Chemical Imbalance

Were the brain tumors really just coincidence?

by Tom Namako

I. "Dad's acting weird"

MISSING PIECES: Margaret Paulino holds a photo of her late husband, Stanley Skalski. Next to her are two grandchildren Skalski never had a chance to meet. Photo By: Michael T. Regan (CLICK IMAGE FOR LARGER VERSION)

Stanley Skalski returned to Port Richmond after five years in the Army and realized he needed a job.

It was 1958, six years since he graduated from Mastbaum Vocational High School. The 25-year-old's skills included jumping out of airplanes (he was a paratrooper in the 11th Division); bandaging wounds (he was a medic); and manual labor. He went with the last skill.

His older sister Sophie raised Skalski after their mother died of Hodgkin's disease. He was barely a teenager. Sophie heard that Rohm and Haas, the chemical company with a plant in Bridesburg, was hiring. She told Skalski to check it out.

By this time, Rohm and Haas had come a long way. In the early 1900s they were forced to relocate their manufacturing plants from Old City farther up the Delaware River, because leather tanning — which involved soaking hides in vats of feces — reeked.

By the time Skalski signed on, the process involved more advanced chemicals. In the 50 years since, they've grown to be one of the largest specialty materials companies in the world, bringing in more than $8 billion a year in revenue and with plants on six continents.

After a brief interview, Skalski landed a job mixing chemicals for the leather-tanning division. "He'd dump 5-gallon buckets of stuff into larger barrels," said his wife, Margaret, who he married in 1960.

Skalski wasn't thrilled with the work. His jeans and overalls had a foreign stench to them, a strong, rotting smell so foul that Sophie did his laundry in a separate batch. His clothes would slowly disintegrate, falling apart every few months.

This disturbed Skalski. One night, he said to his sister, "If I die of some kind of cancer, call a lawyer. Rohm and Haas killed me."

It was a line he repeated so often, it became a family joke. Until 1989.

That year, Skalski woke up on an October morning, shuffled into the living room, sat on his favorite couch, and stared at the opposite wall for three straight days. "It's like someone just turned off the light switch," said Margaret, who worked long shifts as a nurse at the time. "He was like an empty house. The building was there, but no one was home."

Margaret and her son Andrew, 24 at the time, thought Skalski was depressed.

His co-workers knew better: This was a guy who didn't even use vacation days — he took the cash at the end of the year instead. Two co-workers went to his home. They knocked on the door. No answer. They looked in a side window. There was Skalski, sitting on the couch, staring forward, with the television humming. The door was unlocked.

It took several minutes for Skalski to talk to either visitor. He barely recognized them.

Finally they asked: "Who's the president of the United States?"

"Gerald Ford," Skalski said.

"What year is it?"

"1975."

They called 911.

Skalski was diagnosed with Stage 4 glioblastoma, the most aggressive type of cancer that begins in the brain. Victims are lucky to live two years.

Chemotherapy and radiation treatments shrunk the tumor, and for a few months, Skalski was acting normal. That's when his wife, dressed in scrubs after a shift at the hospital, pulled him onto the porch during an unseasonably warm February day.

"Stan," she asked, "do you know what's happening to you? Do you understand what's going on?"

Skalski, sitting in a lawn chair and dressed in sweatpants, looked right at her.

"I know what's going on," he said. "And I'm not afraid. I know I'm going to die."

Two months later, he did. Skalski was 56.

The same year Skalski started working among the chemical vats, a young Ivy League graduate began his 17-year career at Rohm and Haas headquarters on Independence Mall.

Charles A. Hart was part chemist, part businessman. He earned the nickname "Subtle Trouble" at Cornell for his practical jokes. But in the office, he threw himself into the job, and at home, his son David often found him working at the dining room table into the wee hours.

Hart worked at the company's plants in Brazil and Wisconsin before settling at the Philadelphia headquarters to market leather materials. He bought a house in Upper Dublin and spent every Friday at the nearby Spring House facility. There, he used his knowledge of chemicals to check on his clients' orders.

The company even hired David for part-time work. He drove tractors and shoveled dirt outside one of the agricultural plants during college summer breaks. This was no surprise. For decades, Rohm and Haas has had a history of keeping jobs in the family, hiring the kin of hard-working janitors and research chemists.

In 1976, Hart was on a business trip to a facility in Tennessee when he was sent home for being drunk. "They said his speech was slurred, that he was having trouble walking straight," David said. "The only thing was, my father didn't drink."

