Here, the State is suing for recovery of costs associated with the damage to children caused by lead paint on the walls of houses in the state and for the costs of removing the lead from the walls of up to 80 percent of the homes in Rhode Island. The second set of cases is the reason we post this web site. Here, various chemical companies, specifically those who produce or use vinyl chloride monomer (VCM), a suspected human carcinogen, are being sued by workers who have developed a very rare cancer called angiosarcoma of the liver. This cancer is so rare that fewer than two-score cases of it are identified in this country in any given year.
The industry lawyers are particularly disturbed by two chapters in Deceit and Denial that detail how, in the early 1970s, the chemical industry deceived the government about industry's own findings that VCM caused a rare liver cancer in animals exposed to relatively low levels of VCM.
The documents we uncovered while researching our book have received a fair amount of attention from the media. Bill Moyers' "Trade Secrets," a PBS documentary which traces the vinyl story, relied heavily on these documents; we are interviewed extensively in the film. A Toxic Comedy Picture that was broadcast on HBO, Blue Vinyl, directed by Judith Helfand and Dan Gold, also integrated material we identified into the story of vinyl chloride. Both these documentaries have won major awards, and we are proud that we played a role in these productions.
One vinyl chloride case is now scheduled to go to trial in February, 2005. In the legal proceedings for this case, Gerald Markowitz has been deposed for five days by lawyers for Monsanto, Airco, Dow, Union Carbide, Goodyear, Goodrich, Shell and other large corporations. Following his deposition a number of unusual events occurred. The press and the foundation that published our book were subpoenaed for all of their records concerning our work, their relationship to each other, and the peer review process. Following this, five of the eight outside peer reviewers were also subpoenaed to provide all of their records related to the book and to appear at depositions for questioning by company lawyers (see the article in Chronicle of Higher Education that summarizes these events).
In addition to these highly unusual, perhaps unprecedented, intrusions into the academic peer review process, the chemical industry hired Philip Scranton, Professor of History at Rutgers in Camden, to write what lawyers call an "expert report" about two of the chapters of our book, attacking our professional standards, ethics, and integrity.
We are presenting this website primarily for the community of historians who must undoubtedly be confused by the articles and discussions that have recently appeared. We provide the reader with Scranton's report, our response, reviews of our book by the academic community, and a link to websites that provide historians with access to a selection of documents from the chemical industry papers.
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