DAVID ROSNER AND GERALD MARKOWITZ

MOYERS: This kind of material is not generally available to the public, is it?

ROSNER: No.

MOYERS: Most of these remain secret?

ROSNER: This was extraordinary for a historian. Most historians depend upon written records that are in the public domain, newspapers, archives, National Archives, archival records, but you very, very rarely get an insight to the workings of an industry and the workings of a trade association, because those are generally private. And so it was almost a bonanza that we were just absolutely astounded that, for the first time, we would get to see the other side of the story, the other side of kind of a public health crisis, and to see it from the perspective of an industry that really had a dramatic interest in just keeping this quiet. You just never see those documents.

MOYERS: How would you describe what you found? Generally.

MARKOWITZ: It was the story of an industry that knew that it was dealing with a problem that was of major concern to the American public and American work force, and they were determined to keep that story as quiet as possible for as long as possible. They seemed to know it was going to come out eventually, but they wanted to know that they would have as long as possible to keep it just among themselves.

ROSNER: Yeah. And the general story is just a phenomenal attempt to kind of cover up or to keep things--I'm not sure I agree with you, Gerry, when you say that they expected it to come out. I think they never expected these documents to be seen by anyone.

MARKOWITZ: Oh, no. Not the documents, certainly.

ROSNER: They certainly never expected historians to be able to look into the inner workings of their trade association and their vinyl chloride committee meetings and the planning for their attempts to cover up and to basically obscure their role in these workers' deaths. So I don't think anybody ever expected those documents to come to light.

MOYERS: You said it was astonishing to travel through these documents. What astonished you the most?

ROSNER: Well, you often think about the way history works as kind of a set of unintended consequences, consequences of well-meaning people that basically are trying their best in a number of ways to deal with a problem as they see it and within a special historical moment, to have special historical context. You kind of avoid as a historian the idea that there are conspiracies or that there are people planning the world in a certain way. You just try to avoid that because it's--it seems too- -too unreal and too frightening in its implications. Yet, when you look at these documents, you say "Yes, there are people who understood what was going on, people who thought about the crisis that was engulfing them or about to engulf them and tried in every which way to get out of that crisis and to actually shape public opinion, shape professional opinion, and also shape government's opinion about an issue that was really dangerous and actually, in some sense, to suppress an issue."

MOYERS: Do you think all of this added up to, to use your word, a conspiracy?

ROSNER: It certainly amounted to that. It amounted to people who are agreeing among themselves to say certain things and to do certain things and to not tell the public about what was a potential danger to them. So I guess in a legal sense--in a moral sense, at least I should say--in a moral sense, I think it was a conspiracy. In a legal sense, I just don't know.

MARKOWITZ: And the industry itself understood that people could view what they were doing as -- in their terms -- an illegal conspiracy, so that they knew that what they were doing was at least morally indefensible, if not legally indefensible.

MOYERS: With my colleagues going through the material, we'd come upon the story of one of these workers. The industry had become aware of the fact that vinyl chloride was causing something to happen to the workers in their plants. The bones in their hands were literally dissolving, and we’d come upon a document where one of those workers at the B.F. Goodrich plant in Louisville, whom we interviewed, has been complaining since the late '50s, but he was never told by the company what he had or that he wasn't the only one. Then here is this "personal and confidential" memo dated February 1965 in which one of the industry representatives says "It is difficult not to conclude on the face of the evidence, poor as it is, that this is an occupational disease." The industry was aware that this was an occupational disease, and they said nothing. What does this memo tell you, this particular memo?

ROSNER: Well, it tells me that the industry never expected the documents to become public. Also, they never expected that they would be held accountable to the public about what was happening to the work force. They never even expected their workers to learn of the problems that they were facing and the causes of it. It's a world before OSHA. It's a world before NIOSH. It's a world before the EPA. It's a world in which industry did not have much accountability, and they felt that they could -- literally run over the rights of people to learn about their own conditions.

It tells me that it was a very, very different and frightening world, in a way, where an industry felt that it was an independent actor and felt that it didn't need to be accountable to a public, to its own workers, to its own work force, or to any government agency or public accountable group.

MOYERS: And when the industry found out that something was going awry, they took their time?

ROSNER: They certainly did.

MARKOWITZ: They took two years before they made public the fact that the work force was having the acroosteolysis; that this was a disease not only of the bones and the fingers, but also they suspected that it was a systemic disease, which raised all sorts of other problems in terms of where else the problems of vinyl chloride would cause for workers in their bodies.

MOYERS: They clearly were admitting to themselves that something was wrong. If you read these documents, one of the participants in a meeting that you say took place two years later said, "Of course, the confidentiality of this data is exceedingly important. There is no question that the skin lesions and circulatory changes in the hands can occur in workers associated with the polymerization of PVC." They knew. Shouldn't they have told the workers at that point?

ROSNER: Certainly, morally, they should have, and certainly historically, other companies had acted more morally and more responsibly, and certainly, they should have. There is no question about it, and that is what is so shocking about the documents is that they felt that they had an enormous industry, a powerful, a growing industry and an incredible product that they thought was going to become -- as was noted to Dustin Hoffman in "The Graduate" --the future.

MOYERS: Plastics.

ROSNER: Plastics, right. Plastics. And this was a moment in which plastics were everything to this industry. And, yet, they put their own self-interest ahead of that, that of the work force in this case, and also of the public in general in later years.

MARKOWITZ: One of the indications that they knew they should have been telling the work force and public about this is that they mark all of these documents "secret," "confidential." They tell each other in these documents "Keep this within the company, do not tell anybody else about this problem." And so they know this is dynamite. This is something that would cause the work force to seek to protect itself. It would cause, among the plastics industry, concern in the general public about the use of these products. So they understood how important this was.

MOYERS: There was this meeting in October of '66, a meeting of the industry's Occupational Health Committee, and one of the startling disclosures to me, as I read this, is this. One of the theories that these consultants present is that the condition "...may be a systemic disease as opposed to a purely localized disease in the fingers." How do you interpret that as historians, as scientists?

ROSNER: They're concerned about bigger issues than just the acute problem of the shortening of the fingers and disintegration of the bone at the fingertips. They're concerned about-- although later it merges as a problem -- of cancers, chronic disease. This is a period in American history, in American public health history that the public health community is becoming much more aware of chronic illness as the cause of disability among the American population.

Infectious diseases appear to be conquered. Antibiotics have come in and short-term acute diseases seem to be under control, and there is a general assumption that the new diseases of the future would be heart disease, cancer, stroke, chronic conditions, long-term conditions that would be caused by not necessarily germs, but by processes that were out there in the broader environment, and so--

MOYERS: Like the production of plastics?

