Dr. William J. Nicholson

      On Monday, April 2, Bill Nicholson died of a heart attack while jogging. He was 70 years old. Dr. Nicholson was one of the last professionally active members of the famous Mt. Sinai Medical School (NY) team of asbestos researchers led by the legendary Dr. Irving J. Selikoff (1915-1992).

      Dr. Nicholson was originally trained as a physicist. The Mt. Sinai group did careful statistical studies of the excessive rates of cancer and other occupational causes of disability and death among exposed workers. The main subjects of the studies were construction workers who worked with asbestos-containing construction materials, which for many years were sold with no labeling or other efforts to warn about the hazards they could pose. The Mt. Sinai group worked with the union of insulation workers, and as Emeritus Professor Dr. Nicholson continued to testify as an expert witness in personal injury cases brought by workers who were stricken with asbestos diseases. He served on numerous international expert scientific groups and prepared reports for governmental agencies in the US, Sweden, and other countries. In the face of disinformation campaigns by companies who continue to sell asbestos and who face liability for having sold asbestos products in the past, Dr. Nicholson had helped to analyze the data in a scientifically objective manner and in so doing advance public health around the world.

He was recommended to WTO as an expert in the World Trade Organization asbestos case in 1999 by the World Health Organization and the International Program on Chemical Safety. Desparate to exclude his selection by the WTO, Canada objected that he was on the editorial board of the American Journal of Industrial Medicine, which had published the Collegium Ramazzini's call for a global ban on asbestos earlier in 1999. This may seem ridiculous, given the number of editors and contributing editors (over 100) of this journal and the other 12 journals (!) that published the Collegium's statement. In any case, for reasons never disclosed by the learned economists at the WTO, the WTO passed over Dr. Nicholson and selected 4 scientists from the list, 2 of whom were epidemiologists (neither with the stature of Dr. Nicholson on the subject of asbestos).

The bans on asbestos use today in over 20 countries and the virtual extinction of asbestos product use in the US might not have occurred by now without the vital contributions of Dr. Nicholson and his co-workers. He will be missed.