From Poison to Carcinogen: Towards a Global History of Concerns about Benzene

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enzene’s history resembles that of many another substance discovered, industrially exploited, and then increasingly regulated over the last two centuries of the chemical industry’s development. Its structure was first elucidated and duplicated on an industrial scale in nineteenth-century Germany.1 First finding wide use as a solvent, from the 1920s it emerged as a major feedstuff in the making of petrochemicals – now far B

From Poison to Carcinogen: Towards a Global History

of Concerns about Benzene

Christopher Sellers

Global Environment 7 (2014): 38–71© 2014 The White Horse Press. doi: 10.3197/197337314X13927191904808

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and away its most common use. The mushrooming of benzene production and usage constitutes an important, if neglected, strand of what economic historians term a Second Industrial Revolution, those technically-based transformations shared by the leading industrial economies in Europe and North America from the late nineteenth into the twentieth century.2 Environmental historians have more recently begun to explore the ecological impacts of parallel changes on more supranational, long-term, and global scales,3 yet this very leap toward a ‘world’ vantage point has mostly inclined its proponents away from questions that are more cultural and political. Among these, why was it only over the latter part of the twentieth century that human-made chemicals such as benzene helped stir environmentalism in many a nation? This paper charts a transnational perspective on a shift that underlay environmentalism’s rise: a sea change in thinking about the threat that benzene and other environmental chemicals posed to human health.4

Especially in the most industrialized nations after World War II, benzene’s newfound dangers joined with those of a handful of other toxins – radioactivity, lead, and asbestos among them – to inaugu-rate a new appreciation of the long-term, low-dose health effects

1 For instance, A.J. Rocke, ‘Hypothesis and Experiment in the Early Develop-ment of Kekule’s Benzene Theory’, in Annals of Science, 42, 4, 1985: 355.

2 A.D. Chandler, T. Hikino, Scale and Scope: The Dynamics of Industrial Capi-talism, Belknap Press, Cambridge (MA) 1994; D.S. Landes, The Unbound Pro-metheus: Technological Change and Industrial Development in Western Europe from 1750 to the Present, Cambridge University Press, London 1969.

3 J. Radkau et al., Nature and Power: A Global History of the Environment, German Historical Institute, Washington, DC , 2008; J.R. McNeill, Something New Under the Sun: An Environmental History of the Twentieth-Century World, WW Norton & Co., New York 2000; J.R. McNeill, Alan Roe (eds.), Global Environmental History: An Introductory Reader, Routledge, New York 2013; G. Corona (ed.), ‘What Is Global Environmental History?’, in Global Environment, 2, 2008: 229–249.

4 The best, and nearly the only, overview of these issues thus far is: P. Infante, ‘Benzene: An Historical Perspective on the American and European Occupational Setting’, in Late Lessons from Early Warnings: The Precautionary Principle 1896–2000, European Environmental Agency, Copenhagen 2002, pp. 38–51.

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from environmental chemicals.5 In particular, benzene was among the first of many widely used substances that came to be recognized as causing human cancers. Not just the extra-human ecology cel-ebrated in most histories of environmentalism, but the ever-growing understanding of benzene’s and other chemicals’ effects inside the human organism – what Rachel Carson termed ‘the internal environ-ment’ – sparked imperatives for environmental politics and regula-tory transformation.6 In particular, experts’ window on the internal workings of such substances stretched out across time to encompass more of the human lifespan. Essential foundations were thereby laid for a more restrictive and precautionary approach to environmental

5 Ionizing radiation is often considered the first substance to have defined the need for a more precautionary approach: C. Clark, Radium Girls, Women and Industrial Health Reform: 1910–1935, University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill 1997; M.S. Lindee, Suffering Made Real: American Science and the Survivors at Hiroshima, University of Chicago Press, Chicago 1997; J.S. Walker, Permis-sible Dose: A History of Radiation Protection in the Twentieth Century, University of California Press, Berkeley 2000. But for some, such as Dr. Wilhelm Hueper, the formative experience came through studies of chemical industry workers in the 1930s: C. Sellers, ‘Discovering Environmental Cancer: Wilhelm Hueper, Post-World War II Epidemiology, and the Vanishing Clinician’s Eye’, in American Journal of Public Health, 87, 11, 1997: 1824–1835. Lead poisoning in children also gave rise to new awareness of chronic low-level health effects starting esp. in the 1960s: C. Warren, Brush with Death: A Social History of Lead Poisoning, Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore 2000; P.C. English, Old Paint: A Medical History of Childhood Lead-Paint Poisoning in the United States to 1980, Rutgers University Press, New Brunswick 2001; D. Rosner, G. Markowitz, Lead Wars, University of California Press, Berkeley 2012. So did monitoring and studies of asbestos, which by the 1930s had been turning up cases of lung cancer and then mesothelioma: P.E. Enterline, ‘Asbestos and Cancer: The International Lag’, in The American Review of Respiratory Disease, 118, 6, 1978: 975–978; B.I. Cas-tleman, Asbestos: Medical and Legal Aspects, Law & Business, New York 1984; P.W.J. Bartrip, Beyond the Factory Gates: Asbestos And Health in Twentieth Century America, Continuum, New York 2006; id., The Way from Dusty Death: Turner and Newall and the Regulation of Occupational Health in the British Asbestos Industry, 1890s–1970, Athlone Press, London 2001; J. McCulloch, G. Tweedale, Defend-ing the Indefensible: The Global Asbestos Industry and Its Fight for Survival, Oxford University Press, New York 2008.

6 R. Carson, Silent Spring, Houghton Mifflin, New York 1962, p. 179.

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chemicals in many nations, within the workplace as well as without. In the realm of international policy recommendations, the attack on benzene was especially pioneering. Whereas in the 1930s the acute effects of benzene poisoning made it one of several industrial diseases recommended for workers’ compensation laws, in 1971 the growing appreciation of its chronic effects made it the first industrial chemical of the post-WWII period addressed by its own International Labor Organization convention.7 Benzene’s history thus offers a revealing prism into the environmental health problems created by the global spread of modern chemical production: both the damage it inflicted on people and the checkered, gradual, and varied pathways by which the extent of this damage came to be known and regulated.

A project of writing ‘biographies of scientific objects’ elaborat-ed by Lorraine Daston and others provides important suggestions about just how such a history may be written: by concentrating on ‘what makes it possible’ for a substance like benzene ‘to come into being’ via the thought and practices of scientists.8 The focus here falls on expert perceivers, chemists in particular, who first began to identify benzene as ‘benzene’. The global history recently pursued by environmental historians also suggests the value of tracking the material history of benzene itself, as a substance composed of an ‘ar-omatic’ circle of carbon and hydrogen molecules that over the last two centuries has been manufactured on an industrial scale in more and more corners of the earth. This historiographic pathway leads into the business, technology, and pollution histories that helped expand actual human exposures to benzene as it became a raw ma-terial for commodities from aniline dyes and drugs to gasoline to plastics to synthetic fibers to explosives and pesticides. While these changes raised the likelihood that the effects of benzene would be discovered, many of these impacts turned up sooner and with more

7 International Labor Organization, ‘C136 Benzene Convention, 1971’, 1971, http://www.ilo.org/ilolex/cgi-lex/convde.pl?C136 (accessed 26 January 2013)

8 L. Daston, Biographies of Scientific Objects, University of Chicago Press, Chi-cago 2000; other similar methods include I. Hacking, Historical Ontology, Harvard University Press, Cambridge (MA) 2004; U. Klein, W. Lefevre, Materials in Eight-eenth-Century Science: A Historical Ontology, MIT Press, Cambridge (MA) 2007.


9 R. Snyder, G. Witz, B.D. Goldstein, ‘The Toxicology of Benzene’, in Envi-ronmental Health Perspectives, 100, April 1993: 293–306; L. Zhang et al., ‘Sys-tems Biology of Human Benzene Exposure’, in Chemico-biological Interactions, 184, 1–2, 2010: 86–93.

political and legal consequence in some benzene-using nations than in others.

Setting aside important questions about this chemical’s travels as a pollutant and its impacts on nonhuman organisms, this paper ex-plores the evolving transnational recognition of three ways (as recog-nized by today’s scientists) that benzene’s passage into and through the human body can provoke dangerous pathology. Their marked differences in timing go a long way toward explaining the differ-ent historical pace at which each came to be recognized. The easiest to detect, and first to be acknowledged, was acute poisoning from short and massive exposures, that could unleash copious internal and external bleeding and turn deadly. Aplastic anemia, a profound suppression of oxygen-carrying (red) and infection-fighting (white) blood cells, can also be irreversible and fatal, but takes months or years to manifest itself. Leukemia, a malignant proliferation of white cells that can shut off all normal blood cell production, usually ap-pears at least five years to a decade after the exposure begins. The low levels of exposure involved in these last two chronic ailments, as well as the lengthy periods of exposure required, made them far more difficult to detect.9

To track the emergent awareness of each of these hazards, I look especially at Germany, the early innovator in industrial benzene pro-duction, and at France and Italy among the European countries, where the case for benzene’s carcinogenicity consolidated early; I also look at the United States, the largest producer and user just after World War II. To argue the need of balancing these developed-world experiences with those in developing nations, I also consider Mexico and China. Over the twentieth century, both acquired benzene in-dustries comparable to their industrialized counterparts, albeit at dif-ferent paces and under quite different systems of governance.