ROSNER: Exactly.

MOYERS: Or the production of products.

ROSNER: Exactly, human-made, the human-made changes that were being perceived as possibly affecting a much wider group of the population and for much longer periods and in much more indirect ways. So the idea that it is a systemic disease raised all sorts of issues about where was it going to appear, where were the impacts -- when were they going to appear. Was the shortening of the bone the final problem, or was it going to appear in another organ of the body? Was it going to appear 10 years down the road, 20 years down the road?

MOYERS: Was it going to kill people?

ROSNER: Was it going to kill people? And this raised serious problems -- and serious opportunities, unfortunately, for industries to, in some sense, obscure the causes of illness. This is how, I think, we as historians are looking at it. If you can keep the knowledge secret, if you can keep the cause a secret, if you can keep the information secret for long enough, workers will die of other things.

They will vanish from the work force. They will go on to other places. They will retire and die of diseases that may or may not be directly linked to the experience in the work place. Who is going to identify the cause of the cancer that affects a different organ? So the issue of systemic disease was really kind of loaded, and nobody knew where it was going in the public health community, and it was kind of the rising problem in the 1960s. So, by talking about systemic disease and talking about the implications that it was going to be a chronic condition of some sort of a long-term condition that could appear years later--they're raising a host of issues that were unexplored at that moment. The one thing that they did know is that hopefully it wouldn't affect workers for a long time, and if that's the case, then there was an opportunity to produce more plastic and potentially even avoid any kind of responsibility.

MOYERS: So, when they come to see that there could possibly be a long-term effect of one of these chemicals on the body tissue, on the makeup of the human being, especially if it is systemic, what are the implications of that for a particular worker like Bernie Skaggs?

MARKOWITZ: If he doesn't know that this is potentially a systemic disease, he has no way help his doctor or inform his doctor about what kind of diagnosis is appropriate when he becomes ill. If all the doctor is looking for is concerns about tops of the fingers and has not been told in the medical literature that this might be a systemic disease, that this information is kept within the chemical industry, then that worker is going to be mis-diagnosed. The worker's condition is going to get worse, and there is no telling what the effects are going to be for that worker.

MOYERS: He could die not knowing what had killed him.

MARKOWITZ: Absolutely.

ROSNER: He could also certainly die without the opportunity to change his job or to get some kind of compensation for his family or to get some protection for other workers. He's left in the dark.

MOYERS: What do you make of a statement like this from one of these documents? The document is dated October 24, 1966. It is a meeting of the industry's Occupational Health Committee. They are meeting in Cleveland, Ohio. They have been discussing this problem, and at the end of it, according to the memorandum of record--well, let me read it to you. "B.F. Goodrich is sharing its knowledge with all PVC manufacturers." That means other manufacturers of polyvinyl chloride, right?

MARKOWITZ: That's right.

MOYERS: They particularly want to avoid exposes like "Silent Spring" and "Unsafe at Any Speed."

ROSNER: This is that moment. This is the moment where the environmental issues are beginning to emerge, where chronic disease is emerging. This is a moment when there is a growing disenchantment with the chemical industry itself which was in the 1950's, if you remember the slogans from Monsanto and Dow and all the other companies, they revolved around "Better Living through Chemistry; Progress is our only Product."

That image of science and of chemistry is kind of the future of the American population. It is being slowly undercut as, you know, questions about the impact of the chemicals on the environment are emerging from "Silent Spring" as manipulation of public misuse of "Unsafe At Any Speed" is coming out. And it is questioning the role of industry and the progress of America, as of the Vietnam War. It is bringing to the fore Dow Chemical's role in making napalm. There is all sorts of changes in the popular culture that are going on, in which industry itself is being brought under a much more closely examined light, and also a popular culture is beginning to raise all sorts of questions about man's manipulation of nature and man's impact or human's impact on nature that are raising real concerns. And so they are terrified that they are going to come out as potentially an expose.

MARKOWITZ: And what this document also indicates is that these industry representatives are not naive. They understand the implications of what is before them, and we have to remember, this is before cancer is an issue. With just the issue of acroosteolysis…

MOYERS: Which is?

MARKOWITZ: Which is the shortening of the bone in the fingers. They are faced with a situation that could explode at any minute, and they are politically, culturally, economically. This could affect their whole industry if people feel that this plastic, which they are presenting as benign--it may be cheap, but it's benign--that this plastic could represent a real hazard to the work force. And if it would present a hazard to the work force, people are going to wonder. Consumers are going to wonder what is the impact that it could have for me.

MOYERS: I know of your reputation as historians. I don't know much about you as individuals, as people. So do you remember what you thought personally when in these documents you came upon this one, where in one breath they admit that there is the possibility of long-term systemic damage to an individual working with this stuff, and then go on in the same document to say that they want to avoid exposes like "Silent Spring" and "At Any Safe Speed?" What did you think when you saw that?

ROSNER: Well, you just get angry. You get angry and you get upset and you get kind of disillusioned a little bit. You feel this is corruption. This is corruption. This is something that you would, you know, just be extraordinarily upset with if it happened today. And yet, somehow it happened and somehow, in some sense, the whole future of the country was, you know--might have been a little different if people had been made aware not only of this problem, but of other problems that probably never quite surfaced like this did.

MOYERS: When I read this, I thought of my father, Henry Moyers, who spent the last decade of his life working for a chemical company in East Texas, and when I knew that they knew what they knew about Mr. Skaggs, I thought they could have known what they knew about Henry Moyers.

ROSNER: Right, absolutely. Absolutely.

MARKOWITZ: Right. And how many other documents are there in industry archives that tell a similar story of what they are hiding today about what they know about the potential dangers of the chemicals that we are using all around us?

MOYERS: Could it be happening again?

MARKOWITZ: Absolutely. This is a situation today where we really don't know where people are dying as a result of information that is still hidden from us. And one of the great dilemmas in public health is do you prevent the use of a product until it is proved safe or do you assume it is safe unless it is proved dangerous, and industry would like us to believe that until a product or a chemical or a substance is proved to be dangerous, we should continue to use it because we have not shown through epidemiological studies and animal studies that this product causes cancer or other disease.

But, increasingly, people are saying that's not good enough. We are being poisoned by a variety of chemicals, and we find out too late. We are the guinea pigs, and what we need to do is presume a substance is dangerous unless there are firm scientific studies that show that it is safe.

MOYERS: Just the opposite of our present justice system which says someone accused of a crime is innocent until proven guilty, you think we should assume that the chemical is guilty until proven innocent?

