NOTHING IS RANDOM.

Sick and Suspicious (Bob Herbert, New York Times, 9/4/03)

While I.B.M. officials deny it, evidence is being offered by stricken employees that unusually large numbers of men and women who worked for the giant computer corporation over the past few decades have been dying prematurely.

I.B.M. employees, and relatives of employees who have died, are claiming in a series of very bitter lawsuits that I.B.M. workers have contracted cancer and other serious illnesses from chemicals they were exposed to in semiconductor and disk-drive manufacturing, laboratory work and other very basic industrial operations. . . .

Some of the stories are chilling. Gary Adams, a chemist, sadly offers the names of friends and co-workers from the mid-1960's to late 1970's who were part of a small product development group in Building 13 at the I.B.M. complex on San Jose's South Side: John Wong, Ray Hawkins, Gordon Mol, Dewayne Johnson, Al Smith, Dan Fields, Robert Cappell, Ken Hart.

All of them died after contracting malignant illnesses, most of them succumbing in their 30's and 40's. Incredibly, four of them died after developing brain cancer, a rare disease in adults.

'There are not many still around,' said Mr. Adams, who had a nonmalignant bone tumor removed from his left leg in 1985 and now suffers from a precancerous condition in his esophagus. 'If we'd known all this from the beginning,' he said, 'we'd never have gone to work for I.B.M. We'd all have become shoe salesmen or something." . . .

Alida Hernandez, a retired I.B.M. employee, held a number of jobs that required her to work with toxic chemicals. She learned she had breast cancer and underwent a mastectomy in 1993. She told me this week, "If they had told me when I first interviewed that I would be working with hazardous chemicals that might cause cancer, I would not have gone to work."

I.B.M. has vehemently denied all of the plaintiffs' claims, and is being represented by Jones Day, one of the firms that represented R. J. Reynolds in the tobacco industry's fight against a long line of lawsuits.

Take 100 pennies. Toss them into the air. Because their path is effectively random, Bob Herbert expects them to land in a nice, evenly distributed pattern. If they don't, someone must pay. (Yes, I know that they'll land in a bell curve type pattern. Let's ignore that for now, as it doesn't effect the point.)

In fact, although the pennies will, overall, land in a predictable pattern, there will be some anomolies. A couple of pennies will land together at the edge of the pattern. In a couple of other places, there will be a dearth of pennies. All this is random and while the landing spots can't be predicted, it is entirely predictable that penny clusters and penny voids will occur. And the same is true of cancer.

Now, let's look back at the case Bob Herbert mounts against IBM. A woman had of breast cancer. Some other people who worked together over a couple of decades also had cancer. Four men died of brain cancer; suspicious, Bob implies, because brain cancer is a rare disease in adults. Here are the age-adjusted mortality rates for brain cancer from 1969 through 2000. (Here is the same information for all ages.) I'm going to, arbitrarily, use 3 deaths per hundred thousand as the expected rate of brain cancer deaths among IBM's workforce. The rate has been gradually declining over time, but the range in 2000 was about 3.4 for white men, 2.1 for black men and white women, and 1.1 for black women. IBM's US workforce is about 150,000, so every year IBM should expect to lose 4.5 current employees to brain cancer. So, over the last 35 years, how suspicious is it that four men who worked together should all die of brain cancer? It raises questions, to be sure, but enough so that the New York Times should simply accept that a nefarious employer was knowingly risking its employee's lives -- an employer that is now using a law firm the tobacco companies also used, cementing its guilt. (By the way, the overall cancer mortality rate is about 200 per hundred thousand.)

Finally, Herbert quotes IBM employees as saying that if they had known that their work was risky, they never would have taken it on. Rather than work in chip manufacturing, Mr. Adams, the chemist, would have sold shoes. With all due respect, people take on dangerous jobs every day. Lots of people, few of whom are paid particularly well, do jobs much riskier then any job offered by IBM. Posted by David Cohen at September 4, 2003 12:36 PM