Recognition of acute or ‘classical’ benzene poisoning roughly fol-

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lowed the establishment of benzene production and consumption on an industrial scale – though less so in Mexico, at least prior to World War II. As for the more chronic effects, not only was their discovery more delayed, it followed much less automatically from increases in production in a given country. In fact, well into the 1960s in the United States – the very nation which pioneered new forms of manufacture and uses of benzene after World War II – health experts remained considerably more skeptical about a causal link between benzene to leukemia than did European contempo-raries. Soon, however, American experts and regulators joined with those in Europe not just in recognizing benzene’s carcinogenicity, but also in devising much tighter and more precautionist control over workplace as well as environmental exposures. Benzene studies and regulation in modernizing China and Mexico illustrate just how much historical narratives of developing nations diverge not just from trends in the developed world, but from one another. Viewed transnationally, this history suggests, the quest for a single ‘global’ narrative for a toxin such as benzene misses much, especially when drawn solely from experiences in the developed world.10 Certainly, it offers too reductive a perspective on the past for our twenty-first-century world, when so much of the world’s chemical and other production has shifted to nations that we are still inclined to see as only ‘developing’.

From Production to ‘Poisoning’: The NineteenthCentury through the Interwar Period

Today’s scientists can find benzene in the smoke from forest fires or volcanos, yet most detectable amounts come from human

10 My method here draws on the notion of national ‘industrial hazard regimes’ as outlined in J. Melling, C. Sellers (eds.), Dangerous Trade: Histories of Industrial Hazard Across a Globalizing World , Temple University Press, Philadelphia, 2011; other transnational frameworks are articulated in C. Sellers, ‘Cross-nationalizing the History of Industrial Hazard’, in Medical History, 54, 3, 2010: 315–340; Mc-Culloch, Tweedale, Defending the Indefensible, cit.; G. Hecht, Being Nuclear: Afri-cans and the Global Uranium Trade, MIT Press, Cambridge (MA) 2012.


uses, mostly human-ignited fossil fuels.11 Benzene’s establishment as an object of scientific study began not long after an extract from trees in Malaysia called ‘flowers of benzoin’ was carried to Europe, when it became well-known among experimenters in the 1700s in Britain’s Royal Society.12 First synthesized in 1820s labs as a sweet-smelling ‘aromatic’, its chemical structure posed one of the most difficult puzzles for early British and European organic chemists. Among them, the German Kekule famously dreamed about, then solved, the riddle of its ring-like structure.13 Little or no discussion about any human toll from the substance appeared in print until af-ter its synthesis moved from the chemical laboratory into the indus-trial factory. In those countries where benzene came to be made and used on a more industrial scale, acute poisoning began turning up, as well as a more chronic form of poisoning. Yet only after World War I would a common pattern of chronic effect earn its own name (‘aplastic anemia’) and the first cases of benzene-associated leuke-mia show up in medical journals.

In Germany, followed to a lesser extent by other European na-tions and the United States, early industrial synthesis of benzene started with hard coal, then turned to the coal-derived residues of coke ovens. Benzene’s capacity for dissolving other organic liquids and then quickly evaporating led to widening use as a solvent or

11 P. Tinoco et al., ‘Molecular Descriptors of the Effect of Fire on Soils under Pine Forest in Two Continental Mediterranean Soils’, in Organic Geochemistry, 37, 12, 2006: 1995–2018; B. Capaccioni et al., ‘Source Conditions and Degradation Processes of Light Hydrocarbons in Volcanic Gases: An Example from El Chichón Volcano (Chiapas State, Mexico)’, in Chemical Geology, 206, 1–2, 2004: 81.

12 D. Monro, ‘An Account of Some Neutral Salts Made with Vegetable Acids, and with the Salt of Amber; Which Shews That Vegetable Acids Differ from One Another; and That the Salt of Amber Is an Acid of a Particular Kind, and Not the Same with That of Sea Salt, or of Vitriol, as Alledged by Many Chemical Authors’, in Philosophical Transactions (1683–1775), 57, 1767: 479–516; A. Dalby, Danger-ous Tastes: The Story of Spices, University of California Press, Berkeley 2000.

13 A.J. Rocke, ‘Hypothesis and Experiment in the Early Development of Kekule’s Benzene Theory’, in Annals of Science, 42, 4, 1985: 355; G.P. Schiemenz, ‘A Heretical Look at the Benzolfest’, in British Journal for the History of Science, 26, 2, 1993: 195–205.

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diluent mixed into paints, varnishes, and glues.14 Germany became the world’s first major exporter of the substance, producing some 90,000 tons by 1908.15 The scrutiny of worker health, also much more extensive in Germany than elsewhere during this time and in-cluding growing ranks of state-appointed doctors, also yielded many of the earliest reports of ‘poisoning’ from benzene, as vapor from the fast-drying chemical wafted into workers’ lungs.16 By the 1890s reports were widespread of a characteristic affliction that struck quickly as a worker entered into an enclosed space such as a barrel or washing machine. Blood began leaking from the stomach and res-piratory tract and pooling just under the skin; victims often passed out and could die within hours. Already by then, a more chronic form of benzene poisoning had also registered in the German-lan-guage literature describing a condition among women workers at a velocipede factory in Sweden. Among the nine who fell ill, the lag between first exposures and the start of their illnesses ranged from three to four months. As with later cases of more chronic poisoning, red blood cell counts plummeted dramatically, white cells nearly vanished from the blood and fatality was high: four of the nine died. American usages of benzene, though small compared to European nations prior to the First World War, also produced the first medical report on that side of the Atlantic: an account of a series of chronic poisonings involving ‘profound’ ‘blood destruction’ among those working with benzene-laden sealant in a canning factory.17

14 A. Hamilton, ‘The Growing Menace of Benzene (Benzol) Poisoning in Amer-ican Industry’, in Journal of the American Medical Association, 78, 1922: 627 (on changing usage; US versus German production); also W.J. McGurty, ‘Toluene and Benzene Recovery Operations in Greater New York’, in Gas Age, 47, 1919: 175–180.

15 L. Greenburg, ‘Benzol Poisoning as an Industrial Hazard: Review of Studies Conducted in Cooperation with the Subcommittee on Benzol of the Committee on Industrial Poisoning of the National Safety Council’, in Public Health Reports (1896–1970), 41, 27, 1926: 1361.

16 A. Wulf, Der Sozialmediziner Ludwig Teleky (1872–1957) und die Entwick-lung der Gewerbehygiene zur Arbeitsmedizin, Mabuse-Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 2001; L. Teleky, History of Factory and Mine Hygiene, Columbia University Press, New York 1948.

17 C.G. Santesson, ‘Über Chronische Vergiftungen mit Steinkohlen-theerben-


As production and use of benzene in the US mushroomed during and after the war, reports of benzene poisoning proliferated on the American side of the Atlantic. In addition to serving as a solvent, benzene found new usages in rubber and explosives manufacturing and, during the 1920s, as a constituent of fuel for autos. By 1928, one manufacturer boasted of some four hundred uses for the 200,000 tons of benzene that US companies were producing. Though most of this benzene still came from coal, petroleum producers also began experimenting with how their refineries might make this ever-more lucrative substance. Facilitating reportage of the worker impacts was a growing network of health experts coming to oversee this nation’s workplaces.18 Beginning with Alice Hamilton, who surveyed the wartime munitions factories as the first ‘industrial hygiene’ investi-gator for the federal Department of Labor, US reportage of benzene poisoning rose alongside benzene’s spread through US workplaces.19 After the war, those finding niches in the new programs of industrial hygiene instituted by university medical and public health schools amplified the American coverage of benzene’s occupational toll.

zin: Vier Todesfälle’, in Archiv für Hygiene, 31, 1912: 336; L. Mohr, ‘Ueber Blut-veränderungen bei Vergiftungen mit Benzolkörpern’, in Deutsche Medizinische Wochenschrift, 28, 5, 1902: 73–76; L. Selling, ‘A Preliminary Report of Some Cas-es of Purpura Haemorrhagica Due to Benzol Poisoning’, in Bulletin of the Johns Hopkins Hospital, 21, 1910: 33–37; L. Selling, Benzol as a Leucotoxin: Studies on the Degeneration and Regeneration of Blood and the Haematopoetic Organs, Johns Hopkins Press, Baltimore 1913; Greenburg, ‘Benzol Poisoning’ cit. (for discus-sion of American versus European production and use prior to and after WWI).

