate only the one substance, beta-naphthylamine.” The 1948 conversation between the British and DuPont scientists was initially recounted in a column published in the opinion section of The Washington Post on July 15, 1979. The author was Barry Castleman, an environmental consultant and frequent critic of chemical industry practices, and the headline was “Another View: DuPont’s Business Ethics.” Castleman did not name the DuPont scientist, but he identified the British scientist as Michael Williams of Imperial Chemical Industries and claimed that Williams, who died in 1961, frequently retold the story to friends. According to Castleman, the conversation took place in a car and was witnessed by another scientist, an academic, who was thought to be dozing in the backseat but was actually awake.
Two weeks after Castleman’s column appeared, the eminent British epidemiologist Robert A. M. Case wrote a lengthy letter to the editor of the Post identifying himself as the person in the backseat and confirming Castleman’s account of the 1948 conversation. In his letter, Case explained that he was writing because, after Castleman’s column was published, a DuPont representative contacted Case and asked him to confirm or deny the story. “I informed the man from Duponts [sic] that the tale as recounted was absolutely true,” Case wrote. Castelman’s column and Case’s letter to the editor later caught the attention of congressional investigators. Both were republished on pages 100–103 of the official transcript of hearings on “Corporate Criminal Liability” conducted in 1979 and 1980 by the Subcommittee on Crime of the Judiciary Committee of the U.S. House of Representatives. (The Congressional Information Service Index Number for the transcript is 81-H521-54.)
18. T. S. Scott, “The Incidence of Bladder Tumors in a Dyestuffs Factory,” British Journal of Industrial Medicine 9 (1952): 127–32.
19. Sophie Spitz, W. H. Maguigan, and Konrad Dobriner, “The Carcinogenic Action of Benzidine,” Cancer 3:5 (September 1950): 789–804, 804.
20. Zavon, Hoegg, and Bingham, “Benzidine Exposure,” 2.
21. Thomas F. Mancuso and Elizabeth Jackson Coulter, “Methods of Studying the Relation of Employment and Long-Term Illness—Cohort Analysis,” American Journal of Public Health 49:11 (November 1959): 1525–36. In 1967, Mancuso’s follow-up study of workers at the Cincinnati plant produced similar results. The incidence of fatal bladder cancer had jumped again and was now eighteen times higher than the statewide rate for men of the same age. See Thomas F. Mancuso and Anas A. El-Attar, “Cohort Study of Workers Exposed to Betanaphthylamine and Benzidine,” Journal of Occupational Medicine 9:6 (June 1967): 277–85.
22. In an interview many years later, Mitchell Zavon explained that he and Arthur Wendel did not try to publish their 1958 findings because there was already convincing evidence from Europe about benzidine’s carcinogenicity and also because their study was small and lacked a control group. Thomas Mancuso’s study, which used a control group, was published in 1959 but did not identify the Cincinnati Chemical Works by name. “My job was to correct the situation at that plant and make the best health possible for the workers there, and I did that,” Zavon told the author. “Anybody [else] who wanted to know could have read the earlier European studies and known about benzidine and bladder cancer.”
23. The two articles were Wendel, Hoegg, and Zavon, “Benzidine,” and Zavon, Hoegg, and Bingham, “Benzidine Exposure.”
24. In one of the most sweeping actions in its history, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration in 1973 issued tough rules on the use of fourteen carcinogenic chemicals, including benzidine and BNA. The rules were so strict—forbidding benzidine manufacturers from selling the chemical to other companies and requiring that it be handled in enclosed containers (no more open piles)—that they effectively halted benzidine use in the United States.
25. Kevin H. Ferber, William J. Hill, and Donald A. Cobb, “An Assessment of the Effect of Improved Working Conditions on Bladder Tumor Incidence in a Benzidine Manufacturing Facility,” American Industrial Hygiene Association Journal 37 (1976): 61–68.
