BRIEF INTERLUDE: What's the difference between peer review and judicial review? Some scholars are about to find out. Lawyers representing more than 20 chemical companies have taken the unusual step of issuing subpoenas to five peer reviewers of a scholarly book as part of litigation over the alleged health risks of a widely used chemical compound.
The peer reviewers, who are historians and health experts, have been summoned for questioning this month in the case, which pits a former chemical worker who now suffers from cancer against the companies, including the Dow Chemical Company, the Goodrich Corporation, the Goodyear Tire & Rubber Company, the Monsanto Company, and Uniroyal Inc.
The book's publishers received subpoenas several months ago to provide information about early drafts of the book and its peer review.
The civil case is in the discovery phase and is scheduled to go to trial in February in the U.S. District Court in Jackson, Miss. At issue in the subpoenas to the publishers and reviewers is the book Deceit and Denial: The Deadly Politics of Industrial Pollution, which was published in 2002 by the University of California Press and the Milbank Memorial Fund, a foundation dedicated to research on health policy.
The book's authors, Gerald Markowitz, a history professor on two campuses of the City University of New York, and David Rosner, a professor of history and of public health at Columbia University, analyzed internal industry documents from the 1950s through the 1990s.
In the book they present evidence that in the late 1960s and early '70s, chemical-industry leaders failed to inform the government about a link that had been found, in experiments with rats, between exposure to a chemical called vinyl chloride monomer and cancer.
"Basically what we tell in the book is how the industry kept this secret from the government and how they fought against regulation," Mr. Markowitz says.
He has agreed to serve as an expert witness for plaintiffs in several cases against the chemical companies. In the Mississippi case he was questioned by the defendants' lawyers for five days in a pretrial deposition.
Thomas L. Feher, a lawyer who represents Goodrich, says the questioning was part of "examining his research."
Mr. Feher, a partner with Thompson Hine LLP, in Cleveland, says he does not consider the book to be central to the case. "It's not valid research," he says, "and it doesn't speak to the real issues of the case."
In an apparent attempt to back up that assertion, the companies' lawyers in July sent the university press and the Milbank fund subpoenas for documents about the book's peer review. More recently the lawyers subpoenaed five of the book's eight reviewers.
"What seems to be happening here," says Lynne Withey, the press's director, "is that the defense attorneys are trying to discredit Jerry's testimony by discrediting the book. They're trying to discredit the peer-review process."
The book was reviewed in an unusual way, one that Milbank and the California press use when they publish books together. The publishers recruit many more than the usual two or three peer reviewers -- in this case, eight -- and the reviewers meet with the authors and editors to discuss their critiques.
"It's actually a more rigorous kind of peer review than we normally do," says Ms. Withey. "But it is not confidential." As a result, when the press and the Milbank fund sent the subpoenaed information, the defense lawyers received copies of the reviewers' comments as well as their names.
The five peer reviewers who received subpoenas are required to appear for questioning and to deliver all drafts of their reviews, documents they had consulted in preparing the reviews, and correspondence about the book. Like others contacted by The Chronicle, Ms. Withey says she has never heard of another example of reviewers' being subpoenaed.
"It's a disturbing situation," she says. "It's really pretty sleazy on their part."
But David Kotelchuck, an associate professor of occupational and public health at Hunter College, another CUNY campus, says that -- apart from having received the subpoena at home at 11:45 p.m. -- he does not feel harassed by it. The industry, he says, "wishes to defend itself."
"It's perfectly reasonable for them to want to speak to people who have some information about the evidence," he says.
Mr. Kotelchuck says he will tell the lawyers that he thinks the book is scientifically sound.
The defendants also have solicited as an expert witness Philip B. Scranton, a history professor at Rutgers University at Camden. In a 41-page critique of the book and of Mr. Markowitz's deposition, he wrote: "Markowitz frequently and flagrantly violated professional standards central to the historian's profession."
Mr. Markowitz and his co-author, Mr. Rosner, are writing a response to Mr. Scranton's report. "The thing that's upsetting is he is attacking our ethics and our professional credentials. No one's ever done that before," says Mr. Rosner, who says he plans to sign onto the case as an expert witness as a result.
"It's a real distraction," he says. "We have to respond to this hideous thing, and we have to spend lots of time going through each of his misstatements and lies, as far as we're concerned, about our material." He says he thinks the chemical companies are hoping that the historians will stop participating in the case voluntarily or will be excluded by the judge.