18 C. Sellers, ‘‘A Prejudice That May Cloud the Mentality”: The Making of Modern Objectivity in American Industrial Medicine’, in Silent Victories; History and Progress of Public Health in America, J.W. Ward, C. Warren (eds.), Oxford University Press, New York 2006, pp. 230–252.

19 A. Hamilton, Industrial Poisons Used or Produced in the Manufacture of Ex-plosives, Bulletin of the United States Bureau of Labor Statistics 219, Washington, DC, 1917; id., ‘The Growing Menace of Benzene (Benzol) Poisoning’ cit.; H.J. Cronin, ‘Benzol Poisoning in the Rubber Industry’, in Boston Medical and Surgical Journal, 191, 1924: 1164–1166.

20 At this point in the United States, ‘industrial hygiene’ served as an umbrella term for much of the activities and knowledge we today describe as occupational or workplace health. Their expertise also extended to extra-workplace environ-

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As in Europe, the steady stream of reports of poisoning from benzene in the US helped lead, in some states, to its being recognized as an occu-pational disease covered by worker’s compensation laws.21 By the 1930s worker’s compensation for benzene poisoning, which supposedly gave employers an incentive to prevent it, had achieved wide acceptance as a legal fix not just in the more industrial states of the US, but across the industrialized world as well. When the International Labour Organiza-tion (ILO) passed Convention 42 in 1934 to recommend a ‘schedule’ of occupational disease that should receive compensation, ‘poisoning by benzene or its homologues’ was seventh of ten on the list.22

And this legal recognition, in turn, contributed to more stable contours and meanings that benzene poisoning was acquiring in the US as in European medical circles during this time.23 Medically

ments; most early studies of industrial pollution in the US were also undertaken by ‘industrial hygiene’ experts. ‘Industrial medicine’, on the other hand, named the work done by doctors alone, usually those hired by employers. Other nations had somewhat different designations for these realms; e.g., in German, Gewerbe-hygiene had a more restrictive meaning compared to Arbeitsmedizin.

21 F.J. Rohner, C.W. Baldridge, G.H. Hansmann, ‘Chronic Benzene Poisoning – Report of a Case with Necropsy Findings’, in Archives of Pathology & Laboratory Medicine, 1, 2, 1926: 221–226; C.P. McCord, ‘The Present Status of Benzene (Benzol) Poisoning’, in Journal of the American Medical Association, 96, 1929: 280–283; A. Hamilton, ‘Benzene (Benzol) Poisoning’, in Archives of Pathology, 11, 3, 1931: 436–456; C.P. McCord, Benzol (Benzene) Poisoning: A New Investigation of the Toxicity of Benzene and Benzene Impurities, Industrial Health Conservancy Laboratories, Cincinnati 1932; Greenburg, ‘Benzol Poisoning’ cit.

22 ‘C042 – Workmen’s Compensation (Occupational Diseases) Convention (Revised), 1934 (No. 42)’, International Labour Organization http://www.ilo.org/dyn/normlex/en/f?p=NORMLEX-PUB:55:0::NO::P55_TYPE,P55_LANG,P55_DOCUMENT,P55_NODE:CON,en,C042,%2FDocument (accessed 18 October 2013).

23 A source of sometime confusion in the literature of this period was the con-flation of ‘benzene’ with ‘benzol’ as well as ‘benzine’. Benzol, the name for a crude version of benzene that was mixed with other hydrocarbons, was actually the more accurate name, at least in many industrial settings outside the chemists’ labs. Only gradually, as purer versions of benzene came to be demanded and produced, did ‘ben-zene’ begin to predominate as the name for what was being extracted, shipped, and used. One further term that could mislead was ‘benzine’. For chemists, this mixture of non-aromatic but lighter hydrocarbons was quite distinct from benzene, the origi-


speaking, during this interwar period, doctors were consolidating a clearer and more coherent idea about about a more insidious condi-tion that longer-term exposure to benzene could cause, distinguisha-ble from simple ‘poisoning’: aplastic anemia. Though not mentioned in Hamilton’s and others’ earliest reports, by the mid-1920s it gained currency because of similarities between the blood of many ben-zene victims and with ‘that found in a particular variety of ‘anemia’. Defining aplastic anemia as a disease in its own right also entailed recognizing that benzene exposure was only one of its several causes. Health scientists thereby took one more step toward understanding the ecological complexity of benzene’s workings within the human body. Some began to note the parallels between benzene’s bodily im-pacts and those of other industrial substances that otherwise seemed quite distinct, notably radium.24 Enabling these insights were trends not so much in the industry itself as in the health professions across the US as well as Europe: the mounting frequency of blood analysis in medical clinics, the rising number of medical and public health schools as well as governments hiring industrial health experts, and a growing number of private industrial physicians and clinics who might provide a readership for scientific reports.25

This interwar period also brought the earliest reports suggesting that

nal aromatic; yet popular as well as medical authors were not always so clear about the difference. Benzine, which also found many consumers uses, was a product of early oil refineries long before these became the primary producers of benzene. J.C. Bridge, ‘Benzene and Benzine’, in Lancet, 1, 1934: 1089–1089; A. Chassevant, ‘Procédé de recherche et de dosage des vapeurs de benzine dans l’atmosphere’, in Comptes Rendus des Seances de la Societe de Biologie et de ses Filiales, 57, 1905: 1009–1010.

24 S. Wachtel, ‘Zur Frage der Benzoltherapie der Leukämie’, in Deutsche Medizinische Wochenschrift, 39, 7, 1913: 307–308; K. Jespersen, ‘Ein Fall von ben-zolbehandelter Leukämie mit eigentümlichem Verlauf ’, in Deutsche Medizinische Wochenschrift, 39, 27, 1913: 1300–1302.

25 C. Sellers, Hazards of the Job: From Industrial Disease to Environmental Health Science, University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill 1997; G. Schottdorf, Arbeits- und Leistungsmedizin in der Weimarer Republik, Abhandlungen zur Ge-schichte der Medizin und der Naturwissenschaften 74, Matthiesen Verlag, Hu-sum 1995; Luigi Carozzi, ‘Training in Industrial Medicine’, in International La-bour Review, 40, 6, 1939: 733–767.

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benzene might not just decimate blood production, but at some point tip the manufacture of blood cells into malignant overdrive. The first came from the French physician Delore, working in a clinic in Lyon, who saw a number of patients from a chemical plant on the city’s out-skirts. In July of 1927 a patient walked into his clinic who had worked in the factory for 15 years, five of them in a spinning room ‘avec de la benzine’ (contemporary British specialists assumed that ‘benzine’ here named what in the English-speaking world was called ‘benzol’ or ‘ben-zene’, though it was not entirely clear). This worker had earlier seemed immune to its oppressive working conditions, though other workers had frequently only lasted a month. However, at the beginning of July he began to vomit blood and developed subcutaneous hemorrhages that drove him to the clinic. The examining physician found he had all the signs of acute leukemia: swollen glands, a temperature, and a blood sample teeming with white cells but with few red cells and low hemoglobin. He died three days later.26

What is striking to an early twenty-first-century US historian of environmental health about this first report of what would become known as ‘benzene leukemia’ is just how unremarkable it seemed to contemporary physicians in Europe and especially in the United States. Over the 1930s, at least one US physician reported a similar instance of leukemia in a benzene worker, and many discussions of benzene cited the Delore report.27 But Americans emphasized how these case reports ‘had not proved a causal relationship’ even if ‘the evidence was highly suggestive’. They remained tentative even in the wake of a report out of Massachusetts General Hospital that 2 of 19 benzene-exposed workers had been stricken with leukemia, as well as a partially successful effort by a German researcher to reproduce this cancer using benzene on laboratory mice (8 of 54 got this disease).28 Remarkably, both German

26 P. Delore and Borgomano, ‘Leucémie aiguë au cours de l’intoxication ben-zénique’, in Journal de Medicine de Lyon, 9, 1928: 227–233.

27 E. Falconer, ‘An Instance of Benzene Poisoning Followed by Leukemia’, in American Journal of Medical Sciences, 18, 1933: 353–361.