26. In one of her last official acts as the director of the Occupational Safety and Health Administration in 1980, Eula Bingham, who knew benzidine well from her involvement in the Cincinnati study more than twenty years earlier, issued a special “health hazard alert” stating that ortho-tolidine and ortho-dianisidine, as well as benzidine, cause cancer in lab animals and that “exposure of workers to the dyes should be reduced to the lowest feasible levels. This should include discontinuing use of the dyes where possible.” See “Health Hazard Alert—Benzidine-, o-Tolidine-, and o-Dianisidine-Based Dyes,” NIOSH Publication 81-106 (December 1980), 1.
27. William Ehart, “Ciba-Geigy to Participate in Health Hazard Studies,” Ocean County Observer, August 18, 1985.
28. Bruce W. Hills, “Industrywide Studies Report of Industrial Hygiene Surveys at the Ciba-Geigy Corporation, Toms River, New Jersey,” Report 93.26 (National Institute for Occupational Safety, 1987).
Chapter Twelve
1. Don Bennett, “Ocean Groups Blame Ciba for Shelter Cove Pollution,” Ocean County Observer, June 25, 1986.
2. The dialogue between Maria Pavlova and Frank Livelli is from Chemical Town USA, the WNET-Thirteen television documentary that aired November 19, 1986.
3. Don Bennett, “Ciba Doing What It Thought Was Impossible a Year Ago,” Ocean County Observer, June 10, 1986.
4. Status Update: Ciba-Geigy’s Toms River Plant, eight-page brochure from Ciba-Geigy, June 2, 1986.
5. John Simas, Victor Baker’s successor as plant manager, later explained the decision to end chemical production this way: “We saw the writing on the wall and decided that Toms River was not a suitable site for heavy chemicals manufacture.” William Lichtenstein, “The Toms River Experience,” Chemical Engineering (April 1991): 46.
6. According to the state cancer registry, 31,920 New Jersey residents were diagnosed with cancer in 1979, the first year of mandatory reporting. By 2000, the total had risen to 45,641 cases, a 43 percent increase, even though the state’s population had risen just 15 percent during that time. Improved diagnoses explain at least some of the increase in cancer incidence, though how much is unknown. The cancer totals did not include non-invasive, in situ cancers, in which tumors had not spread and were confined to one site in the body because those types of tumors were not reported to the registry.
7. Title 26, Section 2-104, New Jersey Statutes.
8. Do
nald M. Parkin, “The Evolution of the Population-Based Cancer Registry,” Nature Reviews Cancer 6 (August 2006): 603–12, 605.
9. Lisa Roche et al., “Trends in Cancer Incidence and Mortality in New Jersey 1979–2002,” New Jersey Department of Health and Senior Services (October 2005), 46–47, tables 5 and 6.
10. Marlene Monfiletto, “Toxic Waste, Cancer Incidence Raising Unanswered Questions,” Asbury Park Press, November 16, 1986.
11. On the night before the Channel Thirteen broadcast, a local woman named April Stopa brought her copy of TV Guide to the meeting of the Dover Township Committee and complained that the town was about to get a black eye. “New Jersey may be thought of as one big chemical plant, but that’s not what Toms River is like,” she said. Mayor W. Thomas Renkin admitted that he, too, was worried and sought to downplay Ciba-Geigy’s importance to the fast-growing town. See Donna E. Flynn, “Dover Officials Wary of TV Show’s Publicity,” Asbury Park Press, November 19, 1986; and Anthony A. Gallotto, “Ciba TV Show Worries Panel,” Ocean County Observer, November 19, 1986.
Chapter Thirteen
1. Lawrence Schmidt, “Impacts and Implications of the Summer of 1987, New Jersey Floatable Incidents,” published in conference proceedings of Oceans ’88: A Partnership of Marine Interests, October 31–November 2, 1988, 790–93.
2. Sara Rimer, “After Summer of Sun, A Silent Protest,” New York Times, September 8, 1987.
3. Janet Picknally, “1,000 Protest Ciba Pipeline,” Ocean County Observer, September 6, 1987. A few months later, Frank Livelli took his bullhorn to New York City and picketed the Swiss consulate.
