Irving Selikoff; Found Asbestos Link to Cancer
Irving J. Selikoff, the physician and environmental scientist known throughout the world for his research linking asbestos to cancer, which prompted billions of dollars in lawsuits, a series of reforms within the industry and limits on the use of the insulation, died Wednesday of cancer.
Kelly Larkin, a spokeswoman for Mt. Sinai Medical Center in New York City where Selikoff was professor emeritus of community medicine, said he was 77 when he died at Valley Hospital in Ridgewood, N.J.
Selikoff, whose earlier years were devoted to the diagnosis and treatment of tuberculosis, estimated more than 15 years ago that 95% of all cancers are caused by environmental factors but admitted that he would be hard put to say what caused the other 5%. Today’s thinking is that genetics play a role, predisposing some people to cancers.
Selikoff and his laboratory colleagues proved in the 1960s that asbestos workers who didn’t smoke tended not to die of lung cancer while those who did were more susceptible to lung cancer than all other smokers. He also helped prove that anemics are more susceptible to lead poisoning and publicized the findings of Japanese scientists who found that Hiroshima and Nagasaki A-bomb survivors who had worked with benzene after the explosions were three times as likely to develop leukemia as those who hadn’t.
With his findings, Selikoff began a crusade in which he decried the development of new products at the expense of death and disease.
About 8,200 Americans die annually from asbestos alone, he said in the late 1970s, and he predicted that figure would double by the year 2000.
By 1982 Selikoff’s findings and the many lawsuits they produced on behalf of asbestos workers had forced a leading asbestos manufacturer, the Manville Corp., into Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in order to halt those suits while putting pressure on the government to enact an asbestos workers compensation bill. At that point, the company said, it was facing $2 billion in potential claims from asbestos victims and their families who had been exposed to the insulation in pipes, brake lining, paper products and textiles.
Selikoff also linked the chemical PBB, used in fire retardants, to growth retardation and liver cancer.
Born in Brooklyn, Selikoff earned his medical degree from the Royal Colleges of Scotland in 1941 and joined the Mt. Sinai staff that same year. There he was instrumental in establishing the nation’s first hospital division of environmental and occupational medicine. He retired as director of the division in 1985 but continued to be active as a researcher.
He became a consultant to the World Health Organization, the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, the National Cancer Institute, and governments, public health agencies, industry and the unions whose members he tried to protect. One of his many honorary awards was a membership in the International Assn. of Heat and Frost Insulators and Asbestos Workers.
He was the founding editor of two publications, the American Journal of Industrial Medicine and Environmental Research. Selikoff published more than 360 scientific articles, two books and was editor of 11 volumes of the Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences.
His wife died in 1986 and there are no known immediate survivors.