MARKOWITZ: Exactly.

MOYERS: What would that do to industry?

MARKOWITZ: It would force industry to do the research and to have Government do the research that would establish the safety of these substances, because the consequences for our society of using these substances, and then finding out 20, 30, 40 years later that they are dangerous is stupendous. These are lost lives. These are families disrupted. This is cost in Medicare and health costs aside from Medicare, and this is something that we cannot afford. Whereas, the principle of "innocent until proven guilty" is meant to protect all of us in the society. Whereas, if you presume a chemical to be dangerous until proven innocent, that is also a way to protect ourselves as society. It may hurt the chemical industry. That may be true, but I think the societal benefits far outweigh that.

MOYERS: You are saying that requirements of a moral order should be on the same level as the requirements for an economic order?

MARKOWITZ: I think so. I think that's extremely important at this point in our time because we have these stories of vinyl chloride, of lead, of other chemicals, asbestos, where we as a society have suffered so greatly because we have not followed this precautionary principle.

MOYERS: Let me come back to one of the documents. In February 1969 -- this is 10 years after Bernard Skaggs down in Louisville had first reported something strange happening to his fingers. Something was going wrong with his fingers. He went to the company. He went to the doctor and he told them something is happening.

The industry commissioned some scientific researchers to look at this issue, and in their report -- this is a copy of it, February 1969 -- the scientists who had been commissioned by the industry to study the problem urged this, "The severity of exposure of reactor cleaner to vinyl chloride and also of personnel on the charging floor," -- people working with this stuff like Mr. Skaggs,-- "should be kept at a minimum, desirably below 50 parts per million, rather than merely below the current threshold limit value of 500 parts per million." Now, interpret that for me, all of those PPMs.

ROSNER: Well, in part, what they are saying is that all the workers on the floor are being exposed to levels that they know are more dangerous than what was considered the current threshold level. In industrial hygiene, when you try to find a level to which people can be exposed, you look for a level that is ostensibly a safe level. And in the 1950's, a level of 500 parts per million was considered a level that was safe for all workers and the entire population.

What is interesting is that as early as 1961, that question of what was a safe level was raised. A man at the Dow Chemical Company wrote a paper in which he suggested a 50- part-per-million level, the very level that is being mentioned in this 1969 document. So it is interesting that Mr. Skaggs -- Mr. Skaggs is complaining in 1959 of a problem. By 1961, they are already discussing a 50-parts-per-million threshold level for exposure, and in 1969, they are still discussing it.

I mean, for me as a historian, it is an 8-year period of time in which many, many other workers were exposed to the 500-parts-per-million level. And it tells me many things, but workers throughout this industry, throughout this company are being exposed to very high levels, not just Mr. Skaggs, but workers who are guards in the plant, people who are being exposed to the atmosphere are all in danger. And it tells me about a company that really spent 8 years ignoring what it could have dealt with 8 years before.

MARKOWITZ: Now, this group who was making this recommendation were at the University of Michigan, and they eventually issued a report in which they actually recommended that the workers be exposed to no more than 50 parts per million of vinyl chloride monomer and when this report was presented to the MCA -- that is, the Manufacturing Chemists Association, the trade association--they rejected the report and they said, "We will not accept a report that gives a level of 50 parts per million as the level that workers should be exposed to because that implies that vinyl chloride monomer is causing this problem," which they have already admitted is causing the problem, but they didn't want to have anything that would cause the various agencies -- at this time, it was non-governmental agencies -- to lower the threshold limit value that workers should be exposed to.

MOYERS: That decision which you just talked about comes up in a document dated April 30, 1969. The industry's Occupational Health Committee is meeting in Washington, DC, and that recommendation is put forth by the scientists who had been hired to consult and advise the industry, and it says in the records of the meeting, "A motion to accept the report as submitted was then defeated by a vote of 7 to 3." Now, what I have trouble with is that out of the 13 members of that committee that voted "no," 6 of them were doctors. Some of those doctors had to vote against the recommendation of the scientists. How do you explain that?

ROSNER: Well, there are a couple of ways of explaining it. One way of explaining it was that these were physicians who were working within industry, who had identified themselves with an industry and probably over a period of time had become identified with thinking that their particular companies were safe, and so how could such a dissonant piece of information -- this was the best, best picture -- how could it be true that we've been putting our workers at risk for all these years, we just don't believe it. That's one way of looking at it.

Another way of understanding it is that the physicians themselves at that period of time, physicians who used to go and work in industrial hygiene often usually were very closely identified with the industry because they had never had the opportunity to work for anyone else. This is years, again, before OSHA, before there was a federal bureaucracy that would hire -- no NIOSH -- before a federal bureaucracy or any alternative physicians to work in their chosen field unless they worked for industry. So there was really no opportunity for them to object, in a strange way. If they did, if their industry decided to fire them, there were not many places to go. They couldn't necessarily go to OSHA. They couldn't go to NIOSH. It just didn't exist.

I don't want to say sympathy. But, essentially, these are guys who are very, very closely identified professionally with industries. There are really no opportunities for any kind of employment. So, if they chose to work in industrial hygiene and occupational medicine, that is where you are going to get a job before 1970. So, in 1969, they're still no opportunity for them other than that.

MARKOWITZ: They are obviously being corrupted in one form or another by the industry that they work for that has made it clear they do not want a lowering of the exposure level for workers. But, in some ways, what is even more shocking is that the University of Michigan researchers, a year or two later, published their results of their work. This was not a report now for the industry. It was in an academic scientific publication, and they still kept out their original scientific judgment about what workers should be exposed to in the published version. They let industry affect their final judgment as published in then scientific literature.

MOYERS: What does that say to you?

MARKOWITZ: It says that the impact of industry on scientific research is very far-reaching, and some of it is very crass, as in the case of the direct telling of the scientists, this is how you need to change your final report. And some of it is more subtle in the sense of these scientists then going to the world and saying this is, you know, our judgment, our independent judgment -- presumably.

MOYERS: If university researchers were willing then to trim their sails for industry, what does it say about today when as we know one university after another, most American universities are heavily reliant upon industry funding for their research?

ROSNER: This is really a very, very serious problem and it's a very serious question that is going on right now. Universities have been places where the public comes to trust neutral outside observers in serious controversies. Academics have a reputation, or at least they base their reputation, on the idea that they are making some sort of objective statement about a problem. And today, of course, throughout the academic world, this is the hot-button issue -- how much should we in some sense accept from different kinds of industries sponsorship of different kinds of research, whether it be the pharmaceutical industry or whether it be genomics companies or outside genetic testing companies that are springing up. This is a big issue on the campus right now and--

MOYERS: Who can we trust?

