Selikoff, Irving J., M.D.
(Conducted landmark 1964 study on asbestos)Biographical Information:
Irving J. Selikoff (1915-1992) grew up in an era when tuberculosis was one of the greatest of scourges and lived long enough to see the focus of medical researchers turn increasingly to environmental diseases like asbestosis and the many smoking-related diseases. As a result, he was able to make major contributions to both of these fights. Nonetheless, Selikoff has become a controversial figure, with questions having been raised about his credentials and objectivity. His supporters, meanwhile, have dismissed these attacks as the result of a campaign to discredit Selikoff that was sponsored by the asbestos industry and its allies.
Irving John Selikoff was born in Brooklyn on January 15, 1915, the younger of two children of Abraham and Gillie Selikoff, Russian Jews who had emigrated to the United States in 1909. He graduated from Columbia University in 1935 with a Bachelor of Science degree. Between 1936 and 1939, Selikoff studied at Anderson’s College of Medicine in Scotland. In 1940, unable to return to the States because of the outbreak of war in Europe, he went to Melbourne, Australia, to continue his studies. After returning to the U. S., he worked as an assistant at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York city, then completed an internship at the Newark Beth Israel Hospital and a residency at Sea View Hospital in New York. He also received qualification to began practicing medicine, but gaps in the records of institutions he attended led Peter Bartrip, a historian who has often appeared as an expert witness for the asbestos industry, to maintain that it is “open to question” whether Selikoff ever received an M.D.
Selikoff obtained a position on the staff of the Sea View Sanatorium on Staten Island. But he soon began to gravitate toward research and became involved in the fight against tuberculosis. Although many effective treatments for tuberculosis had been discovered by that time, there were still patients who were not helped by the existing methods. As a result, it was a major breakthrough when Selikoff and colleague Edward H. Robitzek demonstrated in 1952 that isoniazid proved effective in killing the tubercle bacilli among those who had not been helped by other treatments. In recognition of the accomplishment, he received the Albert Lasker Award for Clinical Medical Research in 1955 along with Robitzek, Walsh McDermott and Carl Muschenheim.
By this time, Selikoff had become affiliated with the Barnert Memorial Hospital of Paterson, New Jersey, and had established a clinic. He soon began to notice an alarming pattern of lung diseases among patients who worked at an asbestos plant, and became increasingly alarmed when many of them died from lung cancer or mesothelioma. As a result, Selikoff began a detailed study of the consequences of prolonged asbestos exposure. Along with a research assistant, he painstakingly examined the work histories and health records of employees at the factory going back to 1942 and found a strong correlation between asbestos exposure and a variety of lung ailments. He announced the findings in 1963 and they caused a stir.
Selikoff was by no means the first researcher to indict asbestos as a cause of lung disease – other studies, most notably one conducted by Richard Doll in 1955, had suggested a link. But the scope and thoroughness of Selikoff’s study, which was published the following year in JAMA, did convince many who had previously been skeptical. His research played a large role in the decision of the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) to place restrictions on workplace exposure to asbestos.
But Selikoff was not satisfied to stop there, and began setting up informal clinics at union halls to warn workers of the risks of asbestos. In 1968, he accepted a position as director of the Environmental and Occupational Health Division of Mount Sinai Hospital in New York and became so passionate about spreading the word that defenders of the asbestos industry began to portray him as a zealot rather than a disinterested scientist.
Selikoff was undeterred, however, and he went on with his research. As he did, he began increasingly to focus on the role of smoking. At a 1967 convention of the American Medical Association, he described what would come to be known as the synergistic relationship between cigarette smoking and asbestos exposure, and he continued researching the topic in the ensuing years. In 1979, Selikoff and E. Cuyler Hammond released a study of more than 12,000 asbestos industry workers that confirmed his conclusions about the synergistic relationship between cigarette smoking and asbestos exposure in the development of lung cancer.
He retired as division director at Mount Sinai in 1985 but even then he remained active in research, continuing to research the effects of asbestos. In 1990, Joseph Hooper summed up his standing in the environmental health community when he wrote, “Dr. Irving J. Selikoff is short, he is round, he is old. Normally these attributes combine unpreposessingly in one man, but not in Irving Selikoff. He has the aura of a savant of the previous century, someone who might have been sculptured by Rodin. There is the cane, for one thing, and the fluent French, when that’s necessary, and, at the core, the sheer dignifying weight of accomplishment.”
Throughout his career, he was a prolific researcher and writer, publishing two books and more than 350 scientific articles, while also editing 11 books and founding two journals. In addition, he played a key role in founding the Society for Occupational and Environmental Health and the Collegium Ramazzini. He received awards from the American Cancer Society, the American Public Health Association, and the New York Academy of Sciences, among others.
Irving Selikoff died on May 20, 1992, at the age of 77. In his honor, the Environmental and Occupational Health Division at Mount Sinai Hospital where he worked for so many years has been renamed the “Irving J. Selikoff Center for Occupational and Environmental Medicine.”
Sources:
“Asbestos and Smoking: A Deadly Combination,” Occupational Hazards, April 1981, 105-106.
Peter Bartrip, Beyond the Factory Gates: Asbestos and Health in Twentieth Century America (New York: Continuum International, 2006).
Bartrip, Peter W. J., “Irving John Selikoff and the Strange Case of the Missing Medical Degrees,” Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences 58.1 (January 2003), 3-33.
Brodeur, Paul, “The Magic Mineral,” New Yorker, October 12, 1968.
Hooper, Joseph, “The Asbestos Mess,” New York Times, November 25, 1990.
Kaempffert, Waldemar, “Science in Review: New Drugs That Combat Tuberculosis Hold Out A Promise of Far More Effective Control,” New York Times, February 24, 1952, E9.
Lambert, Bruce, “Irving J. Selikoff Is Dead at 77; TB Researcher Fought Asbestos,” New York Times, May 22, 1992.
McCulloch, Jock and Tweedale, Geoffrey, “Shooting the Messenger: The Vilification of Irving J. Selikoff,” International Journal of Health Services, 37:4, (2007), 619-634.
McCulloch, Jock and Tweedale, Geoffrey, “Science Is Not Sufficient: Irving J. Selikoff and the Asbestos Tragedy,” New Solutions, 17 (2007), 293-310.
For More Biographical Information:
American Environmental Leaders. From colonial times to the present. Two volumes. By Anne Becher. Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, 2000.
Who’s Who in World Jewry: A biographical dictionary of outstanding Jews. Edited by I.J. Carmin Karpman. New York: Pitman Publishing Corp., 1972.
American Men & Women of Science, many editions.