Asbestos Podcast EP22 Transcript

Episode 22: The Saranac Coverup

Full transcript from Asbestos: A Conspiracy 4,500 Years in the Making — a 52-episode documentary podcast produced by Danziger & De Llano, LLP.

Episode Information
Series	Asbestos: A Conspiracy 4,500 Years in the Making
Season	1
Episode	22
Title	The Saranac Coverup
Arc	Arc 5 — The Conspiracy Begins (Episode 3 of 5)
Produced by	Charles Fletcher
Research and writing	Charles Fletcher with Claude AI
Listen	Apple Podcasts · Spotify · Amazon Music

Episode Summary

In November 1936, nine asbestos companies — Johns-Manville, Raybestos-Manhattan, Keasbey & Mattison, U.S. Gypsum, American Brakeblok, Asbestos Manufacturing Co., Gatke Corp., Russell Manufacturing, and UNARCO — signed a funding contract with the Saranac Laboratory in upstate New York. The contract contained two critical clauses: research results would be the "property of those advancing the required funds," and publication would occur only "if deemed desirable" by the sponsors. Dr. LeRoy Upson Gardner — a Yale-trained pathologist who had arrived at Saranac Lake in 1917 as a tuberculosis patient, recovered, and stayed to run the laboratory — signed the contract for approximately $5,000 per year. From 1936 to 1943, Gardner's team exposed over 800 mice to asbestos and other dusts. In February 1943, Gardner documented that 9 of 11 asbestos-exposed mice (81.8%) had developed malignant tumors — a rate 16 times higher than control groups — and wrote that "The incidence rate 81.8% is excessive." In the same cover letter to Vandiver Brown, Gardner himself recommended omitting the cancer data from the report pending controlled experiments he believed he could fund independently. He applied for a $10,000 National Cancer Institute grant in March 1943, but his application was unanimously rejected in January 1944 by a committee chaired by Dr. Ludvig Hektoen. On April 8, 1946, Gardner wrote to J.P. Woodard at Johns-Manville requesting access to worker X-rays and noted "I hope, before I die, the opportunity may be afforded us." He died of a heart attack on October 24, 1946, at age 57 — six months after writing those words. In January 1947, the nine sponsor companies met and voted that publication "would not include any objectionable material," defining "objectionable" as "any relation between asbestos and cancer." Vandiver Brown ordered cancer references deleted and asked sponsors to return all draft copies because it would be "unwise to have any copies of the draft report outstanding if the final report was to be different in any substantial respect." A sanitized 42-page report was published in 1948; a promised supplement was never issued. In 1951, Gardner's successor Arthur Vorwald published a journal article calling it "a complete survey" — omitting the 81.8% figure entirely. In 1954, Gerrit Schepers arrived at Saranac, found Gardner's suppressed slides and notes, raised what he had found, and was told to stay quiet — later describing the experience as "I complied thereafter in the United States." The full findings were not published until 1995, in the American Journal of Industrial Medicine — 52 years after Gardner's discovery.

Key Takeaways

The 1936 Contract Was a Blueprint for Purchased Silence. Nine companies bought ownership of Gardner's research before it happened — the "property" clause and the "if deemed desirable" publication clause gave them legal control of whatever he found. Gardner Discovered an 81.8% Tumor Rate in 1943. In asbestos-exposed mice, 9 of 11 animals developed malignant tumors — 16 times the rate of control groups — 17 years before the asbestos-cancer link was "officially" established. Gardner's Scientific Integrity Became the Industry's Cover. His recommendation to omit cancer data pending controlled experiments — honest scientific caution — gave the industry the justification it needed after his death to suppress the findings permanently. The NCI Closed the Only Escape Route. Gardner's $10,000 grant application for independent, properly controlled experiments was unanimously rejected in January 1944, leaving him trapped with industry funding and unable to publish. "Before I Die" — Written Six Months Before His Death. Gardner's April 1946 letter to Woodard containing those words documented his awareness that time and opportunity were running out. He died in October 1946 at age 57. The 1947 Vote Defined Cancer as "Objectionable Material." Nine companies met and voted to delete all cancer references from the report — and Brown ordered draft copies returned to prevent evidence of what had been cut. 52 Years of Silence. From 1943 to 1995. During that time, five thousand Quebec miners struck for dust control without knowing the companies already had cancer proof, and an estimated 70+ human lung cancer cases from those workers accumulated in Saranac files without families being informed.