ROSNER: Well, that's going to become a bigger problem for the American public, I think, in future as we look back and we see the kind of subtle -- I mean very subtle leaving out of statements, publication of reports that are essentially sponsored by trade associations without any kind of ascribing of who sponsored them and where the money came from. As these questions become more apparent, we can expect a kind of public scrutiny that academics have historically been exempted from, and that is very troubling.

MOYERS: Let me come back to our story, to the 1960s. We're into the 1960s, and the industry knows that vinyl chloride is dangerous. They are talking about it, sharing information, concerned about it becoming public, trying to keep it secret. Then, within a few years, there is even more evidence to suggest that vinyl chloride is dangerous. We begin to hear some reports from Europe. Tell us about that.

ROSNER: Well, in the early '70s, Luigi Viola, an Italian researcher. It's a report of animal studies that are coming out of Viola's labs in which a special kind of cancer is appearing in animals exposed to relatively huge amounts of vinyl chloride. 30,000 parts per million. But it's cancer, nonetheless, and this is extraordinarily a major problem for industry. It is a great deal of concern within the trade associations about the potential impact on government regulation of vinyl chloride.

MARKOWITZ: Well, industry invited Viola over here. They have a conference with him. They find out that he is finding the existence of cancers in this gland at lower levels, that 5,000 parts per million as well, and they keep this information secret. In fact, they say that at these lower levels that this could cause a real public relations problem for the industry if this information was published, which the lower levels were not yet published.

MOYERS: Here specifically from the documents of a meeting, again, of the Occupational Health Committee of the trade association of the chemical industry in November 23, 1971. "Publishing of Dr. Viola's work in the US could lead to serious problems with regard to the vinyl chloride industries. The present political climate in the US is such that a campaign by R. Nader" -- I assume that that is Ralph Nader ­ "and others could force an industrial upheaval via new laws or strict interpretation of occupational health laws." How would you characterize the industry discussion during this period of time?

ROSNER: Close to panic, I think. This is the same year that OSHA is organized, NIOSH is organized, the EPA comes into existence. There is a whole new ball game out there about who is going to regulate industry, how much influence industry will have over these agencies, and the discovery of cancer, of course, is, you know, potentially not only a public relations disaster, but a regulatory disaster for this industry. I think that you could read a sense of panic in the industry at that point.

MARKOWITZ: Certainly, they are very concerned about any information about the carcinogenesis alarming the public, and they are determined that this information stay as quiet and as out of the public arena as possible. And they claim to be concerned enough to start their own animal studies and they start talking about doing an epidemiological study which, in fact, they don't do for another two years. But the Europeans do another study that is sponsored by the European companies, and this is by a researcher by the name of Maltoni who is in Bologna, and his work starts to come out in the end of 1972. And about two or three American representatives of the chemical industry go over to Bologna and they observe his laboratory and they see what he's doing, and when they come back, they have a meeting. That is, the American vinyl manufacturers have a meeting with the European vinyl manufacturers, and the Europeans tell them that there are cancers now not only at the very high levels, at thousands of parts per million, but down to 250 parts per million and--

MOYERS: So even less exposure can create a problem?

MARKOWITZ: That's right. And it is causing problems now in the liver and in the kidney, which, of course, humans do have as organs. So that, this is a time when the threshold limit for vinyl chloride is 200 parts per million. They are finding cancer at 250 parts per million, and, yet, they are determined to keep this secret. And they go so far as to even sign a secrecy agreement between the Europeans and the Americans so that each of their researchers will be secret from everybody outside the industry; that only the companies within the Manufacturing Chemists Association, the trade association of the chemical manufacturers, and the European manufacturers will have access to this information.

MOYERS: Let me see if I understand this. The European researchers are saying there is a greater danger of cancer from this stuff than we thought, that human beings have kidneys and livers, which rats have, even though human beings don't have this particular organ that the rats had in the first study. So we think this is very serious. This cancer business is very serious. And they get together, the American representatives and the European representatives, and they say this is top secret, we are not going to make it public--

MARKOWITZ: Exactly.

MOYERS: --to anybody, to the government, to --

MARKOWITZ: To the OSHA, to NIOSH--

MOYERS: To the workers?

MARKOWITZ: To the workers.

MOYERS: To the doctors?

MARKOWITZ: To the doctors. No one is going to get this information except the companies who have signed the secrecy agreement. And they all agree and we have the documents where they actually -- the different companies actually sign the secrecy agreements.

MOYERS: So in late January of 1973, several months later, the National Institute of Occupational Safety and Health, NIOSH as you call it, actually published a request for all persons having health and safety information regarding vinyl chloride, including unpublished studies such as this, to submit it to the US government. The government asks for help, "If you know anything about what is going on in this research, let us know." And what does the industry do?

ROSNER: Well, one thing they do is they plan for a meeting in which they will kind of obscure the issue. They plan a meeting in which they are going to go to Washington and meet with NIOSH to ostensibly provide them with information, but provide them only with the scantest amount of information, the most vague kind of information possible, and they agree in their minutes to only present information that is already known, to only allow NIOSH information that it already has.

MOYERS: And they are not going to tell the government that they know that these very low doses -- lower doses of vinyl chloride can cause cancer? They are not going to tell?

MARKOWITZ: No, they are not going to tell, and there is a document from March 1973 in which the MCA writes to member companies, to some of the member companies, and they say to them, "We have a moral responsibility to tell the government what we have learned about this problem with vinyl chloride. We have a moral responsibility to tell them that there is evidence of cancer at lower doses than what the publicly available information from Viola's original studies has been made public." And yet, they do not provide that information. They keep it secret.

MOYERS: Here is the letter from a Mr. George E. Best, who is the vice president and technical director of the Manufacturing Chemists Association, writing to Mr. John D. Brian, Conoco Chemicals, Continental Oil Company, Saddlebrook, New Jersey. "Dear Mr. Brian," he goes on to say, "There is also the aspect of moral obligation not to withhold from the government significant information having occupational and environmental relevance and the desirability of industry taking the initiative rather than at some time later having to defend another course." So one member of the industry at least is saying, "Hey, we ought to tell the truth."

MARKOWITZ: Right.

MOYERS: And what happens?

MARKOWITZ: Well, they don't tell the truth. They continue to keep this information secret. And in fact, I think it is a month or two later, when they begin planning for a meeting with NIOSH in which they are going to give the appearance of telling them the information about the problems of vinyl chloride, but in fact they withhold the critical information, when they start planning that meeting, they say that that letter that you just read could be seen as evidence of an illegal conspiracy to withhold information from the government that they need in terms of protecting the people's health.