28 L. Selling, E. Osgood, ‘Chronic Benzene Poisoning’, in International Clinics, 3, 1935: 52–63; G.O.E. Lignac, ‘Die Benzolleukämie bei Menschen und weißen Mäusen’, in Krankheitsforschungen, 9, 1932: 403–453.


and French publications by 1939 spoke of ‘benzene leukemia’ as an established clinical entity, following the longstanding practice – as with ‘lead colic’ or ‘miner’s phthisis’ – of naming a disease with its presumed occupational cause. But US counterparts did not.29

Why did the same evidence that benzene might cause leukemia among exposed workers seem less conclusive to US doctors and hy-gienists than it did to European counterparts – and certainly much less remarkable to either than to later generations on both sides of the Atlantic? For one thing they were comparing workers who got leuke-mia to those stricken with other chronic syndromes that were more common, also nearly as deadly. Once patients succumbed to aplastic anemia, about a third of them died.30 As I have argued elsewhere, since Percival Pott’s identification of scrotal cancer in chimney sweeps in the late 1700s, European doctors pinpointing workplace causes of cancer had long relied on series of cases culled solely in medical clinics by physicians’ history-taking and diagnosis. This tradition was less well-established in the US; nor did their US counterparts have recourse to the comprehensive national statistics of compensated worker diseases kept by European nation-states that augmented the case series method once ‘benzene leukemia’ was declared compensa-ble.31 In the United States, where the systematic collection of medical records was less institutionalized and even viewed with suspicion, in-dustrial health experts leaned more heavily on experimental methods or lab-inspired epidemiology in such a way as to make them more skeptical about long-term effects.32 US researchers’ dependence on

29 T. Mallory, E. Gall, W. Brickley, ‘Chronic Exposure to Benzene (Benzol) III: Pathological Effects’, in Journal of Industrial Hygiene and Toxicology, 21, 1939: 355–393; F. Hunter, ‘Chronic Exposure to Benzene (Benzol) II: Clinical Effects’, in Journal of Industrial Hygiene and Toxicology, 21, 1939: 331–354; Lignac, ‘Die Benzolleukämie’ cit.; M. Perrin, P. Kissel, L. Pierquin, ‘Leucose aiguë benzolique’, in Paris Medicine, 1, 1938: 533ff.

30 Hunter, ‘Chronic Exposure to Benzene (Benzol)’ cit.31 Sellers, ‘Discovering Environmental Cancer’ cit.32 C. Sellers, ‘The Cold War Over the Worker’s Body: Cross-National Clashes

over Maximum Allowable Concentrations in the Post-World War II Era’, in Toxi-cants, Health and Regulation Since 1945, S. Boudia, N. Jas (eds.), Pickering & Chatto, London 2013, pp. 25–46; C. Sellers, ‘The Public Health Service’s Office

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corporate funding (as opposed to the government salaries enjoyed by many of their European counterparts) also made any claims about oc-cupational causes – and the claimants – more vulnerable to attack by industrial interests. In the chemical industry, Wilhelm Hueper’s ex-perience at Dupont during the 1930s suggests that occupational can-cer had become a sore spot for the chemical industry. When Hueper insisted that aniline dye workers’ cancer came from workplace expo-sures, he was promptly fired. The German-born and trained Hueper soon compiled his own and much other evidence, largely from Eu-rope, into the world’s first textbook on occupational cancer, a work to which most US reviewers responded with skepticism.33

As for nations outside the developed world, a look at Mexico and China suggests that though the former especially may have experi-enced growth in benzene-related ailments, both nations had fewer experts standing at the ready to identify these as such, much less to write them up for the growing international literature. Over the interwar period, Mexico had acquired a modern petroleum indus-try via foreign companies and investments; the workplace and envi-ronmental hazards they brought with them spurred Mexico’s 1938 nationalization of the petroleum industry.34 Even before taking over the holdings of the oil companies, Mexico had begun developing and a state-sponsored literature on industrial health dangers as well as national rules that included the ILO’s recommended workers compensation schedule, thereby writing compensation for benzene poisoning into national law.35 Yet there were few clinics or even phy-

of Industrial Hygiene and the Transformation of Industrial Medicine’, in Bulletin of the History of Medicine, 65, 1, 1991: 42–73.

33 W.C. Hueper, Occupational Tumors and Allied Diseases, Charles C. Thomas, Springfield 1942; Sellers, ‘Discovering Environmental Cancer’ cit.; on Hueper’s biography see R.N. Proctor, Cancer Wars: How Politics Shapes What We Know and Don’t Know about Cancer, Basic Books, New York 1996, pp. 36–48.

34 M.I. Santiago, The Ecology of Oil: Environment, Labor, and the Mexican Rev-olution, 1900–1938, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 2009.

35 International Labour Organization, ‘Ratifications for Mexico’, https://www.ilo.org/dyn/normlex/en/f?p=1000:11200:0::NO:11200:P11200_COUNTRY_ID:102764 (accessed 18 October 2013).


sicians in Mexico’s oil-producing region who might be able to iden-tify such syndromes in the clinic or courtroom, especially compared with Europe or the US. The new textbooks warned of benzene’s dan-gers but without mention of cancer or blood tests, emphasizing only how exposures might be avoided.36 As for the China of this decade, its failure to ratify the ILO’s worker’s compensation convention sug-gests that it gave little attention not just to benzene poisoning but to any occupational causes of disease. A 1938 inquiry by the ILO into China’s programs and expertise in industrial hygiene or medi-cine found essentially none, beyond a few medical or public health courses where students visited rug or other factories. Among the reasons offered for this inattention, even in Peiping (now Beijing), was that it was ‘not an industrial city’.37

After World War II: Shifting Sources and a Rising Debate

Two decades into the post-WWII period, as US physicians began to pay more attention to benzene’s carcinogenic potential, their per-sisting skepticism began to be challenged by others. When Roger De-Gowin, a Chicago doctor working in the medical unit of the Argonne National Laboratory, diagnosed leukemia in a 56-year-old painter in 1962, he discovered a pattern of chronic benzene poisoning in the patient’s medical records all the way back to 1947. Even though De-Gowin featured the benzene connection in his write-up for the Jour-nal of the American Medical Association, he remained quite hesitant about asserting benzene to be the cause. He merely found it ‘tempting to relate the blood disease, or diseases, to benzene exposure’ – making clear that he, for one, was not succumbing to the temptation. This and

36 E. Ruiz Hurtado, Apuntes sobre higiene industrial Facultad Nacional de Me-dicina, Mexico City 1936, pp. 33–34; A. Pruneda, Higiene de los Trabajadores, Ediciones de la Universidad Nacional de Mexico, Mexico City 1937, pp. 43–44.

37 ‘Institutions to Which letter was sent requesting information concerning Teaching of Industrial Hygiene’, also letters such as that of I-chin Yuan, Peiping Union Medical College, to Miss Hinder, ILO official, 23 June 1937, in HY 109, Series HY (Hygiene Industrial, 1920–53), ILO Archives, Geneva.

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other expressions of doubt about benzene’s carcinogenicity among US experts soon drew the intervention of prominent Italian physicians Enrico Vigliani and Ernest Saita, published in the New England Jour-nal of Medicine the following year. Both of them worked in Milan’s Clinica del Lavoro ‘Luigi De Voto’, the oldest occupational health clinic in Europe. Both had published repeatedly on the question over the previous decades, albeit in an Italian literature virtually ignored by their US colleagues. Summarizing a long series of reported cases from their own clinic as well as government statistics, they asserted that ‘the attribution of cases [of leukemia] seen at the Clinica del Lavoro to exposure to benzene cannot be doubted’.38

Underlying this international debate between physicians about the reality of ‘benzene leukemia’ lay a host of differences in the na-tional, industrial, and historical contexts in which each operated. While at least one of the cases turning up in Vigliani’s and Saita’s Milan clinic implicated a newer chemical process, most of the other industries in which their patients worked were ‘traditional’ ones like shoemaking, conducted in small factories or as household enter-prises, as well as contracted work like painting, where benzene was still used as a solvent or diluent. In one such factory, glues used to assemble shoes contained 70 percent benzene into the early sixties.39 The intellectual and institutional backing for physicians like Vigliani and Saita who reported the resulting ailments grew out of a long-standing integration between industrial medicine and compensa-

38 R.L. Degowin, ‘Benzene Exposure and Aplastic Anemia Followed by Leuke-mia 15 Years Later’, in Journal of the American Medical Association, 185, 10, 1963: 748–751; E.C. Vigliani, G. Saita, ‘Benzene and Leukemia’, in New England Jour-nal of Medicine, 271, 17, 1964: 872ff.; E.C. Vigliani, ‘Practice of Occupational Medicine in the Clinica Del Lavoro Luigi Devoto’, in Archives of Environmental Health, 17, 1, 1968: 135–142.