Key Concepts

Purchased Science: The Contract Mechanism

The November 20, 1936 contract between nine asbestos companies and the Saranac Laboratory was not unique in structure — industry funding of research was common — but the specific clauses were extraordinary. Making research results the "property of those advancing the required funds" gave the sponsors legal ownership not just of the physical materials but of the scientific findings themselves. The "if deemed desirable" publication clause removed the researcher's ability to publish even if he wanted to. Together, the two clauses converted a scientific laboratory into an industry asset whose outputs were controlled by the people most motivated to suppress them. The contract became "Plaintiffs' Exhibit No. 100" in asbestos litigation — one of the most consequential documents in the history of mesothelioma cases.

The Methodological Trap

Gardner's 1943 finding faced a genuine scientific limitation: his mice were not genetically controlled for cancer susceptibility, meaning the 81.8% rate could not be definitively attributed to asbestos exposure rather than genetic predisposition. His solution — apply for independent NCI funding to conduct properly controlled experiments — was scientifically sound and procedurally appropriate. The NCI rejection on methodological grounds was also technically correct: without genetic controls, the result was ambiguous. But the tragedy was that Gardner was not asking the NCI to accept his ambiguous results. He was asking for $10,000 to resolve the ambiguity. The rejection left him permanently trapped with industry funding and permanently unable to publish findings that would have alerted workers to cancer risk decades earlier.

Gardner's Omission Recommendation: Honesty Used Against Itself

The detail that most complicates the Saranac story is that Gardner himself, in the February 1943 cover letter to Brown, recommended leaving the cancer data out of the published report pending controlled experiments. He wrote: "The question of cancer susceptibility now seems more significant than I had previously imagined. I believe I can obtain support for repeating it from the cancer research group. As it will take two or three years to complete such a study, I believe it would better be omitted from the present report." This was honest scientific caution, not industry cooperation. Gardner did not intend to suppress his own findings — he intended to confirm them properly before publishing them. After his death, "omitted from the present report" became the industry's permission slip. In the 1947 suppression vote, in Brown's deletion instructions, in Vorwald's sanitized 1948 report and 1951 journal article, Gardner's own words were the stated rationale for permanent silence. As the episode puts it: he was denied, and then he died, and his own integrity became the excuse.

The Human Evidence: Quebec Miners and Ivan Sabourin

The animal experiments were not the only evidence Gardner had. By 1943, Saranac files contained 11 documented cases of human lung cancer in Quebec asbestos miners, including 2 mesotheliomas — 17 years before the official establishment of the asbestos-mesothelioma link. Lung tissue samples had been transported across the U.S.-Canada border from Johns-Manville facilities in Quebec to the Saranac Laboratory by Ivan Sabourin, general counsel for the Quebec Asbestos Mining Association, who made repeated cross-border trips with specimens in his car. The results were directed to Sabourin and to corporate counsel. Company doctors treating the sick workers were not informed. Families were told the deaths resulted from smoking. By 1958, the Saranac files held over 70 unreported lung cancer cases from Quebec miners. None of those families received the truth in their lifetimes.

The 1947 Suppression Vote

After Gardner's death in October 1946, the nine sponsor companies faced a specific problem: Arthur Vorwald, Gardner's successor as director, was preparing to publish the research. The companies met in January 1947. The vote was documented in court records from the Sumner Simpson Papers: publication "would not include any objectionable material" — defined explicitly as "any relation between asbestos and cancer." Vandiver Brown — the Johns-Manville general counsel who had received Sumner Simpson's "the less said about asbestos" letters in 1935 and organized the 1936 Saranac contract — issued the deletion instructions and asked sponsors to return their copies of the draft report, noting that it would be "unwise to have any copies of the draft report outstanding if the final report was to be different in any substantial respect." The instruction to return draft copies was itself evidence of what had been cut — an attempt to destroy evidence that produced evidence of the attempt.

Schepers and the 1995 Publication

Gerrit Schepers arrived at Saranac Laboratory from South Africa in 1954 as Director of Research. He found Gardner's files — the slides, the handwritten notes, the 81.8% figure, the suppressed human cancer cases. When he raised what he had found, he was told to stay quiet. He described the experience years later in five words: "I complied thereafter in the United States." Schepers went on to testify as an expert witness in asbestos litigation, where he described what the industry knew and when it knew it. But the full account — Gardner's data, the 81.8% figure, the suppression — did not appear in a peer-reviewed journal until 1995, when Schepers published in the American Journal of Industrial Medicine (PMID: 7793430). That publication came 52 years after Gardner's discovery, 49 years after Gardner's death, and 4 years after Schepers left Saranac.

