Medical experimentation on human subjects without informed consent was illegal in many countries following the Second World War. This illegality did not necessarily prevent governments and corporations from experimenting on citizen workers, especially when industrial success depended on the results of these studies. This was seen in the community of Asbestos, Canada, location of the largest chrysotile asbestos mine in the world, the Jeffrey Mine. Throughout the 20th century, the American Johns-Manville Company (JM), which owned the mine, used workers as they would test mice, and the entire community of Asbestos as a giant, living laboratory.

The people of Asbestos were not aware that they were being used as part of a large-scale industrial hygiene experiment. In this single-industry resource community, the local population was instead thankful for the perks the American company brought the town, including a JM-run health care facility where each Jeffrey Mine employee received yearly checkups. Under the guise of receiving free, state of the art medical care, workers were monitored as their diseases progressed, were given experimental treatments without their knowledge, and when they inevitably died, their bodies were secretly autopsied, and their lungs taken across international borders to company laboratories without their consent.

This paper will examine the scientific experts who manipulated medical evidence in this large-scale community-cum-laboratory, to challenge the growing consensus that asbestos was dangerous to human health. The first recorded death due to asbestos-related disease occurred in 1909; the people of Asbestos were not informed of their asbestos-caused illnesses until the 1970s. Over this 60 year period, JM used Jeffrey Mine workers, and members of the larger community, to gather extensive medical evidence proving asbestos was a hazardous mineral and tracing the progression of the diseases it causes. The company then manipulated this data and published studies in international medical journals to promote the idea that asbestos workers became sick because of lifestyle choices, namely smoking cigarettes. This misrepresentation of evidence highlights important aspects of the use of expertise, the objectivity of the scientific method, and the influence of politics and big business on medical research.