39 Vigliani, Saita, ‘Benzene and Leukemia’ cit.; E. Paci et al., ‘Aplastic Anemia, Leukemia and Other Cancer Mortality in a Cohort of Shoe Workers Exposed to Benzene’, in Scandinavian Journal of Work Environment & Health, 15, 5, 1989: 313–318, (p. 313 for the use of the term ‘traditional’); G. Cecchetti, G.F. Peru-zzo, D. Sordelli, ‘Industrial Hygiene Programs for Workers’ Health Protection in Italy’, in American Industrial Hygiene Association Journal, 49, 1988: A373–376.


tion law. In their Milan clinic, patients’ ailments were frequently attributed to occupational causes, and causation seemed all the more proven when leukemia cases mounted among the benzene-exposed. Bolstering their authority, an ‘Occupational Hygiene Act’ passed in 1956 had turned recommended exposure limits for chemicals into national law; Vigliani’s clout was enhanced by his international prominence as secretary-general of the International Commission on Occupational Health.40

On the other side of the Atlantic, while the benzene to which De-Gowin’s patient was exposed had come through drying paint, most making and use of benzene now took place in the largest and most technologically sophisticated of industries. Starting in the US, use of benzene as a solvent was becoming dwarfed by new uses made by oil refineries and other petrochemical plants, which turned to benzene as an intermediary in the making of synthetic petrochemicals, from rubber to nylon to detergents to pesticides. By the early 1960s, most benzene produced in the US came from petroleum rather than coal and went straight back to petrochemical plants.41 But the mounting volume of benzene in US workplaces did not translate into more reports of benzene-associated diseases, cancer in particular. These new benzene-saturated workplaces in the US belonged to some of the largest and most technologically savvy corporations. Oil and chemical companies now making and using most of the benzene had their own medical and industrial hygiene teams with a strong and vested interest in keeping whatever toxic exposures and effects they detected in-house.

Moreover, unlike in Italy, no national law or agency had the authority to regulate workplace dangers. Regulation happened, in-stead, at the state level, and where many of these new production lines arose, in heretofore less-industrialized states like Texas and Louisiana, preexisting medicolegal systems for dealing with work-place health remained scant, and compensation for any industrial

40 Cecchetti, Peruzzo, Sordelli, ‘Industrial Hygiene Programs’ cit.41 R. Stobaugh, ‘Benzene: How, Where, Who, and Future’, in Hydrocarbon

Processing and Petroleum Refiner, 44, 9, 1965: 209–218.

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disease had just begun.42 While Houston and other Texas cities bur-geoned, many of these petrochemical complexes lay either on their far outskirts or in more rural locales, where doctors other than those affiliated with the companies remained relatively few and far be-tween.43 Nor did these states have cancer or occupational disease registries, or laws that required local physicians to report publicly what cases they encountered. Those very conditions that drew so many benzene-exposed workers into the Milan clinic of Vigiliani and Saito and aided the doctors’ tabulations of how many benzene workers had contracted leukemia were simply absent in corners of the post-WWII United States such as Port Arthur, Texas, where ben-zene usage and exposure were on the rise.

Also impeding the case for a causal link between benzene and leukemia in the United States were the evolving scientific standards for proving cancer’s external causes. Most obviously, causal proofs for leukemia in particular had gained a new gold standard against which other assertions were now measured: the study of this disease among atomic bomb victims.44 Yet this exemplified a larger trend: the emergence of a new large-scale epidemiology for studying can-cer’s environmental causation modeled on the laboratory. Especially in the US and Great Britain, studies of lung cancer and smoke pro-vided the model for a new extra-workplace epidemiology of expo-sures across entire populations which quickly heightened the bar for

42 United States. Division of Labor Standards, Occupational Disease Coverage in the Compensation Acts of U.S., Canada, England, Government Printing Office, Washington, DC, 1936; ‘New Compensation Insurance Rates to Apply Sept. 5’, Brownsville Herald, 7 August 1947.

43 C. Sellers, ‘Petropolis and Environmental Protest in Cross-National Perspec-tive: Beaumont-Port Arthur, Texas, versus Minatitlan-Coatzacoalcos, Veracruz’, in Journal of American History, 99, 1, 2012: 111–123; B.L. Allen, Uneasy Alchemy: Citi-zens and Experts in Louisiana’s Chemical Corridor Disputes, MIT Press, Cambridge (MA) 2003; B.L. Allen, ‘Cradle of a Revolution? The Industrial Transformation of Louisiana’s Lower Mississippi River’, in Technology & Culture, 47, 1, 2006: 112–119.

44 M.S. Lindee, Suffering Made Real: American Science and the Survivors at Hi-roshima, University of Chicago Press, Chicago 1997; M. Todeschini, ‘Illegitimate Sufferers: A-bomb Victims, Medical Science, and the Government’, in Daedalus, 128, 2, 1999: 67.


demonstrating environmental effects. In the case of the benzene-leu-kemia link, the new standards worked to sustain a skepticism about less-studied environmental causes that, as we have seen, already had a history among American physicians.45

Of course, obvious barriers of language and journal availability had also kept US investigators of a benzene-leukemia link from being more aware of the European work, an obstacle that DeGowin’s study, which mainly referenced the English-language literature of the 1930s, only confirmed. Vigliani and Saita directly confronted this wall be-tween readerships by seeking publication in the New England Journal of Medicine. Theirs was but a single instance of a veritable flowering of transatlantic exchanges during this period about environmental and industrial factors in health. Joining their efforts were the many conferences on maximum exposure levels, the growing US involve-ment in the Europe-based International Union Against Cancer, and personal initiatives like Irving Selikoff’s network-building in asbestos studies.46 Selikoff sought backing in Great Britain and Europe for his wielding of the new epidemiological methods to demonstrate asbes-tos’ carcinogenic properties among insulation workers; reaching out to the US from Europe, Vigliani and Saita had to offer more than just a series of cases if they were convince the US medical readership.47 Their article offered analysis relatively new to these authors: dividing their clinical tally of cases by the estimated population of exposed workers, they then compared the resulting ratio to the background rate of leukemia locally in the overall population.48 Showing how

45 Sellers, ‘Discovering Environmental Cancer’ cit.46 Sellers, ‘The Cold War over the Worker’s Body’ cit.; J. Melling, C. Sellers,

‘Objective Collectives? Transnationalism and “Invisible Colleges” in Occupational and Environmental Health from Collis to Selikoff’, in Dangerous Trade: Histories of Industrial Hazard across a Globalizing World, Temple University Press, Phila-delphia 2011; W.U. Gardner, ‘Proceedings: International Union Against Cancer: Brief History, Organization, and Program Review of a Non-governmental Vol-untary Organization’, in National Cancer Institute Monograph, 40, 1974: 51–55.

47 I.J Selikoff, J. Churg, E.C. Hammond, ‘Asbestos Exposure and Neoplasia’, in JAMA: The Journal of the American Medical Association, 188, 1964: 22–26.

48 Degowin, ‘Benzene Exposure and Aplastic Anemia’ cit.; Vigliani, Saita, ‘Benzene and Leukemia’ cit.

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much higher the leukemia rate was among exposed workers, they put numbers on assumptions about background populations that long been taken for granted among those invoking case series of sick work-ers as demonstrations of an occupational cause. Now, when it came to carcinogenicity, these Italian physicians took up more of the US (and British) epidemiological game.

Taking Carcinogenicity Seriously: Towards a New Regulatory Regime for Benzene

This debate had little initial impact on the American Conference of Governmental Industrial Hygienists (ACGIH), which published recommendations for the maximum levels that should be allowed for the dangerous chemicals to which US and other workers were ex-posed (the so-called threshold limit values or TLVs). In 1963 it reaf-firmed its commitment to an exposure limit first set in 1948 for ben-zene of 25 parts per million (ppm).49 Yet change was afoot; already a re-evaluation of how benzene should be regulated was underway in Europe. In 1963, Italy banned the use of more than 2 percent benzene in glue; by 1968, the internationally renowned toxicolo-gist Rene Truhaut was recommending a maximum exposure level for benzene of only 1 ppm in French workplaces.50 Motivating this tightening of benzene’s regulation, as with other hazards like radia-tion, were growing convictions not just that certain chemicals could cause human cancers, but that they did so in unconventional ways. Unlike classic kinds of poisoning, some scientists began to argue, carcinogenic chemicals had no threshold, no dose beyond which the body could adjust or compensate; tumors might even be induced,

49 C. Zenz, ‘Benzene – Attempts to Establish a Lower Exposure Standard in the United States: A Review’, in Scandinavian Journal of Work, Environment & Health, 4, 2, 1978: 103–113.

50 Paci et al., ‘Aplastic Anemia, Leukemia and Other Cancer Mortality’ cit.; R. Truhaut, ‘Sur la fixation d’une limite tolérable pour le benzène dans les ambiances de travail’, in Archives des Maladies Professionnelles de Médecine du Travail et de Sécurité Sociale 29, 1, 1968: 5–22.


some said, from a single molecule.51 The result was a remapping of benzene’s (and other carcinogens’) passage through the human or-ganism, in which the window of danger extended many more years (the ‘latency’ period) and the possible avenues of harm were turn-ing more subtle, minute, and stochastic (that is, increasingly framed in terms of probability as well as mechanism). Though at the time few except Rachel Carson might have put it in these terms, they were gravitating towards a more ecological conception of the human body, in which the ‘internal environment’ was far more suscepti-ble to environmental chemicals than had long been assumed.52 Into the 1970s, as these theories gained greater credence and traction cross-nationally, the ILO stepped forward to encourage, and the US government to implement, much more stringent and precautionary approaches to benzene.