Full Transcript

Cold Open — The Cure Cottage

Host 1: Picture the Adirondack Mountains. 1917. A man arrives at Saranac Lake for the fresh air. And to die.

Host 2: Not one for the tourism brochure.

Host 1: Tuberculosis. In 1917, it was essentially a death sentence. But Saranac Lake had something special — a sanatorium founded by a doctor named Edward Livingston Trudeau who believed fresh mountain air and rest could cure the incurable.

Host 2: "Cure cottages." For people who came there to die.

Host 1: And some of them didn't die. The man who arrived in 1917 was named LeRoy Upson Gardner. He was 28 years old. An assistant professor of pathology at Yale. And he was dying of tuberculosis.

Host 2: Let me guess — he recovered.

Host 1: He recovered. Whatever combination of mountain air and luck and medical care — he beat it. And then he stayed.

Host 2: Stayed to do what?

Host 1: He started working at the Saranac Laboratory — the research facility connected to the sanatorium. By 1927, he was director. By 1936, he had a problem: the laboratory was running out of money. And that's when nine asbestos companies made him an offer.

Host 2: Nine companies. Offering money to a struggling laboratory. I'm sure there were no strings attached.

Host 1: The cure cottage that saved his life —

Host 2: — became the laboratory that buried his greatest discovery. This is Episode 22: The Saranac Coverup.

Sponsor Break 1

Host 2: This episode is brought to you by Danziger and De Llano. Thirty years of turning corporate records into family justice. Dandell dot com.

The Contract — November 20, 1936

Host 1: November 20, 1936. A letter arrives at Saranac Laboratory. It authorizes Dr. Gardner to begin studies on asbestos dust. The funding: nine companies — Johns-Manville, Raybestos-Manhattan, Keasbey and Mattison, U.S. Gypsum, and five others.

Host 2: Nine competitors. Working together. That's never good for the workers.

Host 1: Just like we saw last episode with the trade associations. But this contract had something different. Something worse.

Host 2: Worse than coordinated silence?

Host 1: Buried in the letter was a clause — and I'm quoting now — that the results of Gardner's research would be the "property of those advancing the required funds."

Host 2: So they owned whatever he found. Before he found it.

Host 1: And here's the critical part: publication would only occur "if deemed desirable" by the sponsors.

Host 2: "If deemed desirable." They put that in writing. In 1936.

Host 1: They put that in writing. The industry had learned from Simpson — "the less said about asbestos, the better." Now they were institutionalizing it. Buying the right to silence science before the science even happened.

Host 2: And Gardner signed it. A Yale pathologist signed away his right to publish.

Host 1: Money. The Great Depression had gutted charitable giving. The laboratory was struggling. Gardner had been investigating silicosis — a lung disease from silica dust — and asbestos research was a natural extension. The companies offered five thousand dollars a year.

Host 2: Five thousand a year. Split nine ways. That's what it cost to own a man's science.

The Mouse Experiments — 1936–1943

Host 1: He didn't know what he'd find yet. The experiments were supposed to answer basic questions about asbestosis. Nobody expected what Gardner would actually discover.

Host 2: Cancer.

Host 1: Cancer. From 1936 to 1943, Gardner and his team ran systematic experiments. Over 800 mice exposed to different dusts — silica, quartz, flint, and asbestos. The asbestos mice inhaled long chrysotile fibers for 15 to 24 months.

Host 2: He wasn't even looking for cancer.

Host 1: He was looking for lung disease. The cancer was an accident. In February 1943, Gardner wrote up his findings. Under the section on cancer, he documented what he'd found in 11 mice that had survived long-fiber asbestos exposure.

Host 2: Eleven mice. How many got tumors?

Host 1: Eight developed malignant tumors in their lungs. Eight had tumors in other organs. In total, nine of the eleven had cancer somewhere in their bodies. And then Gardner wrote this sentence: "The incidence rate 81.8% is excessive."

Host 2: "Excessive." That's one word for it.

Host 1: He compared it to mice exposed to other dusts for the same length of time. Average tumor rate? About 19%. The asbestos mice had tumors at rates sixteen times higher than average.

Host 2: Sixteen times. And he couldn't tell anyone.

The Trap — Scientific Integrity as Cover

Host 1: He couldn't publish. And worse — he knew the experiments had a flaw. The mice weren't genetically controlled. He'd accidentally used a strain unusually susceptible to cancer.