Not long after, David and his younger bother were playing ping-pong with their father in the basement — a weekly tradition. Hart was usually a decent player: fast, skilled and clever. David served a ball, and it flew past Hart. Then another. Hart could barely swing the paddle. He tried to speak, but it was garbled. He limped upstairs. "We had no clue what was going on," David said. "I told my mother, 'Dad's acting weird.'"

Finally, on a Sunday in May, Hart passed out on David's lap in the middle of a sermon at Church on the Mall in Plymouth Meeting. David tried to prop his father back up, but he was unconscious. They drove him to the hospital.

Hart was diagnosed with glioblastoma. He died exactly one month later. He was 43.

It wasn't long after Navy Seaman Thomas Szerlik returned from the Korean War when he saw his first computer. The machine at the Marine procurement terminal on Delaware Avenue was the size of a room. Szerlik, a Bridesburg native, had never seen anything like it. He fell in love, even though he had tied the knot a few months earlier.

He asked Joan Watters, who lived in Tacony, to marry him in 1955 — hours after he was laid off from his gig at Coca-Cola. "Not long after he proposed, he got the Marine job," his wife said. "And then he fell in love with that computer. I was out and it was in."

Szerlik, a high school graduate, put $100 down on a rancher in Levittown, where he and his wife raised two sons. For years he bounced from job to job, from computer operator to programmer. Rohm and Haas hired him in the late 1970s, first in Philadelphia, then full time at Spring House. He jumped at the chance to work for a big company.

It wasn't long before that excitement dwindled. Over dinner one night, he told his wife that he wasn't happy with his office location.

Joan asked why.

"I'm right next to chemical division," he said. "And funny things go on in that lab, and I don't like being close to it. They're always experimenting with something in there."

It was 2 a.m. on an April morning in 1993 when Joan heard Szerlik get out of bed and turn on the shower. She groggily opened the bathroom door and asked what was going on.

"Oh, I have to take the car up to the dealership this morning," Szerlik said.

"It's only 2 a.m.," she said.

"Oh, well, that's all right. I'll be there early."

"I'll go with you."

"No, no. I'll take care of it myself. I know all the guys up there and I'll get a cup of coffee." He put on a pair of Bermuda shorts and a shirt, Joan said, and drove off in their Chevy.

Szerlik returned two hours later. His speech was slurred. He was answering questions with an incoherent mumble. An ambulance took him to Lower Bucks Hospital, where a CAT scan showed a brain tumor.

"Glioblastoma," the doctor explained, drawing a picture of the cancer's trademark central mass and smaller, snakelike tentacles tangled in the gelatinous brain. Surgeons cut a flap of skin from Szerlik's scalp, sawed through his skull, and shaved off a portion of the tumor to relieve the intense pressure. A social worker visited Joan to ask about her financial situation, and if she cold afford a nursing home for her husband.

She didn't need it. Szerlik was dead a month later. He was 58.

THE FACILITY: According to one ex-employee, five people who worked in the same hallway here at Building 4A were later diagnosed with brain cancer. Photo By: Michael T. Regan (CLICK IMAGE FOR LARGER VERSION)

Margaret Skalski eventually remarried and moved to a bright house in Pennsauken, where a small terrier runs around the sunroom. She used to ask around about her husband's death, but she thought it was time to move on.

Then, in 2003, she saw an article in The Philadelphia Inquirer about an 18-month study concerning brain cancers at Spring House. She called Rohm and Haas for an invitation to hear the study's results, despite being told that her husband wasn't a part of the study because he worked full time in Bridesburg.

"Before we got that letter, I thought we were alone," she said. "No one else really seemed to know anything. I thought it was something that was just going to pass by."

Television cameras and newspaper reporters were scattered outside the Spring House auditorium on Jan. 8, 2004. Margaret and her son Andrew went inside and showed security their official invitation with Rohm and Haas letterhead. Dozens of people, all waiting to hear the results, crowded into the room. They were stunned.

"It made me feel like all the questions I had and all the questions I was asking for all those years were justified," she said.

Inside the auditorium, Margaret met wives whose husbands had died years ago. She heard similar stories about loved ones seemingly losing their minds. She listened as people spoke of more than a dozen people dead of brain cancer.

There was Irv Adler, an agricultural chemist. He worked at Spring House and died from glioblastoma in 1980.