At its 1971 meeting in Geneva, Switzerland, the ILO passed a convention on benzene that became its first chemical-specific rec-ommendation of the post-WWII era.53 Prior to any declaration on asbestos – though after several on radiation – it targeted benzene as the first chemically defined carcinogen worthy of new rules for contending with its occupational dangers. This convention, as oth-ers, sprang out of a lengthy process of meetings between interna-tional experts, who composed the first draft of the convention fol-lowed by debate and vote on the floor of the ILO assembly itself, which was composed of inexpert representatives from government,

51 The most thorough discussions of the challenge to thresholds thus far have come in the history of the science of radiation risks: I. Semendeferi, ‘Legitimating a Nu-clear Critic: John Gofman, Radiation Safety, and Cancer Risks’, in Historical Studies in the Natural Sciences, 38, 2, 2008: 259–301; E.J. Calabrese, ‘Origin of the Linearity No Threshold (LNT) Dose-response Concept’, in Archives of Toxicology, 87, 9, 2013: 1621–1633.

52 For parallel histories of this transformation in thinking about the environ-mental relations of the human body in the US during this period, see L.L. Nash, Inescapable Ecologies: A History of Environment, Disease, and Knowledge, University of California Press, Berkeley 2006; N. Langston, Toxic Bodies: Hormone Disruptors and the Legacy of DES, Yale University Press, New Haven 2011.

53 International Labor Organization, ‘C136 Benzene Convention, 1971’ cit.

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business, and labor of the member nations. While benzene’s carci-nogenicity certainly figured into this deliberation, the final text of the convention itself made no mention of leukemia, cancer, or any other pathology. It nevertheless revealed several lines of compromise between the different scientific user, and producer communities in-volved. Rather than banning the substance outright, the convention called on member nations just to forbid its use as a solvent. As for other uses, it called for a ‘substitution’ of benzene with alternatives ‘wherever harmless or less harmful substances are available’. It nev-ertheless allowed certain exemptions, workplaces where negotiators agreed that benzene’s dangers could be tolerated: ‘for [the] chemical system’, in motor fuels and labs, also in ‘the production of benzene’ itself.54 In other words, its most stringent urgings applied to those uses of benzene that had proven so troublesome in a place like Italy. And it showed greatest leniency about those very uses of benzene that were proving so profitable in the United States. A so-called tolerance level for benzene – the maximum allowable exposure in workplace air – was also set at 25 ppm, closer to the level endorsed by the US ACGIH than by French expert Truhaut.

Consonant with their experts’ leadership on the ‘benzene leuke-mia’ issue, some of the first nations to ratify the new convention were Italy, France, and Germany. Other early ratifiers were, less predict-ably, in the second or third world: Cuba, Hungary, Cote D’Ivoire, and Ecuador. Missing from the 38 ratifying nations even today is the United States, despite the concessions that US and other petro-chemical corporations were able to achieve in the convention’s text.55 The US slight of the benzene convention aside, the United States in the early 1970s was moving toward a more centralized, national system of workplace and environmental oversight, much like that al-ready in place in many European nations. Soon, the US government and its experts would take benzene’s carcinogenic potential far more seriously as the rationale for a more precautionary national policy.

54 Ibid.55 International Labor Organization, ‘Convention No. 136 Ratifications’,

http://www.ilo.org/ilolex/cgi-lex/ratifce.pl?C136 (accessed 16 March 2012).


Over this same period, rising pressure from newer environmen-tal groups inside the United States as well as an increase in union militancy regarding occupational hazards led to some momentous changes in the laws and oversight of benzene, along with other workplace and environmental chemicals. A new Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), created in 1970 for administering new clean air and water laws, and an Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), formed and empowered by the 1972 Oc-cupational Safety and Health Act, imposed national oversight and administrative rules over those workplaces and environments where benzene production and exposure had grown. In the groundswell of outcries and media attention that impelled these changes, the chemical industry, where benzene use had burgeoned the most, was also the single most maligned of all the industries that environmen-talists and labor activists targeted.56 Carcinogens and the prospect of environmental cancer also loomed large.57 Because the evidence of benzene’s carcinogenicity was becoming ever more formidable, it ranked near the top of the new agencies’ priorities.

OSHA started off by setting a threshold level of 10 ppm that split the difference between the ACGIH and the French recommenda-tions. Then National Institute of Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH), the newly created scientific companion to OSHA, set up a committee in 1974 to review the evidence that benzene caused cancer, whose assessment was itself revisited by another committee appointed by the National Academy of Sciences.58 Among the evidence they ex-amined were a study supporting a benzene-leukemia link by Vigliani, a report by a Turkish doctor named Askoy, and an epidemiological

56 H. Erskine, ‘The Polls: Pollution and Industry’, in The Public Opinion Quar-terly, 36, 2, 1972: 263.

57 Proctor, Cancer Wars cit.; J.T. Patterson, The Dread Disease: Cancer and Modern American Culture, Harvard University Press, Cambridge (MA) 1987.

58 National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, Occupational Expo-sure to Benzene, Criteria for a Recommended Standard, (NIOSH) no. 74–137, US Government Printing Office, Washington, DC, 1974; National Research Council (US), Committee on Toxicology et al., Health Effects of Benzene, National Acad-emy of Sciences, Washington, DC, 1976.

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investigation of American rubber workers sponsored by NIOSH it-self.59 In 1977, after this committee had declared that ‘benzene must be considered a suspected leukemogen’, or cause of leukemia, OSHA then lowered its allowable level to 1 ppm.60 This effort at the national level accompanied contemporaneous local conflicts, including one in Port Arthur, Texas. There, the local union rather suddenly took up the cause of benzene protections at a key moment in the 1977 nego-tiations over its contract. Bolstered by a strengthened medical staff, union leaders insisted on a reduction in benzene levels in the local pet-rochemical complexes.61 More broadly, during the controversies that erupted around the nation over hazardous waste sites, starting with Love Canal in 1978, benzene became among the most mentioned and feared of environmental contaminants.62

Implicated companies soon launched a legal challenge to the 1 ppm standard that became a landmark case in US environmental law. In a lawsuit that worked its way up to the US Supreme Court by 1980, allied lawyers for petroleum, chemical, iron and steel, and rub-ber companies argued that the 1 ppm standard set by OSHA three years prior was simply not scientifically justified. The court ruled in their favor, though without commenting directly on the science that OSHA had put forward. The court concluded, in language that sub-sequently reverberated through many an environmental controversy, that the agency had assumed too much about how benzene’s toxicity worked, that it had neglected to offer a ‘balancing test’ for its asser-tion that, for carcinogens, there was no safe threshold of exposure.63 OSHA then had to go back to the drawing board with its benzene

59 P.F. Infante et al., ‘Leukaemia in Benzene Workers’, in Lancet, 2, 8028, 1977: 76–78; M.Aksoy, S. Erdem, G. Dincol, ‘Leukemia in Shoe-Workers Ex-posed Chronically to Benzene’, in Blood, 44, 6, 1974: 837–841.

60 R. Snyder, ‘The Benzene Problem in Historical Perspective’, in Fundamental and Applied Toxicology, 4, 5, 1984: 692–699.

61 S. Lindee, ‘Benzene Charge Levied’, Port Arthur News, 13 September 1977.62 J. Barbanel, ‘Homeowners Are Bitter and Fearful as Results of Study Are

Released’, New York Times, 18 May 1980.63 Industrial Union Department v. American Petroleum Institute, 448 US (Su-

preme Court 1980), p. 607.


standard, and with its leadership turned over to appointees of Ron-ald Reagan, union lawsuits had to force further action. Ironically, though, when OSHA finally issued a new benzene standard, it pro-posed the same lower level of 1 ppm, and was no longer challenged, either legally or scientifically.64 Helping diminish controversy over this policy was a declaration in 1982 by the International Agency for Research on Cancer, a part of the World Health Organization that in the early 1970s had begun systematic reviews of chemicals’ carci-nogenicity. ‘There is sufficient evidence’, it declared, ‘that benzene is carcinogenic to man’ [italics in original].65

Part of the reason was that newer epidemiological studies contin-ued to show elevated levels of leukemia, even among workers with much lower levels of benzene exposure than what the ACGIH al-lowed. As study and debate about the occupational epidemiology took over in US health journals during the 1980s and 1990s, refin-eries were becoming able to reduce exposure levels still further by automating more of their production.66 At the same time, industri-alists in the US were becoming savvier about how epidemiological study and debate might be wielded more to their advantage. After 1980, a larger proportion of the cancer epidemiology of refinery and other benzene workers in the US, as well as other published scientific argument, came from experts consulting or working with the petro-chemical industry in particular. They emphasized the flaws in earlier studies and ‘inconsistencies’ in the evidence: for instance, though one of four main types of leukemia (acute myelogenous (AML))

64 M.S. Linet, P.E. Bailey, ‘Benzene, Leukemia, and the Supreme Court’, in Journal of Public Health Policy, 2, 2, 1981: 116–135; D.P. McCaffrey, OSHA and the Politics of Health Regulation, Plenum Press, New York 1982.

