Asbestos and Pulmonary Cancer (1950)

This item is not a research study. It is a set of confidential letters and memos from June to October 1950, plus a draft research contract. They passed among company staff, the Q.A.M.A., the Saranac Laboratory and New York University's Institute of Industrial Medicine, and concerned planning research on whether asbestos produces lung cancer. One letter is addressed to J. P. Woodard at the Johns-Manville Corporation. No data or findings are reported. The writers proposed two lines of research. One was a statistical survey of workers and the general population in two towns. The other was animal experiments using fibers named as Vimy, J-M or King, South African Blue, and Munroe. The draft contract had results sent to the funder at least 30 days before publication for comment. One memo called putting out truthful counter-propaganda a good idea. Another said the writer's company would pay 50% or more of the cost. A program was recorded as approved at a Q.A.M.A. directors' meeting on October 23, 1950.

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.

From J-M's medical library

This copy comes from the Johns-Manville medical library. It was among the papers J-M kept in its medical library without an index entry. Barry Castleman cites it in chapter 2, "Cancer", of Asbestos: Medical and Legal Aspects (5th ed., 2005); see Reading Castleman.