MOYERS: What do the documents show about that meeting that they had with the Government, do you remember?

MARKOWITZ: What is fascinating about that meeting is that they plan it very extensively. They plan what it is they are going to tell the government, which is predominantly public information, and it gives them information about the background of the vinyl chloride industry, how important it is, how economically vital it is. They are going to tell them about all the work they did in protecting worker's health with acroosteolysis research they did. They are going to give them their research protocols for how they are going to investigate cancer today, that is, in the 1970s, by the Manufacturing Chemists Association, but they are not going to tell them the critical information.

MOYERS: Showing lower doses can produce cancer?

MARKOWITZ: Exactly.

MOYERS: They're not going to tell the government that.

MARKOWITZ: They are not going to tell the government that. And they say that their goal in doing this was to avoid what they call "precipitous action" by the government, by which they mean lowering the threshold value that workers would be exposed to, lowering the exposure of workers to vinyl chloride, and in essence the government doing its job which would be to protect the work force.

ROSNER: They go so far as to plan to bring a very, very limited number of documents. I believe seven pages of material, part of which is documents about the economic condition of the industry and how essential it is to the American economy, and then a number of other pages that will fill in publicly available information. And, again, it is a sign of how little they want to reveal. They didn't even want to come with material if it could possibly harm them and damage them.

MOYERS: In one of these documents from that period of time, around the time they were meeting with the government, there is a paragraph that I don't quite understand, and I'd like to see what you think about it. They not only talked about the studies from Europe which showed lower doses could be a problem. They talked about a problem beyond the worker's problem. Here is the quote. "If vinyl chloride proves to be hazardous to health, a producing company's liability to its employees is limited by various worker's compensation laws." In other words, even if a worker can show that he has been made ill by the product he is working with, worker's compensation limits the company's responsibility. All right, I understand that, but then this sentence, "A company selling vinyl chloride as an aerosol propellant, however, has essentially unlimited liability to the entire US population."

MOYERS: What does that mean?

ROSNER: The history of worker's compensation laws were meant to, in some sense, protect companies from liability suits, suits against them by workers who were damaged or hurt on the job. What that sentence means is that they felt relatively protected by worker's comp for workers themselves, if workers happen to get injured on the job or diseased on the job. Their liability, the amount of money they were going to have to pay out was limited by worker's comp, and it was predictable and it was relatively small -- in fact, very small. But the problem that they are identifying is the giant elephant in the corner. It is the issue of what happens when worker's comp isn't there to shield them from suits in court, what happens if people who are not covered by worker's comp suddenly get exposed to vinyl chloride and begin to sue them for damages to their health.

MOYERS: Who?

ROSNER: The public, Mr. and Mrs. America, who are using aerosol spray cans, in this particular case, to keep their hair in place, beauty parlor attendants, women who are having a dangerous product, vinyl chloride, marketed to them in the form of aerosol without knowing the danger. In that case, without any kind of warning, without any kind of identification of vinyl chloride as a potential danger to the public, to the consumer, there is no protection from worker's comp. They are going to be brought to court, and there is unlimited numbers of people who if they come down with the disease, could potentially sue them for huge amounts of undetermined money, undetermined damages in a public hearing.

MOYERS: Are you saying that the companies were aware that vinyl chloride could be a problem for their workers, but you are saying that they also knew from these documents that vinyl chloride could be a problem for the consumer, for the public?

ROSNER: Well, they are certainly terrified of that. That is the real looming liability issue, until really the establishment of the EPA, and of OSHA and NIOSH. What happened within the factory walls was a very private matter. You could control it in certain ways. The government really didn't have the right to walk in. And also the laws that governed injuries and accidents and disease at the work place were so codified that virtually a worker could die, could get killed, could be injured, and you would never really know about it outside of the world of worker's comp and the world of industrial hygiene. The problem, of course, was the fact that in contrast to a relatively controlled and small group of workers who had relatively little liability and little ability to either get information or also get money from companies through worker's comp, you had huge numbers of consumers, people outside who were being exposed to vinyl chloride and--

MOYERS: Including all of those women who were hairdressers who were using aerosol propellants in their hairspray?

ROSNER: Right. Vinyl chloride monomer is used as a propellant. It is a gas, and it is used as a propellant in hairsprays, in deodorants at that time, in a whole slew of pesticides and other cans that are propelling chemicals out into the environment. So, if it turns out that this relatively low threshold limit is poisoning workers, what is the potential danger if it ends up poisoning consumers?

MOYERS: Unlimited liability.

ROSNER: Unlimited liability. Millions and millions of women, of workers, of people exposed to monomer in all sorts of forms. This is catastrophic. This is potentially catastrophic.

MARKOWITZ: One of the most disturbing aspects to this particular document is that here you have the industry saying we are going to give up this part of the industry, the aerosol part of the industry, because the liability is so great, and the danger is the same, probably even a little less than it is for workers, but they are not going to inform the work force. They are not going to do anything about protecting the work force because the liability is limited for them. So it is a very cynical way of deciding on how you are going to deal with this dangerous product.

MOYERS: They are not going to even tell the hairdressers who had been using it for some years, like Ms. Burbidge, across from my mother's house, my mother's hairdresser. They are not going to tell Ms. Burbidge that she was exposed to a danger or my mother?

MARKOWITZ: Exactly.

ROSNER: Exactly.

MARKOWITZ: And what is interesting is that when they decide at about this time to take this product, the use of vinyl chloride monomer, off the market as an aerosol, they don't even send a letter to these companies that were manufacturing it. They say we should have individuals go personally to these companies and tell them we are taking it off. And I think part of that is to avoid leaving a paper trail about this.

ROSNER: Another part of the story is the cynicism with which they decide that this particular product can be taken off the market. They consciously note that this is a very small portion of the vinyl chloride market. This isn't going to hurt them financially. So why expose themselves to liability? If this minor part of the industry can be excised and the huge liability that goes with it excised, this is not a health concern so much as it is a financial and economic concern.

MOYERS: Did the industry ever acknowledge to the general public that they had been concerned about these aerosol products, about hairspray and other things, even though they had taken them off of the market?

ROSNER: Not to my knowledge.

MARKOWITZ: No, they do not.

MOYERS: What does that say to you guys?

MARKOWITZ: I mean, it's such an unwillingness by the industry to take any responsibility for what they have done. They have put people in danger. They have exposed a variety of people to a dangerous product, and, yet, they are not willing to say, "This is something we did, we didn't know it, we, you know, had no way of knowing it," whatever excuses they wanted to make up, but they don't even do that. They don't even say this is something that you should now tell your doctor about, have them look for this in coming years, that this may cause you problems and you should be aware of this in terms of developing your own health plan for the future.