Host 2: So even if he could publish, the industry would attack the methodology.

Host 1: Exactly. He needed to redo the experiment with proper controls. Five hundred mice, bred for cancer resistance. Two to three years of careful work. But that required money.

Host 2: Money he couldn't ask the sponsors for. Because they'd know what he was looking for.

Host 1: And here's the detail that makes this story more complicated than a simple coverup. In February 1943, Gardner wrote a cover letter to Vandiver Brown — the same Johns-Manville lawyer who held the contract. And in that letter, Gardner himself recommended leaving the cancer data out of the report.

Host 2: Gardner recommended it?

Host 1: His exact words: "The question of cancer susceptibility now seems more significant than I had previously imagined. I believe I can obtain support for repeating it from the cancer research group. As it will take two or three years to complete such a study, I believe it would better be omitted from the present report."

Host 2: So his own scientific integrity —

Host 1: Gave the industry exactly the cover it needed. Gardner was being honest. He knew the data was suggestive but not conclusive. He wanted to do the experiment properly before publishing. That's good science.

Host 2: And terrible strategy. Because once he was dead, those words — "omitted from the present report" — became the industry's permission slip.

The NCI Rejection

Host 1: So in March 1943, he applied for a ten thousand dollar grant from the National Cancer Institute. Independent funding. A way out of the contract.

Host 2: The one escape hatch.

Host 1: January 8, 1944. A committee chaired by Dr. Ludvig Hektoen — the "grand old man of American medicine" — reviewed Gardner's application. They rejected it. Unanimously.

Host 2: On what grounds?

Host 1: The critique was scientifically sound — without genetic controls, the 81.8% figure "doesn't mean anything." Some mouse strains naturally develop cancer at high rates.

Host 2: So they were technically right.

Host 1: About the flaw? Yes. But here's the tragedy: Gardner wasn't asking the NCI to accept his flawed results. He was asking for ten thousand dollars to conduct proper experiments that would answer the question definitively. They said no.

Host 2: And that meant Gardner stayed trapped. Owned by nine companies who didn't want answers.

"Before I Die"

Host 1: The one door that could have freed him —

Host 2: — closed in his face. And then?

Host 1: April 8, 1946. Six months before his death. Gardner writes a letter to J.P. Woodard at Johns-Manville. He wants to review chest X-rays from Johns-Manville workers — to see if the patterns in human lungs match what he's seeing in mice. And then he writes this sentence: "I hope, before I die, the opportunity may be afforded us."

Host 2: Before I die.

Host 1: Before I die. Was he sick? We don't know for certain. What we know is this: on October 24, 1946, LeRoy Upson Gardner died suddenly of a heart attack. He was 57 years old.

Host 2: Six months after writing "before I die."

Host 1: The experiment notes? Filed away. The microscope slides. The handwritten observations. The 81.8% figure. All of it — property of the nine companies that had funded the research.

The Human Evidence

Host 2: And it wasn't just mice.

Host 1: No. By 1943, Gardner had documented eleven cases of human lung cancer in Quebec asbestos miners and millers — including two mesotheliomas.

Host 2: Mesothelioma. In 1943. Seventeen years before the "official" discovery.

Host 1: Those workers' lungs had been shipped across the border from Johns-Manville facilities in Quebec to Saranac Laboratory.

Host 2: Shipped. Across the border. By whom?

Host 1: A lawyer named Ivan Sabourin. General counsel for the Quebec Asbestos Mining Association. According to court documents, Sabourin made repeated trips across the border transporting lung samples and X-rays in the trunk of his car.

Host 2: A lawyer. Driving dead men's lungs across international borders. In his trunk.

Host 1: The results went directly to Sabourin. The company doctors who treated the workers were never informed. The families were told their loved ones died from smoking.

Host 2: And eleven became seventy.

Host 1: By 1958, the files at Saranac contained over seventy unreported lung cancer cases from Quebec miners. None of the families were ever told the truth.

Sponsor Break 2

Host 2: When corporations control the science, families never get the truth. Danziger and De Llano has spent thirty years finding the documentation that companies tried to hide — the internal memos, the suppressed studies, the evidence that was never supposed to surface. Dandell dot com.

The Suppression Vote — 1947

Host 1: So Gardner dies in October 1946. Within months, the sponsor companies have a problem: Arthur Vorwald, Gardner's successor, is preparing to publish the research.

Host 2: The research with the 81.8% cancer rate.

