Several, years ago, I wrote about Barry Castleman’s 1979 memorandum to Irving Selikoff, in which Castleman implored Selikoff to refuse to cooperate with lawful discovery from defense counsel in asbestos personal injury cases. The Selikoff – Castleman Conspiracy” (Mar. 13, 2011). The document, titled “Defense Attorneys’ Efforts to Use Background Files of Selikoff-Hammond Studies to Avert Liability,” was dated November 5, 1979. Coming from The Legacy Tobacco Documents Library at the University of California, San Francisco, created by litigation industry’s tobacco subsidiary, the document is clearly authentic. Barry Castleman, however, has testified that he cannot remember the 35+ year old memorandum, which failure of recall is not probative of anything.1 He refuses to renounce his role as a co-conspirator.
Jock McCulloch and Geoffrey Tweedale have both made careers of attacking any manufacturing and mining industry with connections to asbestos, while supporting the litigation industry that thrives on asbestos. Sadly, Jock McCulloch died of mesothelioma, earlier this year, on January 18, 2018, in Australia. McCulloch attributed his disease to his exposure to crocidolite when he researched one of his books on blue asbestos in South Africa.2 Although I found his scholarship biased and exaggerated, I admired his tenacious zeal in pressing his claims. His candor about the cause of his last illness was exemplary compared with Selikoff’s failure to acknowledge the extent to which amosite and crocidolite were used in the United States.
In 2007, Jock McCulloch and Geoffrey Tweedale wrote an article in which they attacked those who dared to say anything negative about Irving Selikoff.3 Of course, in claiming that the asbestos industry was “shooting the messenger,” these authors were, well, shooting the messenger, too. In 2008, McCulloch and Tweedale wrote a much more interesting, hagiographic article about Selikoff.4 From the legal perpective, perhaps the most interesting revelation in this article was that the authors had drawn “upon unprecedented access to the Selikoff archive at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York City.”
Several years later, defense counsel in the United States attempted to visit the Selikoff archives at Mt. Sinai Hospital. After an unseemly delay, the inquisitive counsel were met with unprecedented obstruction and denial of access:
From: [ARCHIVIST]
To: [DEFENSE COUNSEL]
Subject: Request for appointment with Archivist
Date: Wed, 3 Sep 2014 16:18:53 +0000I realize that this must seem out of the blue, but we have recently realized that the stub email address we have – msarchives – has not been forwarding email the way it was intended to do. I apologize for not responding to you previously, and for what it is worth, here is the answer to your question.
Some Selikoff material in the Mount Sinai Archives, although I believe some of his research material is still with our Dept. of Preventive Medicine. Our collection is currently closed to researchers, as per the request of Mount Sinai’s Legal Department in 2009. Here is their statement concerning these records:
It was agreed that Dr. Selikoff’s correspondence and archives that are kept within the auspices of the MSSM library under the direction of the MSSM archivist, Barbara Niss, would be kept confidential for at least an additional 25 years to protect Dr. Selikoff’s research endeavors and the privacy of all the individuals, particularly the research subjects, who he studied and with whom he communicated. It is anticipated that twenty-five years from now, these individuals will no longer be alive and their concerns about keeping these matters private will have become moot. However, if we determine that this is not the case, we will reserve the option to continue to keep these documents confidential. We are also taking this action to preserve the academic freedom of our researchers so they can pursue their research, communicate with colleagues and comment on these important environmental/scientific issues, without concerns that they will be subpoenaed as non-party witnesses in these massive tort litigations.
Again, my apologies for the very late reply. Please let me know if you have questions.
So there you have it, 35 years after Castleman implored Selikoff not to cooperate with lawyers’ proper fact discovery, the Selikoff archive is still at its obstruction and denial.
1 See “The Selikoff – Castleman Conspiracy” (Mar. 13, 2011). In 2014, Castleman testifies that he has no recollection of the memorandum. The document was also available at Scribd.
2 See Laurie Kazan-Allen, “In Memory of Jock McCulloch” (Jan. 21, 2018) (quoting an email from Jock McCulloch, dated July 21, 2017: “The injury almost certainly occurred while I was researching Asbestos Blues in South Africa, which is all of twenty years ago.”); “Remembering Jock McCulloch,” Toxic Docs Blog (Jan. 28, 2018) (quoting his partner’s tribute about the cause of his death: “His exposure to blue asbestos was probably in South Africa during the mid-1990s, when he was researching a book on the history of mining.”).
3 Jock McCulloch & Geoffrey Tweedale, “Shooting the Messenger: The Vilification of Irving J. Selikoff,” 37 Internat’l J. Health Services 619 (2007).
4 Jock McCulloch and Geoffrey Tweedale, “Science is not Sufficient: Irving J. Selikoff and the Asbestos Tragedy,” 17 New Solutions 293 (2008).