4. For more about Lawrence Bathgate, see Ronald Brownstein, “Raising Bucks for Bush,” New York Times Magazine, May 17, 1987; Peter Overby, “N.J. Mogul Revs Up the Money Machine, Bathgate Is Buddy to Bush, Kean,” Bergen Record, August 18, 1988; and Chris Conway, “Bank Lowers the Boom on GOP’s Top Financier,” Philadelphia Inquirer, June 17, 1991.
5. Richard McDonald, “Lead Readings May Force Dover to Shut Family’s Well,” Ocean County Observer, January 25, 1988.
6. Among the eighty-nine Cincinnati veterans who had moved to the Toms River plant in 1960, there were seventeen cancer deaths—twice as many as expected.
7. A. J. McMichael, an epidemiologist at the University of North Carolina School of Public Health, first coined the term “healthy worker effect” in 1975 in a study of mortality rates at a rubber factory. For more about the healthy worker effect, see A. J. McMichael, “Standardized Mortality Ratios and the ‘Healthy Worker Effect’: Scratching Beneath the Surface,” Journal of Occupational Medicine 18:3 (March 1976): 165–68; C. Y. Lee and E. C. Sung, “A Review of the Healthy Worker Effect in Occupational Epidemiology,” Occupational Medicine 49:4 (1999): 225–29; and Timothy Wilcosky and Steve Wing, “The Healthy Worker Effect,” Scandinavian Journal of Work, Environment, and Health 13 (1987): 70–72.
8. Elizabeth Delzell, Maurizio Macaluso, and Philip Cole, “A Follow-Up Study of Workers at a Dye and Resin Manufacturing Plant,” Journal of Occupational Medicine 31:3 (March 1989): 276–77.
9. Richard McDonald, “Union Won’t Sit Still for Outbursts,” Ocean County Observer, March 20, 1988.
10. In addition to being hazardous, trichloroethylene is also devilishly difficult to clean up. The usual ways of cleaning up underground spills, by digging up contaminated soil or pumping up tainted groundwater, work poorly for compounds like TCE, perchloroethylene, and vinyl chloride. These dense solvents dissolve very slowly in groundwater but sink to the bottom of the water table, like the oil at the bottom of an unshaken bottle of salad dressing. As a result, the solvents, which can travel for miles in groundwater without degrading much, are treacherously difficult to pump up through recovery wells. Hydrologists call them dense non-aqueous phase liquids, or DNAPLs. Wherever DNAPLs turn up, including in Toms River, multiyear, multimillion-dollar cleanups follow.
11. See three stories by Anthony A. Gallotto in the Ocean County Observer: “Taint Seen in Well of TR Water,” November 11, 1987; “Water Co. Followed Procedures,” November 15, 1987; and “DEP Has Done Little to Find Source of TR Water Taint,” November 17, 1987.
12. Lauren Ascione, “Ciba Indicted Again by Grand Jury,” Ocean County Observer, February 17, 1988.
13. Gillick, For the Love of Mike, 109–12.
14. U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, EPA Superfund Record of Decision: Ciba-Geigy Corp., Operating Unit 1, April 24, 1989, 31.
15. Don Bennett, “DEP Rejects Ciba’s Plant Plans,” Ocean County Observer, October 25, 1988.
16. Patricia A. Miller, “Ciba-Geigy Has No Plans to Expand Its Dover Plant,” Asbury Park Press, April 25, 1991.
Chapter Fourteen
1. This chapter’s brief sketch of the life and work of Theodor Boveri is drawn from the following articles: Fritz Baltzer, “Theodor Boveri,” Science 144 (May 15, 1964): 809–15; Ulrich Wolf, “Theodor Boveri and His Book On the Problem of the Origin of Malignant Tumors,” in Chromosomes and Cancer, ed. James German (John Wiley and Sons, 1974), 1–20; and Thomas Ried, “Homage to Theodor Boveri (1862–1915): Boveri’s Theory of Cancer as a Disease of the Chromosomes, and the Landscape of Genomic Imbalances in Human Carcinomas,” Environmental and Molecular Mutagenesis 50 (2009), 593–601.