ROSNER: That is awfully Pollyannish of you, the idea that they are going to tell people to watch out for long-term disease. It would have been enough to just say there is a potential problem here and just be aware if you have certain problems in the future.

MARKOWITZ: Pollyanna is my middle name.

MOYERS: Were they willing to tell the Government?

ROSNER: Well, I believe at the NIOSH meeting, there is a question. Somebody walks up to someone and asks -- they have been hearing that they can't get a hold of vinyl chloride monomer as a propellant anymore, what is going on, and the answer was a very ambiguous answer about they just decided to take it off the market. I don't believe they gave any reason at all.

MARKOWITZ: They don't say why they are taking it off the market. They just say that we have decided to stop selling it for this purpose.

MOYERS: Here is a memo marked "confidential," May 31, 1973, in which a Union Carbide executive is pointedly reminding his colleagues that if that March letter that you talked about admitting knowledge of the European research ever became known, it would "be construed as evidence of an illegal conspiracy by industry." They knew the potential repercussions of what they were doing?

MARKOWITZ: It is an extraordinary situation where they know they should be telling the government about this problem. They know that they are wrong not to tell them. They explain why they are not going to tell them, and then they admit that their engaging in this kind of activity can be legitimately seen as evidence of an illegal conspiracy, and then they go ahead and don't tell the government and continue to hide this until the deaths of workers force the industry to make it a public issue.

MOYERS: What was their rationale for not telling the public health officials in government that there was a problem? Was it because they thought it was a consumer problem, not one concerning workers? Is that the rationale?

MARKOWITZ: I think the rationale was they were afraid that if they told the government that it would take what they called precipitous action--that if they told the government that there was a health problem, the government would lower the exposure limit that workers could be exposed to, and that if they did that, this would put an economic burden on the companies. If they had to reduce the exposure of workers to below 50 parts per million or 250 parts per million, that would cause some companies to spend a lot more money on protecting workers, and this would cut into the profits of that industry. And in fact, they said that it couldn't be done. And when the government told them, six months, a year later, that they had to do it, lo and behold, they were able to do it. So it turned out to be a false reason, but that was their rationale that they did not want the Government to take this action.

ROSNER: One aspect of the stories, which is really interesting, is the fact that this is a very clubby world or that this world of vinyl manufacturers seems very clubby. There is a small group of them, I think a dozen, maybe even fewer than a dozen, VCM and polyvinyl chloride manufacturers, people actually manufacturing the stuff.

And there is -- even though Dow in 1961 recommends the lowering of the TLV to 50 parts per million, it is still being fought, not necessarily because anybody disbelieves it, but because some companies seem to think that they can't get to that level, and they all agree, even Dow. Even the biggest companies that say "Yeah, we can get to this level fairly easy," at various points, even though they know that they can get to this level, some of their friends in the other companies are essentially saying it will be very difficult for us. They agree to just kind of ignore the issue up until the '70s.

So it's almost the structure of this clubby little world of a few vinyl manufacturers that is another part of kind of the strange culture of denial, the strange culture of keeping this issue secret not only because of profit, but because they they don't want to drive any of their friends out of business. It is a strange structure to the industry and a strange culture, as well as a strange morality.

MARKOWITZ: It's interesting when in the spring of 1974, after this is a public issue and OSHA is proposing an emergency standard of 50 parts per million, the industry goes in as the united front and they oppose the 50-parts-per-million standard and they have discussions among themselves in which some of them say yes, we can reach 50 parts per million and we should be at a 50-parts-per-million and others say we can't reach this. And they all agree, well, we'll go with the lowest common denominator which is to oppose a 50-parts-per-million standard and say that we can't do it, even though some of the industry obviously can do it and are at that point below 50 parts per million in their exposure limits for their workers.

MOYERS: And this is after the four workers died and were discovered to have had a rare cancer at the Goodrich plant in Louisville?

MARKOWITZ: That's correct.

MOYERS: And they were still arguing against the lowest exposure for safety purposes?

MARKOWITZ: Absolutely.

MOYERS: And they were still withholding evidence from the public?

MARKOWITZ: That's correct.

MOYERS: From the government?

MARKOWITZ: That's correct.

MOYERS: From the consumer?

MOYERS: Yes.

ROSNER: And they're certainly withholding the information that they could get to it relatively easy, which is so stunning, because almost immediately after the deaths and after the emergency standards pass and after the hearings, they manage to get to a lower standard very quickly without any disruption to the industry.

It is really grating for nearly 15 years. There obviously was some kind of technical capability that didn't put the industry out of business, and, yet, they claim that this was going to devastate their industry. They are going to devastate a major portion of the American economy. The kind of rhetoric that was used in these hearings and in their promotional campaign was just so counter- factual and so cynical when you realized how easily they were able to get to a new kind of standard.

MOYERS: What might have been different if the industry had told the government what it knew?

ROSNER: Well, it might be that the angiosarcoma deaths might have been avoided. It might have been that OSHA and NIOSH would have taken, if not precipitous action, serious action and seen itself as a vital agency for regulating the worker's environment much more seriously. It might have been a whole different history to OSHA and NIOSH. One of the things that I am concerned about is that was one of the first confrontations with industry about the limits of what the federal government had the right to do, and the opposition, the power that was brought to bear, the suits and the continuing--you know, the continuing pressure from industry, I think, has in some sense forever affected the culture of those industries, to this day.

You don't see the kind of aggressive regulation or aggressive enforcement of regulation from these agencies that many in the early '70s thought was a real possibility. So it goes beyond just the few documented deaths from angiosarcoma. It goes into the long-term impact on the way Americans think about regulation, the way the work force in general is protected and the chemical industry, as well as the vinyl chloride industry, a portion of it. So it is a much deeper impact that I am concerned about.

MOYERS: In this regard, in your experience, is this kind of deception unique to the vinyl chloride industry, or does it represent a larger pattern?

ROSNER: If you put it together with the other kind of scandals or crises that have been documented and emerged, the asbestos crisis, the asbestosis and the attempts since the 1930s to cover up the impact of asbestos on both the work force as well as the broader public, the silicosis crisis which in the 1930s affected thousands upon thousands of American workers and virtually vanished from attention because of, again, a concerted effort by different industries to, in some sense, cover up the issue--and if you look at the tetraethyl lead controversies of the 1920s when lead gasoline was first introduced into the American market and there was tremendous opposition because of the deaths of workers and the fear not only from the work force, but the general environment, when you start putting these different cases together, you develop kind of a skepticism about whether this is just unique outrage, whether this is just a moment in time that is horrifyingly an exception to the rule.