There was Jay Ruth, a lab technician who mixed agricultural pesticides. He died in 1986 from astrocytoma, another form of brain cancer.

Robert Exner, who worked in the Spring House labs and then moved to human resources, died in 2000 from glioblastoma.

Wayne Kachelries, a research chemist, died from glioblastoma in 1980. His sons realized there was a problem the same way the Harts did — Kachelries couldn't hit a ping-pong ball.

Barry Lange, a research chemist, died in 2003 from glioblastoma.

There were also families of those still clinging to life, like Jemin Charles Hsu, a Spring House pesticide chemist, living with glioblastoma.

Olivia Ranalli, a saleswoman who traveled to Paris and Milan in search of the newest leather fashions, was living with glioblastoma.

Generally, there are about three cases of glioblastoma per 100,000 people in America. While it's the most common type of cancer that begins in the brain, only about 9,000 people develop a new case each year, and the cause remains a mystery.

In all — and depending on whom you're talking to — either 12 or 15 known former Rohm and Haas employees in the agricultural pesticide, biocide or leather divisions have been diagnosed with malignant brain cancer. Every one of them, according to family members or former employees, either worked at Spring House, visited the site regularly, or handled the same type of chemicals used there.

Arvind Carpenter, Rohm and Haas' director of epidemiology and the person who oversaw the research, began a PowerPoint slide show. There have been 5,600 full-time Spring House workers since the site opened in 1963. Age, race and other factors were considered, Carpenter said.

There were more than 20,653 chemicals in use during that time, broken down into 36 categories, like pesticides.

A case-control study was performed. According to Carpenter, three outside experts approved the study's methods of statistical analysis.

The conclusion, Carpenter said, is that the cancers are one big coincidence.

"Even though there seems to be an excess of brain cancer cases among employees at Spring House, no workplace-related risk factor was found to be associated with these brain cancers," he said.

Families and former officials pelted him with angry questions. According to Syd Havely, a Rohm and Haas spokesman, Carpenter said in a moment of exasperation, "I wish I could tell you there was a correlation, because someone who did that would be famous. ... I wish I could tell you it was 'this.'"

He couldn't. Instead, he went on: "Spring House is a safe place to work."

Nothing has changed at Spring House since the meeting, Havely said: No suspect chemicals have been removed from production; no new safety precautions have been added; and no buildings have been cleared out even with the admittedly high cancer rate.

"If the numbers don't suggest a particular chemical," he said, "it is what it is."

The company said they "reinforced" the safety codes and also offered free MRI and CAT scans to any former employees whose doctors are worried about brain cancer.

Carpenter said at the end of the meeting that there's still more research to be done. But the families weren't about to wait for him. They started to investigate on their own.

Since then, a three-way battle began, pitting Rohm and Haas against several lawsuits and the angry families of former employees. At the center of the controversy is Carpenter's study.

The families of Barry Lange, Charles Hsu and Olivia Ranalli hired Philadelphia attorney Aaron Freiwald, a journalist turned lawyer, not long after the meeting. His Center City office is adorned with U2 paraphernalia, a few guitars, and drawings by his kids. He's got three individual lawsuits against Rohm and Haas simmering in local courts. There could be hearings for Lange and Hsu's reports early next year; Rohm and Haas is trying to dismiss Ranalli's complaint.

"These are good, smart, educated people who suffered with their families through brain cancer," Freiwald said in an interview. "And I feel strongly that if they developed this medical condition at work then the company should be held accountable."

There was also a class-action suit filed on behalf of every current and former Spring House employee, demanding a program that monitors their health for brain cancers. Rohm and Haas lawyers argued that the program is unnecessary because Carpenter's study found no danger at the site. A commonwealth court judge ruled in July that medical monitoring is a worker's compensation issue, but that each employee has to first fill out his or her own form and then prove in court that Rohm and Haas should provide the program. So far, Frewiald said, about two dozen people have filed a claim.

Freiwald attacks the science and integrity of Carpenter's study in the three individual suits; two are filed in Philaelphia courts and one in Montgonery County. In 2006, he subjected Carpenter to a three-day sworn deposition that produced interesting, and complex, results.

Rohm and Haas hired a three-expert panel to review the study over the 2003 Christmas holiday — a few weeks before the Jan. 8 meeting with the families. To this day, Havely said, a full written report on Carpenter's study hasn't been completed. The panel instead based its review on data from the company's research and the PowerPoint slide show Carpenter used that night in January 2004.