65 International Agency for Research on Cancer; World Health Organization, Some Industrial Chemicals and Dyestuffs, World Health Organization, Geneva 1982, p. 93; J. Higginson, ‘The International Agency for Research on Cancer: A Brief Review of Its History, Mission, and Program’, in Toxicological Sciences: An Official Journal of the Society of Toxicology, 43, 2, 1998: 79–85; interestingly, in this same year an Italian, L.Tomatis, had become IARC’s director.

66 Snyder, ‘The Benzene Problem in Historical Perspective’ cit.; Linet, Bailey, ‘Benzene, Leukemia, and the Supreme Court’ cit.

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figured in all the more comprehensive investigations of benzene ex-posure, evidence varied on the other three.67

Where benzene became a rising concern in the US during this same period was in relation to consumer exposures to the gasoline in which it was mixed and refineries’ emissions into surrounding communities. By the time of the BP oil spill in 2010, the presence of benzene combined with the lore of its carcinogenicity to make it among the most dreaded of threats borne by the looming tide. Es-pecially in discussions about the effects of spilled petroleum on the health of those who lived or worked around contaminated waters, benzene was frequently mentioned, for instance, as ‘known to cause a host of health problems including anemia…and leukemia’.68 And with good reason: a spot test of 12 exposed residents by a Louisiana environmental group found 4 of them to have ‘unusually high’ levels of benzene in their blood.69

Diverging Pathways in the Developing World

For all the differences in the ways Europe and the United States have contended with the carcinogenicity of benzene since the 1960s, their approaches nevertheless paralleled one another more closely than did the trajectories of concern about this toxin in other, less developed parts of the world. And it was precisely in develop-

67 S.H. Lamm et al., ‘Consistencies and Inconsistencies Underlying the Quan-titative Assessment of Leukemia Risk from Benzene Exposure’, in Environmental Health Perspectives, 82, 1989: 289–297; O. Wong, ‘An Industry Wide Mortality Study of Chemical Workers Occupationally Exposed to Benzene I: General Re-sults’, in British Journal of Industrial Medicine, 44, 6, 1987: 365–381; O. Wong, G.K. Raabe, ‘Critical Review of Cancer Epidemiology in Petroleum Industry Em-ployees, with a Quantitative Meta-analysis by Cancer Site’, in American Journal of Industrial Medicine, 15, 3, 1989: 283–310.

68 J. Hobbs, ‘Doctor: Ailments Might Be Spill-related’, Walton Sun, 6 Novem-ber 2010; B. Clanton, ‘Study: Air Toxins Didn’t Hit Harmful Levels after Spill’, Houston Chronicle, 3 September 2011.

69 M. McDermott, ‘Toxic Oil Spill Chemicals Showing Up in Gulf Coast Res-idents’ Blood’, Treehugger, 21 January 2011, http://www.treehugger.com/green-food/toxic-oil-spill-chemicals-showing-up-in-gulf-coast-residents-blood.html.


ing nations where the balance of worldwide production and use of benzene was shifting: by 2010, 55 percent of benzene’s production and 50 percent of its consumption happened outside of the United States, western Europe, and Japan.70 Among those nations that be-gan producing and using far more benzene were China and Mexico. Even as acceptance of benzene’s carcinogenicity led to a tighten-ing of its regulation in the industrialized world, China and Mexico illustrate two different pathways by which industrializing nations could resist this new precautionism: the one even while engaging the new cancer epidemiology and its practitioners, and the other while largely ignoring them.

China’s embrace of benzene began not long after the 1949 Com-munist Revolution; it was employed mainly for painting and shoe-making. However, benzene use accelerated particularly as a result of the economic reforms of the 1980s, when the government, which had previously overseen all economic activity, opened doors to pri-vate enterprise. Seen in comparison with the experiences of Europe and the US, the Chinese industries exposing a half-million workers to benzene by 1984 were a blend of new and old. They were new in that, like the post-WWII United States, their benzene came mainly from petroleum. But they were old in that, like pre-1960 Italy, ben-zene exposures came mostly (90 percent in the 1984 study) through its use as a solvent – precisely what the ILO’s convention had forbid-den.71 And the regulatory approach, although it seemed newer, actu-ally continued to target poisoning more than carcinogenicity. The Chinese government lowered its official exposure limit to 12 ppm as early as 1979 (and since 2002 it has been 1.8 ppm – still more than the 1 ppm adopted over 30 years ago by the US’s OSHA). But the extreme porosity of China’s workplace regulation meant, and still means, that exposures regularly exceed these rules. The average ex-

70 IHS Chemical, ‘Benzene’, last modified October 2011, http://www.ihs.com/products/chemical/planning/ceh/benzene.aspx.

71 S.N. Yin et al., ‘Occupational Exposure to Benzene in China’, in British Journal of Industrial Medicine, 44, 3, 1987: 192–195 (with history of exposures as well as relevant industries).

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posure among shoemakers in the 1980s, for instance, was over 150 ppm, more than 10 times the official limit.72

We know how high these exposures were because China emerged as an international center for study of benzene’s occupational epi-demiology during this period. While a first such survey had taken place in 1959, the government stepped up its investment in the sci-ence of industrial health in the late 1970s, hoping to monitor and perhaps forestall the human damage from its privatization of the economy. With benzene as one of their central foci, Chinese epi-demiologists implemented the new epidemiological methods on a formidable scale, aided by the degree and variety of exposures still occurring among Chinese workers. US investigators, stymied by the corporate barriers to similar studies in the US, got in on the act. Among the most impressive of the results, the US National Cancer Institute joined with China’s National Academy of Preventive Medi-cine starting in 1987 to study the development of cancer in nearly 75,000 benzene-exposed workers in 12 Chinese cities to produce a landmark confirmation of benzene’s ability to cause leukemia in hu-man exposures lower than 10 ppm.73

In Mexico, on the other hand, while exposures to the toxin mounted, scientific studies of them and their effects remained much more limited. During the late twentieth century, nearly all of Mexi-co’s benzene was made by Petroleros Mexicanos (Pemex), the public-

72 Y. Liang et al., ‘The Development and Regulation of Occupational Exposure Limits in China’, in Regulatory Toxicology and Pharmacology, 46, 2, 2006: 107–113; L. Wang et al., ‘Benzene Exposure in the Shoemaking Industry in China, a Literature Survey, 1978–2004’, in Regulatory Toxicology and Pharmacology, 46, 2, 2006: 152.

73 S.C Liu, C.C Wu, W.Y. Wang, ‘Industrial Health and Prevention of Oc-cupational Diseases in New China’, in Chinese Medical Journal, 81, 1962: 1–8; M.M. Quinn et al., ‘Modernization and Trends in Occupational Health and Safe-ty in the People’s Republic of China 1981–1986’, in American Journal of Industrial Medicine, 12, 5, 1987: 499–506; W. Wu, ‘Occupational Cancer Epidemiology in the People’s Republic of China’, in Journal of Occupational Medicine, 30, 12, 1988: 968–974; G. Li, S. Yin, ‘Progress of Epidemiological and Molecular Epi-demiological Studies on Benzene in China’, in Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, 1076, 2006: 800–809.


ly owned oil company whose profits fed some 30–40 percent of the federal government’s operating budget. Starting in the mid-1960s, the Minatitlan refinery along the Coatzacoalcos River in southern Veracruz served as the initial core for a vast expansion of petrochem-ical plants there, including those for benzene production. Beginning at the refinery itself, benzene’s manufacture was then taken over by a new complex in nearby Cangrejera starting in the early 1980s.74

As benzene production rose there over the last decades of the twentieth century, the Mexican response included very few studies of its health effects, as well as little regulation. Early on, in the 1950s and 1960s, the federal health establishment had established rules for benzene exposure that set the occupational maximum at 100 ppm – a limit which the ACGIH had found too lax in 1948.75 But even this level did not necessarily apply to Pemex, which oversaw its own health and safety regimes. Extensive interviewing suggests they did little or no sampling of workplace exposures for benzene and other chemicals into the 1980s.76 Only in 2002 did it finally equip and staff its own toxicology lab – the only one in the region.77 While textbooks on occupational hygiene put out by government doctors mention benzene’s carcinogenic potential and new and more effective environmental laws have been in place since the late 1980s and early 1990s, the likely presence of benzene outside the petrochemical complexes themselves, in the water, the air, and the bodies of residents, rarely provokes any official attention.78 Aside

74 A. Toledo, A. Botello, Energia, Ambiente y Desarrollo, Centro de Ecodesar-rollo, Mexico City, 1988; J. Omar Moncada Maya, ‘Crecimiento y Deterioro, El Caso De Coatzacoalcos-Minatitlán’, in Revista Geográfica, 103, 1986: 55–68.

