ABSTRACT
Professor Irving J. Selikoff (1915-1992) was America’s foremost medical expert
on asbestos-related diseases between the 1960s and early 1990s. He was also
well known to the public for his media appearances on the burgeoning asbestos
problem. Yet his reputation has been strikingly mixed. On the one hand, he
has been portrayed as a mischief maker and irresponsible demagogue, who
exaggerated the risks of asbestos and so destroyed an industry; on the other, as
a pioneer in asbestos epidemiology, whose landmark studies of insulation (and
other) workers demonstrated the severity of a modern occupational and public
health tragedy. Drawing upon unprecedented access to the Selikoff archive at
Mount Sinai Hospital in New York City, this chapter demonstrates that the most
serious criticisms of Selikoff are either ill-founded or simply false. It also shows
that Selikoff, in the highly politicized world of asbestos science, was a far more
complex and conservative individual than previous studies have suggested.
