Dow, the Stern trial, Marc Lappe and the famous dog study

May 18, 2005

Most damning of the internal Dow Corning documents revealed at the

Stern trial, however, was a report on a study co-authored by Silas Braley, the

chemist who was in many ways the father of the silicone implant at Dow

Corning. The study, which had been published in a medical journal in 1973,

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involved four dogs implanted with small implants and observed for two years.

The published study largely reported the results at the end of the six-month

mark (even though published after the end of the 2-year period), finding only

minor inflammation in some of the dogs. The internal report which had been

keep within the company, however, revealed that, at the end of the 2-year

period, one of the dogs had died, and the other three had varying degrees of

severe chronic inflammation. Two dogs suffered thyroiditis — evidence of

autoimmune response — and spots on the spleen.

During the Stern trial an expert witness named Marc Lappe, called by the

plaintiff to comment on the study, pointed out the discrepancies between the

published study and the internal reports. Dow Corning lawyers tried

unsuccessfully to have Lappe’s testimony excluded. The judge then asked to see

the documents both Lappe and the Dow Corning lawyers brought into court,

and noticed that the identifying numbers on the dogs had been altered on the

documents Dow Corning had given the attorneys. It looked suspiciously like the

company had altered the data to make it more difficult to get at the full two-year

results of the study.

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The revelation of these internal documents, especially the allegedly

misreported dog study, was the key reason why the Stern jury found Dow

Corning guilty of fraud and awarded Stern $1.7 million. Subsequent

developments in the case led to the continued suppression of this information

from the public. Dow Corning appealed the jury’s decision, and during the

appeal reached a settlement with Stern for an undisclosed amount of

money and an agreement that all the internal Dow Corning documents disclosed

at the trial would remain confidential. This secrecy agreement won by the

company may have been one of the most important contributions to its later

troubles with the courts, for it made much more plausible the later charges that

the company had withheld important risk information from the FDA as well as

from its consumers and the public.

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