Certainly, most American industries work within a very moral and reasonable context. Most industries don't do what these particular companies did, but you have to ask whether there are other examples of this that haven't been made public. As you dig deeper, you see these issues more and more often. Major money and major interest and major financial gain does pollute the body politic, and it does pollute science, and it does pollute the political discussion about danger and what we should as a society be exposed to and what we should be avoiding. It just does. That is what you start to realize.

MOYERS: Let me talk about the science. Because science is another dimension to this story that we have touched upon, but haven't really gone into any depth with. The industry planning group laid out the plans to create its own science when the European studies came in. The industry didn't want to be caught off guard again. They wanted to be ahead of the field. So the industry put together its own science.

MOYERS: This is the minutes of the meeting of the MCA, December 14, 1971. They say the need to be able to reassure the public that polyvinyl chloride entails no risk to the user. So they are going to set up their own science.

MARKOWITZ: They develop a research protocol, that is, they start with the endpoint of one, reassuring the public, reassuring workers that the products that they are working with are safe, that they are going to protect themselves from liability suits. And when research is conducted in that way where you are trying to protect the industry rather than give the industry the information it needs to protect the workforce and the public, the process of science is absolutely corrupted. And this document that you read from is extraordinary in that way because they lay out so clearly there - - they list the four goals.

MOYERS: Can you remember them?

MARKOWITZ: One was to reassure the public. The second was to reassure the workforce. The third was to be able to defend against liability suits, and I can't remember what the fourth was.

MOYERS: In other words, they were saying to the epidemiologists, the researchers, the scientists, "Here is the end, we want. Produce the science to get us there."

MARKOWITZ: That's right.

ROSNER: There is a prolonged debate beginning at this point about what good science is. It is a debate that continues to this day. In part, it is brought on by the arrival of the environmental movement which is asking questions of scientists that historically they hadn't been asked, people who turn on their tap water and see -- you know, smell something odd, or taste something odd and who know it is not good for them -- are asking scientists to make decisions about whether or not this is dangerous for them that often scientists are very wary of making.

A clinician may say there is a problem here, and you may say there is a real problem with drinking water that smells bad, but the question becomes in this case, "Does it really cause disease?" And that is a contentious issue that there is a lot of play with, and that is what industry begins to play on, how do you actually prove the relationship between a particular exposure and a long-term disease.

Historically, in the chemical industry, it was animal studies. If you expose animals to a substance, they form a cancer, a disease, you can assume that it's a carcinogen. What you see within the science of that period is the beginnings of a real challenge to traditional, historical methods for identifying disease.

Clinicians are no longer to be trusted, because clinicians don't have large enough numbers to really prove something. Even epidemiologists aren't really to be trusted to draw a cause-and-effect relationship because there are so many variables between assuming that, for example, a vinyl chloride factory spewing smoke out of its chimney is really poisoning a local population. You can't tell the routes of water transmission. There are so many intervening variables about what can possibly cause the observed effects of a particular condition on a particular population that there are lots of ways of explaining it away. So what you start seeing is a debate even within industries about what good science is and how to shape measurement and shape the way we measure risk. That becomes increasingly important over time in a whole host of industries, but it is really taking form. Environmental disease is causing traditional mechanisms for judging what is a danger, what is a problem, causing a re-evaluation.

MOYERS: In a sense, to bring it down to this, they were trying to set up conditions that would produce from their science the results that they want.

MARKOWITZ: You know, the American public somewhat naively believes that when scientists are conducting a study that they are going to arrive at a somewhat objective truth. And to get objective truth, you need to be able to ask objective questions. But here you have the industry with the results that they want already, and it takes extraordinary will on the part of scientists who are conducting these studies to arrive at answers that are going to be contrary to what the sponsors of that research are asking for. This is really the problem with their proposal, that they are telling the scientists that this is what we want. They are giving them the money to do the research, and the scientists know that in the end, they have got to come up with something that is approximate to what their funders are interested in.

MOYERS: This is the document of that meeting where they have gathered to discuss, to plan for their vinyl chloride research, and they say here are the assumptions that should guide any decisions about our science. One, "the need to be able to reassure the public that vinyl chloride entails no risk to the user"-- that is telling the outcome before the research. Second, "the need to be able to assure the employees of the industry, the workers, that management was concerned for and diligent in seeking the information necessary to protect their health." Third, "the need to develop data useful in defense of the industry against invalid claims for alleged occupational or community exposure." Here is the fourth one, "The need to establish the program under conditions that would provide industry with the means to guarantee the objectivity of the program and the validity of the experimental conditions." I don't understand that one. What does that mean?

ROSNER: Hire university professors.

MOYERS: Hire what?

ROSNER: Hire university professors and don't do it ourselves.

MOYERS: Is that what that means?

ROSNER: I think so. I think it's trying to find ways -- trying to find objective voices that can state what you want them to state. That's what that tells me.

MOYERS: One of the things that the documents indicate from the start, that even the industry's own scientists understood that beauty parlors, hair salons, were a better laboratory than vinyl chloride manufacturing plants.

It says, "With reference to our recent conversations relative to the possible hazard from exposure to vinyl chloride monomer, beauty operators applying hairspray on a daily routine basis might actually be a better population to examine than chemical plant operators." They are saying we should go and look at beauty operators to see the effect on them of vinyl chloride. To your knowledge, beauty operators included in the study?

ROSNER: No. I don't know of any study that ever looked at them closely.

MARKOWITZ: No. There was never any examination of the beauty operators, and, in fact, they never told the beauty operators that they were even potentially at risk.

MOYERS: But they were acknowledging that beauty operators might be a more revealing study than even the workers in the plants.

MARKOWITZ: Part of the reason may be that the beauty operators were exposed to the pure vinyl chloride monomer gas for 8 hours a day at very high concentrations, hundreds, thousands of parts per million, and so they had there a study of a group of people who they knew were exposed to very high concentrations.

Whereas, in the plant, they didn't know precisely how much of a concentration various workers were exposed to, and they would go in and clean part of the vats for a couple of hours and then be out of it. Here were a group of people who were really exposed to this material throughout the whole day, every day, for months and years at a time.

MOYERS: What do you make of the fact that, as the documents show, there was a conflict between wanting to contact terminated employees to find out if they were dead or alive? The industry wanted to go and see what had happened to their workers, to find out if they were dead or alive, but they didn't want to tell them why they wanted to know this.