75 ‘Maximos Permisos En Los Centros De Trabajos’, 1953, Archives of Subsec-retaria de Salubridad y Assistencia, volumen 46, expediente 3, Library of Secre-taria de Salubridad y Assistencia, Mexico City.

76 A. Gamiatea, interview by E. Rico and C. Sellers, 28 May 2010; L. Bozada, interview by E. Rico and C. Sellers, 24 May 2010; F. Mercado, interview by F. Enciso and C. Sellers, 7 July 2011.

77 Mercado, interview cit.78 F. Mercado, Benceno, D.F: Centro de investigación laboral y Asesoría sindi-

cal, México 2000; S.P. Mumme, C.R. Bath, V.J. Assetto, ‘Political Development

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from two temporary initiatives – a 2001 study by Greenpeace and a 2007 ‘bucket brigade’ of local activists trained and equipped to do rudimentary measuring by the San Francisco-based Global Com-munity Watch – aerial monitoring of benzene simply has not taken place in the region where most of Mexico’s benzene is made.79 This nation’s only regular sampling of benzene concentrations in the air happens in Mexico City, where atmospheric pollution by traffic is recorded, and this only began in 2007.80 Nor have other epidemio-logical health studies been done on the effects of benzene or other petrochemical exposures in the Coatzacoalcos region, the heartland of Mexico’s petrochemical production.

Talk nevertheless recurs among refinery workers, their neighbors, doctors, and journalists about elevated rates of leukemia and other cancers in the region.81 While benzene’s actual influence on local human bodies is likely as real, and perhaps as dramatic, as in China of the 1980s or Italy of the 1960s, unlike in those places that reality remains more in the realm of rumor than of accepted fact, making its amelioration all the more difficult.

and Environmental Policy in Mexico’, in Latin American Research Review, 23, 1, 1988: 7–34; S.P. Mumme, ‘Trade Integration, Neoliberal Reform, and Envi-ronmental Protection in Mexico: Lessons for the Americas’, in Latin American Perspectives, 34, 3, 2007: 91–107.

79 R. Stringer, I. Labunska, K. Brigden, ‘Organochlorine and Heavy Metal Contaminants in the Environment around the Complejo Petroquimicos Pajaritos, Coatzacoalcos, Mexico’, March 2001, Greenpeace Research Laboratories, http://www.greenpeace.to/publications/Coatzas%20report.pdf (accessed 29 January 2013); APETAC, Global Community Monitor, and Greenpeace, ‘Bucket Brigade Detects High Levels of Carcinogenic Benzene in Southern Veracruz’, 19 February 2007, http://www.gcmonitor.org/article.php?id=556.

80 ‘Mexico: Rastreo De Benceno Tolueno Etileno’, Terratoxnews: L.A., http://terratoxnews.blogspot.com/2007/05/mxico-rastreo-de-benceno-tolueno-y.html (accessed 29 January 2013).

81 Bozada, interview; audiotapes of Witness Seminar held in Minatitlan, Vz., 16 August 2013.


Conclusion

Over the twentieth century, then, as production and consump-tion of benzene have grown ever more ubiquitous around the globe, there has, in fact, been a transition in thinking about and practice toward benzene in many parts of the world from ‘poison’ to ‘car-cinogen’. This passage has depended, in part, on transformations in the way benzene has been made and used in the more industrial-ized parts of the world: the switch from coal to oil as a source of the substance, for instance, and the switch from solvent to chemi-cal feedstuff as its primary application. But we cannot understand these changes in benzene’s economic and material roles in our world without looking at the new culture and politics of benzene that helped steer them.

This ongoing shift in benzene’s medical and health history points up the superficiality of global environmental histories that gesture mainly to Rachel Carson and a formal science of ‘ecology’ as the sources of a mid-twentieth-century sea change in thinking about toxic chemicals.82 By the 1960s, a new approach to benzene, as other carcinogens, was being hatched in the health sciences: among doc-tors, scientists, and regulators. Over the mid-twentieth century in western Europe and the United States, at least on the health front, Carson herself was, arguably, less an originator than an early reader and popularizer of this new brand of thinking. Over the succeeding years, transnational exchange and debate among health experts ush-ered in a more ecological understanding about just how benzene – as well as other toxins – worked on the human body from inside: ex-tending the timeframe of environmental causation and magnifying the importance of minute exposures. With the new ideas also came new regulatory strategies for controlling benzene in workplaces and

82 Global environmental history, that is to say, could use a bodily turn like the recent one in American environmental history: N.M. Maher, ‘Body Counts: Tracking the Human Body Through Environmental History’, in A Companion to American Environmental History, D.C. Sackman (ed.), Wiley-Blackwell, Chiches-ter 2010, pp. 163–180.

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the environment, including much lower limits on the amount of this toxin to which people should be exposed. Though early on, Italy and other European nations stood at the forefront of these changes, by the late 1970s, the United States had followed suit, with their own new science, agencies, and laws.

The examples of China and Mexico raise serious questions about how genuinely global this transition has been. As the bulk of the world’s benzene has shifted to recently industrializing parts of the world, drawing with it the balance of worldwide human exposure to this toxin, the idea of benzene as a carcinogen has been slower to follow. Indeed, the gathering history of concerns about benzene in the US and Europe may well have helped drive this material shift in the world’s ‘benzene balance’ away from there, toward other, rapidly industrializing regions of the planet. China’s example does demon-strate that ideas and expertise accepting benzene’s carcinogenicity could also prosper in the toxin’s newer habitats. But both there and in Mexico, those regulatory strategies that could actually prevent benzene leukemia from happening proved more difficult to import. This stark contrast to the more developed world, at least at the time of this writing, suggests the crucial importance to global histories of environmental chemicals of an as-yet little-noted factor: not so much the science or the laws, but a state’s capacity to regulate ef-fectively. Without this capacity, China, Mexico, and other develop-ing nations remain – at least in terms of how they actually handle benzene in their workplaces and communities – still in the ‘poison’ stage, not yet fully treating it as a carcinogen.83

The many, profound limits to the ‘global’ extent of talk about benzene’s more chronic health impacts don’t just stop there. The Coatzacoalcos region of Mexico shares these limitations not just with much of the less or partially developed world, but with many vulnerable corners of developed nations. Judging by oral histories of a place like Port Arthur-Beaumont, Texas, among workers as well

83 My point here echoes that of Gabrielle Hecht about the ‘banal’ approach to radioactivity, especially in African nations; Hecht, Being Nuclear cit.


as managers and town residents, the risk talk that has governed policy-making around benzene since the 1970s has also had a less lasting impact there.84 Some local health professionals frankly ac-knowledge their suspicions about industrial influences on the local cancer rate, but they also note the many pressures against any local epidemiological study. Here and elsewhere in developed nations, this situation reflects important gaps between expert and lay under-standing, but also something more. A species of what Proctor and Schiebinger call ‘agnotology’ has been at work, suppressing further studies while sowing doubt about earlier ones.85 Even in upper-level policy circles in the United States, benzene has enjoyed some re-prieves. When tetraethyl lead was banned as an antiknock constitu-ent of gasoline in the 1970s, many companies substituted benzene for it, a move that the EPA did not begin to regulate until 2007.86

While this study demonstrates what may be gained through an historical purview that spans the experiences of several nations and international agencies, it offers cautions about leaping too uncriti-cally or prematurely to a ‘global’ vantage point. In particular, it suggests the partiality of any ‘global’ history of that concentrates exclusively on the developed world. Only by also taking the de-veloping and partly developed world into account will our envi-ronmental, industrial, and health histories be able to attain a more genuinely ‘global’ reach – at least one suitable for the late twentieth and twenty-first centuries.87 Such an inclusion, as here, may pose a challenge to our usual ways of narrating these kinds of history, rooted as these are in developed-world experiences. The historian

84 Conclusion based on 16 interviews conducted with residents in 2010 and 2011; transcripts in possession of the author.

85 R.N. Proctor, L. Schiebinger, Agnotology: The Making and Unmaking of Ig-norance, Stanford University Press, Stanford, 2008.

86 ‘A Special Solution For Fuel Enhancers’, New York Times, 15 September 1991; F. Barringer, ‘E.P.A. Limits the Benzene in Gasoline by 2011’, New York Times, 10 February 2007.

87 On this point, see also Melling, Sellers, Dangerous Trade cit.; Sellers, ‘Cross-nationalizing the History of Industrial Hazard’ cit.

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who seeks this more genuinely global perspective, however, should find ways of embracing rather than evading the multiplicity of nar-ratives it reveals.

From Poison to Carcinogen: Towards a Global History of Concerns about Benzene

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