At that meeting in the Spring House auditorium, Carpenter had told the audience that the experts approved of the way he did the report. Freiwald says that's not so.

Elizabeth Ward, one of the experts and the managing director of surveillance research at the American Cancer Society, had several objections with Carpenter's study. The first problem was that Carpenter didn't provide enough information. "I had questions on a day we met," she said in a recent interview. "Some were answered, but there were still some things I didn't feel like I had a perfect understanding of at the time. I think it was difficult to offer comments without reading a full [written] report of his study and ask more questions on his methods."

Ward also raised several issues in a Christmas Eve e-mail to Carpenter, a document Freiwald obtained from the company. She wrote, "It appears that exposures in Building 2, 4A and 4B [at Spring House] might be associated with increased risk." It's widely known, Freiwald said, that several employees who died from brain cancer worked there. It's a direct challenge to what Carpenter told the families, although he denies the correlation.

Freiwald also said that the panel wasn't independent. One of the experts, W. Dana Flanders, a professor of epidemiology at Emory University, was on Carpenter's dissertation committee while he attended the University of Alabama. This, Freiwald says, is a conflict of interests.

Neither Flanders or Carpenter believe that's true. In a recent phone interview, Flanders said he doesn't remember many aspects of the study since it took place more than three years ago. "The methods seemed reasonable," he said. "No important objections stuck in my mind." Peter Lees, the third panelist and a professor at Johns Hopkins University, did not return calls for comment.

Either way, Freiwald said, three panelists aren't enough. He alleges that Carpenter is dodging a full peer review — the academic standard for verifying scientific conclusions — because he knows his report is weak. Carpenter completed his study in 2003, and repeatedly said he would publish those results. He hasn't.

Carpenter now wants to wait until a new study, called a cohort mortality study, is completed before both are submitted for peer review. This study would determine whether Spring House workers are more at risk for brain cancer than any other normal person. Carpenter is finished with the results of this new study and is currently writing the analysis, and should be finished this fall.

Although Havely says that the new study will be reviewed by the same three experts as before, one of those panelists begs to differ. "I haven't spoken to Rohm and Haas about that and probably would not be able to do it," said Ward. "I decided not to do outside consulting work because my regular job is time consuming enough."

Freiwald and the families think the company is stalling. The new study was supposed to be done in June, and now Havely said "software issues" held it up until this fall. He said they'll try to publish both in the American Journal of Industrial Medicine.

Havely said he understands that the families want to see if Carpenter's report is sound enough for publication. "I've said this a hundred times," he said. "It was a good study. I truly believe that." But he knows he doesn't have the final word.

"The peer review is the real test," he admitted.

Freiwald has also attacked the way Carpenter presented chemical information to the families, saying that concerns about certain dangerous substances weren't included in the study.

Freiwald obtained an e-mail message sent from Havely to Carpenter at 1:12 p.m. on Dec. 30, 2003. It was a draft of the letter that would be sent to the families, telling them about the upcoming meeting and that the cancers weren't linked to the company.

In the draft, the letter said the two chemicals — N-Nitrosodimethylamine and 1,3 Propane Sultone — "showed statistical significance" of being linked with the cancers, and that the company was "examining the use and application of these chemicals among employees." Even though several employees — specifically Lange and Hsu — handled one or both of those chemicals, the concerns were removed from the final letter.

HUSBAND AND WIFE: Joan Szerlik with a photo of her late husband, Thomas, who once told her: "Funny things go on in that lab, and I don't like being close to it." Photo By: Michael T. Regan (CLICK IMAGE FOR LARGER VERSION)

The federal Centers for Disease Control classifies N-Nitrosodimethylamine, an odorless, yellow liquid, as a carcinogen that has shown a high rate of lung and liver cancer in animal tests. The federal National Institutes of Health says that 1,3 Propane Sultone is a colorless liquid or white, crystalline solid that is "anticipated to be a human carcinogen."

Havely said writing that paragraph was a mistake on his part. "[Carpenter] explained to me that there wasn't a statistical link," he said, "and that it shouldn't have been included.

"Sometimes," Havely said, "the rate is due to chance."

Requests to interview Carpenter for this story were denied.