MARKOWITZ: They were, you know, from their perspective, in a terrible bind. They wanted the information to know if the workers had suffered any injury as a result of exposure to vinyl chloride, but they didn't want to tell the workers that they might have been exposed to vinyl chloride and that there was a danger in that exposure. So they didn't want to even alert the workers in any form through these surveys that they might have had a problem that they should investigate themselves, that they should consult with their doctors about, that they should be worried about.

MOYERS: But didn't that skew the evidence?

MARKOWITZ: Absolutely, absolutely. They were not getting a full body of evidence.

ROSNER: They also weren't getting the evidence of the people who were dying. They eliminated those people from their sample, which may have been the people who were most affected. It also was eliminating, in part, the people who had been working in this environment the longest period of time, looking at people who were elderly perhaps and who had died in old age and who might have been in the plants since the 1950s. So there were all sorts of questions about the validity of their sample as they skew and shape the sample that they are using. They are shaping the research, they are shaping the questions. They are telling people to keep quiet. They are in some sense kind of affecting the very nature of the science because science should be helping people. It should be there to aid people, and certainly, when you are asking questions as personal and as private and as intimate as questions about your own health and your life and your experience-- you are not letting the very victims know about what is being done to them, there is a real question about medical ethics and medical morality.

MOYERS: They were afraid of lawsuits, too?

ROSNER: Absolutely, desperately.

MOYERS: They were afraid that Ms. Ross would do what Ms. Ross did.

ROSNER: Right, exactly.

MOYERS: And yet, if I understand the record, by late 1974, even this flawed science was suggesting what the industry feared. Is that right?

MARKOWITZ: Absolutely. I mean, the industry was becoming very clear that they were exposing workers to too high levels of vinyl chloride, and even before the deaths were exposed in 1974, in 1973, Dow had done an epidemiological study of its own work force and found that almost twice as many workers had died of cancer than were expected, and this information was also not presented to NIOSH. In fact, they made a conscious decision not to present this information to NIOSH.

MOYERS: Not to tell the government.

MARKOWITZ: That's correct.

MOYERS: And yet, during this time, Dan Ross and others like him, working in vinyl chloride plants, were being told there was nothing to worry about, that there is no danger.

MARKOWITZ: That's correct. They -- the industry -- kept assuring the work force that there was not anything that they need to be concerned about, that the only problem that they had identified was this hand disease, acroosteolysis, and that they had been able to solve that problem and that they were going to protect the work force.

MOYERS: But they didn't.

MARKOWITZ: No, they certainly did not. In fact, many workers came down with angiosarcoma of the liver, other cancers or suspected being related to vinyl chloride exposure. The industry neither informed nor protected the work force.

MOYERS: Would it lead you to the conclusion as historians that this was a cover-up?

MARKOWITZ: Historians don't like to use broad political terms like "cover-up," but there is really no other term you can use for this because the industry had the information. They knew the significance of the information they had, and they refused to tell the government because they were afraid the government would take action that would protect the work force.

ROSNER: You search for another explanation, and you can search for all sorts of subtleties, and you can search for arguments about the nature of science, but when you boil it all down and you look at it, you become not only suspicious of that moment of time, but you become suspicious of the entire industry and its entire history.

That is what is really troubling. The crisis around '74 is one thing. What continues after '74, I wouldn't trust anything that came out of that industry at the present time up to the moment. I don't know what their epidemiology is. I wouldn't trust the researchers they hired, and that is really a terrible legacy of that whole period because you want to be able to -- we have no other mechanism in our country of really protecting people other than our trust in ourselves and also the trust in the enterprises and the industries that are around us.

We believe in private enterprise. We believe in the right of entrepreneurs to do what entrepreneurs do, but it is all based upon a basic assumption that there is a morality working in this industry. Once you tinker with that, once you destroy that, once you do that too much, it is a larger problem than an immediate crisis.

MOYERS: Gerry, let me ask you about the Wong case. Do you remember the Wong case?

MARKOWITZ: Yes. Otto Wong published a review of the epidemiological literature on vinyl chloride, and he found that there was substantial evidence for the fact that vinyl chloride caused a problem with brain cancer and other sites other than angiosarcoma of the liver, which everyone conceded was caused by vinyl chloride, but the dispute among -- between the industry and public health officials was, "Did vinyl chloride also cause cancers in other sites, and specifically in the brain," and Otto Wong did the study and he found that, in fact, there was evidence for cancers in other sites. The chemical industry wrote a letter to the American Journal of Industrial Medicine in which they criticized his results and said that for a variety of reasons, he had not accounted for X, Y, and Z, and that his results were not accurate. Wong, who had been funded in his research by the chemical industry, then took the extraordinary step of writing a letter himself to the same journal saying, in essence, yes, the chemical industry was right, he was wrong, that the evidence was much more ambiguous.

MOYERS: He recanted.

MARKOWITZ: He recanted.

MOYERS: And you say this was extraordinary. What did you mean?

MARKOWITZ: Well, this is a person who spent years developing this study and working with the evidence, and he presented in his journal article his best considered judgment about what the results of his research was. Then, to have it criticized by his funders and to suddenly recant on the basis of one letter, it is absolutely an extraordinary event. It means that he had no faith in the integrity of his own work.

MOYERS: And isn't it true that the Wong study found a link between vinyl chloride and the very kind of brain cancer that killed Dan Ross?

MARKOWITZ: That is absolutely correct, absolutely correct. That was the real source of contention about the Wong study, that the vinyl chloride industry wanted desperately to say that vinyl chloride caused angiosarcoma of the liver and that was it, no other cancer. And Wong said that the evidence did not support that, and it did cause the same kind of brain cancer that killed Mr. Ross.

MOYERS: So the Wong study was right?

MARKOWITZ: Yes.

MOYERS: But he recanted because of pressure from the industry?

MARKOWITZ: That is certainly what it looks like, yes.

MOYERS: Were you retained by the Baggett firm?

ROSNER: Yes, we were.

MOYERS: Can we trust your history?

ROSNER: I believe so. I mean, that's why we very openly say we were retained. I think anyone has to judge it, but when you look at our timeline and what we produced, what you will see is that generally we depend upon the quotes, the material itself.

MARKOWITZ: May I say that Billy Baggett, Jr., sent our timeline to representatives of the industry and said if there is anything incorrect in the timeline, if there is anything that they have misrepresented, please let us know, and he has not heard anything from them and we have not heard anything from them that anything that we said about the industry was incorrect.

MOYERS: Well, the documents are there.

MARKOWITZ: Yes.

MOYERS: The trail is very clear.

ROSNER: That's right.