Host 1: The cancer finding they now owned. So in early 1947 — most sources say January — representatives of the nine funding companies meet. And they make a decision.

Host 2: Let me guess. They voted.

Host 1: They voted. The decision, documented in court records from the Sumner Simpson Papers: publication "would not include any objectionable material."

Host 2: "Objectionable." That's doing a lot of work in that sentence.

Host 1: Defined as — and I'm quoting — "any relation between asbestos and cancer."

Host 2: They defined cancer as objectionable. And put it in the minutes.

Host 1: Vandiver Brown — the same Johns-Manville lawyer who'd received the "less said about asbestos" letter from Sumner Simpson back in 1935 — sent instructions. All references to "cancers and tumors" should be deleted. And Brown asked the sponsors to return their copies of the draft report.

Host 2: Return the drafts. Because —

Host 1: Because — and this is Brown's own language — it would be "unwise to have any copies of the draft report outstanding if the final report was to be different in any substantial respect."

Host 2: They wanted no evidence of what they'd cut. Except they created evidence by writing that down.

The Sanitized Record

Host 1: The 1948 report, published two years after Gardner's death, ran 42 pages. It discussed asbestosis in detail. It mentioned that tumors had been observed. And then it promised: "Rather than delay the entire report, further discussion will be reserved for a supplement to be issued later."

Host 2: The supplement that was definitely coming.

Host 1: Never published. In 1951, Vorwald and his colleagues published a journal article claiming to present "a complete survey of the entire experimental investigation." The 81.8% figure? Deleted entirely.

Host 2: "A complete survey." Minus the cancer. That's not a survey. That's a press release.

Host 1: The sanitized science entered the public record. The truth stayed in the archives.

Fifty-Two Years

Host 2: How long did it stay buried?

Host 1: Fifty-two years. From 1951 to 1995. During that time, workers kept dying. The 1957 meeting we talked about last episode — where the ATI voted not to fund cancer research because it would "stir up a hornet's nest" — that happened six years after the Saranac findings were buried.

Host 2: They already had proof. They didn't need more research.

Host 1: They needed silence. And here's a detail that makes it worse. In February 1949 — two years after the suppression decision — five thousand workers in Quebec went on strike.

Host 2: The asbestos miners. What were they striking for?

Host 1: One of their demands: elimination of asbestos dust. Another: action to check the spread of lung disease. They were fighting for dust control. They had no idea the companies already possessed proof that the dust caused cancer.

Host 2: They went on strike two years after the evidence was buried. Fighting without their strongest weapon.

Host 1: The companies suppressed the cancer evidence in 1947. Two years later, workers struck for better conditions. The strike was declared illegal. Provincial police were dispatched. The workers lost.

Schepers and the 1995 Revelation

Host 2: So who eventually pulled this out of the filing cabinet?

Host 1: In 1954, a South African researcher named Gerrit Schepers came to Saranac Laboratory as Director of Research. And he found the files.

Host 2: Gardner's notes. The slides. The suppression.

Host 1: All of it. And when Schepers raised what he'd found, he was told to stay quiet. Years later, he described what happened in five words: "I complied thereafter in the United States."

Host 2: "I complied." That's it?

Host 1: That's it. He became an expert witness in asbestos litigation. He testified about what the industry knew and when they knew it. But the full account didn't appear in a peer-reviewed journal until 1995.

Host 2: 1995. Gardner's research finally published — fifty-two years after he wrote it.

Host 1: The American Journal of Industrial Medicine. Gardner's 81.8% figure. The suppression. The promised supplement that never appeared. All of it, finally in the scientific record.

Host 2: Fifty-two years. How many workers died in that gap?

Host 1: Gardner died thinking his research would eventually be published. He wrote "I hope, before I die" — and the opportunity never came.

Sponsor Break 3 — Anna Jackson Spotlight

Host 2: If you're listening to this because someone you love was diagnosed with mesothelioma, you already know what that waiting feels like. The waiting for answers. The waiting for someone to tell you where the exposure happened and who's responsible.

Host 1: Paul Danziger and Rod De Llano have spent over thirty years finding the documentation that companies tried to bury. Nearly two billion dollars recovered for asbestos victims. And their team knows this fight personally.

Host 2: Anna Jackson is Director of Patient Support. Fifteen years ago, she lost her own husband to cancer. She walked away from a career in advertising and joined this fight — because she understood what families go through.

Host 1: That's who answers when you call. Not a call center. A team where everyone has skin in the game.