There are those who don't believe Carpenter's study simply because it defies common sense. Their arguments don't deal in scientific terms or legal jargon but a well-known fact: A lot of people who used to work at Spring House are dead today because of brain cancer. No matter how many statistics are analyzed, studies are commissioned, and meetings are held, for them, it just doesn't add up.

"It's at the point where you just say, 'Oh, come on,'" said David Hart. "The pile is getting bigger and bigger under the rug. I don't think they intended for this to be a cover-up, but it sure as hell is now. Deny, deny, deny — how it's at that point is sad."

Tom Haag, a longtime Rohm and Haas employee, makes the common-sense argument well. He grew up in Northeast Philly when his house was surrounded by farmland. Rohm and Haas hired him as a lab assistant in the late 1950s, and 38 years later, he had a degree in chemistry, brokered deals between Rohm and Haas and Japanese firms, and was the director of his own department. Pick up a common can of household paint at any hardware store, and it likely has a chemical makeup that Haag invented. He retired with a golden parachute, and now lives in an impressive home in an age-restricted community in Holland, Pa.

Haag worked at Spring House for a period of his career and got to know many of its employees.

In the early 1980s, Building 4A at Spring House was used for agricultural chemical research. Inside were dozens of offices with vinyl floors and concrete-block walls layered with a glossy coating of paint. It looked like a hospital. One particular hallway still stands out to him.

"Tom Szerlik sat in that hallway, doing computer modeling of molecules — the same thing architects do with digital building designs, making sure everything fit. He died of glioblastoma," Haag said, placing his palms flat in the air as if he were touching the office's walls.

"Seventy-five feet down, on the other side of the aisle, was Irv Adler, who died of brain cancer, glioblastoma, 17 years ago.

"Irv had a lab technician, Jay Ruth. He died of brain cancer, astrocytoma. He was a bachelor and didn't leave many footprints behind.

"Right across the aisle was Barry Lange. He died of glioblastoma.

"And right around the corner was Charles Hsu, who worked on the same project as Lange" — trying to limit the effect of nitrosoamines, a type of molecule, on people's health — "and he died of glioblastoma."

Haag dropped his hands to his lap.

"Such a rare cancer. A cancer that is so rare, and yet they were all in the same hallway."

There are pictures of Jemin Charles Hsu and his family sitting on shelves and curio tops in his upstate New Jersey home. They show a stereotypical chemist: huge, clunky glasses, a lean frame, and a head of clumsily combed hair.

At least, that's what he looked like before 2003.

By June of that year, the Hsu family had converted their living room into a hospice. A large bed replaced a couch, and the shelves usually reserved for artwork or family photos were overridden with stacks of orange bottles holding prescriptions.

Earlier this year, Hsu lay wrapped in white bed linens, from toe to neck. An IV ran from a silver hook and vanished under the sheets. His head was tilted on a white pillow. His face was bloated, and his thinning hair was slicked back to prevent it from looking too wily. He barely took a breath, let alone speak.

His petite wife, Lee Hsu, stood at the foot of his bed.

"It's ... terminal now," she said, lowering her eyes. She left the room with a fast step, snapping up a tissue from the several well-used boxes scattered in the room.

Hsu died weeks later, in July. He was 59.

Lee's family wasn't alone this year. Olivia Ranalli, the leather saleswoman, died in March. She was 60.

Lee has been upset with Rohm and Haas since Carpenter and Havely visited her husband during cancer treatments at the M.D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, Texas, in 2003. Both came to check in on Hsu, she said, and also inform him that his cancer is not covered by workers' compensation benefits.

That's when Lee — an immunologist and manager at a major pharmaceutical firm who has overseen rigorous scientific reports — took an interest in the next study.

"I think they made a lot of mistakes and ignored some factors," she said. "I think they covered that up and they're trying to get away with it. They're trying to do whatever they can do to cover up and separate themselves from the cancers."

Lee says she's not interested in getting any money for her husband's death — quite frankly, she doesn't need it. All she wants from Rohm and Haas has been repeated over and over by many others: "I just want them to admit to it."

Lee and the dozen other families now have all the time in the word to wait because their loved ones are dead. They know they have to wait for the seemingly endless court proceedings, for the next study to be done, and for the peer review, or, as Havely calls it, "the real test."

But the true test, Lee said, will come years, likely decades, from now.

"That's why I hope they remove the chemicals that can cause this kind of disease," she said. "If not, the illness will keep precipitating. For years, we'll just keep finding out about Spring House workers who get cancer over and over and over again."