2. “Taking everything into consideration, I believe that the essential point can finally be approached,” Boveri wrote in a 1901 letter to a scientific colleague. “I feel beyond any doubt that the individual chromosomes must be endowed with different qualities, and that only certain combinations permit normal development.” See Wolf, “Theodor Boveri and His Book,” 7.
3. Theodor Boveri’s book on cancer, published in 1914, was called Zur Frage der Entstehung Maligner Tumoren (On the Problem of the Origin of Malignant Tumors).
4. As cancer geneticist Allan Balmain pointed out almost ninety years later, if a modern reader substitutes “gene” for “chromosome” (Boveri had no way of seeing the genetic machinery tucked inside chromosomes), Boveri in 1914 managed to foretell the identification of oncogenes, tumor-suppressor genes, and even telomeres, the protective “caps” at the ends of chromosomes that shorten each time a cell divides in an aging organism, increasing the risk of cancer. See Allan Balmain, “Cancer Genetics: From Boveri and Mendel to Microarrays,” Nature Reviews Cancer 1 (October 2001): 77–82.
5. “The connection between cancer and certain chemical irritants is ever clearer than it is between cancer and the physical agents I have mentioned. I need only refer to the cancers of paraffin works,” Theodor Boveri wrote. Boveri, Zur Frage der Entstehung Maligner Tumoren, trans. Henry Harris, reprinted in Journal of Cell Science 121, Supp. 1 (2008): 1–84.
6. This chapter’s brief description of Hermann J. Muller and his work is drawn from the following articles: Guido Pontecorvo, “Hermann Joseph Muller, 1890–1967,” Biographical Memoirs of the Fellows of the Royal Society 14 (November 1968): 349–89; Daniel J. Kevles, “Hermann J. Muller,” Science 214 (December 11, 1981): 1232–33; and Tove Mohr, “Hermann J. Muller, 1890–1967: An Appreciation by a Friend,” Journal of Heredity (1972): 132–34.
7. Hermann Muller once attempted suicide, via an overdose of sleeping pills, after hearing that a rival was awarded a Nobel Prize. The next day a search party found him, dazed, in the woods near the University of Texas.
8. Thomas Edison, who developed one of the first X-ray imaging machines, or fluoroscopes, was also one of the first to notice that long-term, direct exposure to X-rays often led to cancer. One of his assistants, a glassblower named Clarence Madison Dally who had helped Edison invent the incandescent lightbulb, developed tumors and severe radiation burns on his hands from demonstrating the fluoroscope. His left hand and four right fingers were amputated, prompting Edison to declare that he would no longer work with X-rays. “Don’t talk to me about X-rays, I am afraid of them,” he told the New York World in an article published August 31, 1903. Dally died the following year from metastatic cancer.
9. Herman
n J. Muller, “Artificial Transmutation of the Gene,” Science 66: 1699 (July 22, 1927): 84–87.
10. Hermann J. Muller, “Time Bombing Our Descendants,” American Weekly, January 3, 1948.
11. Hermann J. Muller, “Radiation Damage to the Genetic Material,” American Scientist 38:1 (January 1950): 35–59.
12. Peter Armitage and Richard Doll, “The Age Distribution of Cancer and a Multi-Stage Theory of Carcinogenesis,” British Journal of Cancer 8:1 (March 1954): 1–12.
13. Alfred G. Knudson, “Mutation and Cancer: Statistical Study of Retinoblastoma,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 68:4 (April 1971): 820–23.
14. Alfred Knudson provides an insightful historical overview of research into mutation and cancer in “Two Genetic Hits (More or Less) to Cancer,” Nature Reviews Cancer 1 (November 2001): 157–62. See also Ezzie Hutchinson, “Alfred Knudson and His Two-Hit Hypothesis,” an interview of Knudson, Lancet Oncology 2 (October 2001): 642–45.