Host 2: Dandell dot com. That's D-A-N-D-E-L-L dot com.

Host 1: The documentation exists. The truth exists. Someone just has to find it.

The Blueprint

Host 2: So what does the Saranac story prove?

Host 1: It's the mechanism. The blueprint for how you purchase silence.

Host 2: Step one: fund the research.

Host 1: Step two: own the results.

Host 2: Step three: bury what you find.

Host 1: Gardner's scientific caution — his own recommendation to omit the cancer data until he could do it right — was appropriate given the experimental limitations. He wanted to do the work properly. He applied for independent funding to escape the trap.

Host 2: He was denied. And then he died. And his own integrity became the excuse.

Host 1: And the companies met. And they voted. And fifty-two years passed before anyone outside the litigation system knew the truth.

Next Episode Tease

Host 2: But there's more.

Host 1: There's more. The animal studies weren't the only evidence they buried. Next episode, we're going to look at what the industry did with human data — the workers whose lungs ended up at Saranac, and the pattern that emerges when you trace their deaths.

Host 2: The seventy workers nobody counted.

Host 1: The seventy workers nobody counted. Episode 23: The Human Experiments.

Host 2: We'll see you then.

External Links

Primary Documents and Legal Records

• Mesothelioma Compensation Guide — Danziger & De Llano
• Asbestos Exposure Information — Danziger & De Llano

Medical and Scientific Resources

• Schepers 1995 AJIM publication (PMID: 7793430) — Full publication of Gardner's suppressed findings
• Vorwald 1951 sanitized survey (PMID: 14789264) — The "complete survey" omitting the 81.8% figure
• NCI Malignant Mesothelioma — National Cancer Institute

Asbestos Exposure and Health

• Asbestos Exposure — Danziger & De Llano
• Asbestos Exposure Information — Mesothelioma Lawyer Center
• What Products Contained Asbestos? — Mesothelioma.net

Compensation and Legal Resources

• Mesothelioma Compensation Guide — Danziger & De Llano
• Asbestos Trust Funds Guide — Mesothelioma Lawyer Center
• Asbestos Trust Funds — Mesothelioma.net

Podcast Resources

• Episode 22: The Saranac Coverup — MLNM podcast landing page
• Asbestos Podcast Hub — All episodes and series information
• Episode 22 on Apple Podcasts
• Episode 22 on Spotify

Series Navigation

Asbestos: A Conspiracy 4,500 Years in the Making — Arc 5: The Conspiracy Begins
Previous: Episode 21: The Asbestos Textile Institute	Episode 22: The Saranac Coverup	Next: Episode 23: The Human Experiments

Related Wiki Pages

• Saranac_Laboratory — The Adirondack research institution and its asbestos suppression history
• LeRoy_Upson_Gardner — Yale pathologist, Saranac director, discoverer of 81.8% tumor rate
• Vandiver_Brown — Johns-Manville general counsel who organized the 1936 contract and 1947 suppression vote
• Simpson_Letters — Executive correspondence documenting coordinated suppression (Episode 20)
• Asbestos_Textile_Institute — Trade association and 1957 "hornet's nest" vote (Episode 21)
• Asbestos_Occupational_Exposure_Quick_Reference — High-risk occupations and exposure statistics
• Asbestos_Trust_Fund_Quick_Reference — Compensation mechanisms for occupationally exposed workers
• The_Asbestos_Podcast — Main podcast page with all episodes

About This Series

Asbestos: A Conspiracy 4,500 Years in the Making is a 52-episode documentary podcast tracing the complete history of asbestos from 4700 BCE to the 2024 EPA ban. The series is produced by Danziger & De Llano, LLP, a nationwide mesothelioma law firm with over 30 years of experience and nearly $2 billion recovered for asbestos victims.

Episode 22 is the third episode of Arc 5 ("The Conspiracy Begins"), which documents the evolution of asbestos suppression from personal letters (Episode 20) to institutional trade association votes (Episode 21) to the purchase of scientific research itself (Episode 22). The Saranac story introduces the mechanism that would be replicated across the industry: fund the research, own the results, suppress what you find.

Approximately 3,000 Americans are diagnosed with mesothelioma each year. Mesothelioma has a latency period of 20-50 years, meaning people exposed decades ago are still being diagnosed today. Over $30 billion remains available in asbestos trust funds for victims.

If you or a loved one were exposed to asbestos or have been diagnosed with mesothelioma, contact Danziger & De Llano for a free case evaluation. Call (866) 222-9990. Available seven days a week.