A BU professor has been called as an expert witness in one of the largest lawsuits in the country, in which more than 250 workers at IBM chip-making plants in California, Minnesota and New York are claiming IBM exposed employees to carcinogenic substances.
Professor Richard Clapp, an epidemiologist and professor in the School of Public Health, has been asked to testify for the plaintiffs in the case that features a ‘corporate morality file,’ which followed 30,000 IBM employee deaths from 1969 to 2000.
Clapp concluded that certain cancers affected more IBM employees and earlier in their lives than usual, compared with the overall population, according to The Financial Times.
‘I’ve done 12 to 15 trials over the past 15 years, and in most of those it’s a situation where I’ve done research on something, such as dioxins, and the plaintiff in court has been exposed to dioxins,’ Clapp said.
Clapp is not a medical doctor, so he cannot testify on specific case files, but rather has a doctorate in epidemiology and testifies on what generally causes the toxins.
‘There are two kinds of causal opinions: general and specific,’ Clapp said. ‘I do general, and an M.D. does the specific.’
Clapp, who received his master’s in Public Health from the Harvard School of Public Health, said he is usually called to be an expert witness for ‘toxic tort’ cases, which involve toxic chemicals and radiation. Clapp said attorneys regularly contact him to act as an expert witness in cases.
‘The attorney of the plaintiff usually calls me,’ he said. ‘I’m not sure why because I don’t advertise. There must be some kind of Lexis/Nexis search for toxic tort cases, or simply they hear of me through word of mouth.’
In the IBM case in which Clapp is currently involved in, the ‘corporate mortality file’ alleges IBM knew its employees were being exposed to toxic chemicals and dying of breast, blood and lymph cancer more often than normal.
The plaintiffs in the case, filed by four former Silicon Valley employees and their families, all had manufacturing jobs inside IBM ‘clean rooms’ where disk drives were commonly made.
BU spokesman Colin Riley said BU professors are commonly called in as experts.
‘We have a lot of experts, in all areas,’ Riley said. ‘We have people over [at the BU Medical School] who could help find causation related to health risks.’
Clapp also recently testified in a case in which a local plant allegedly exposed an Alabama community to polychlorinated biphenyls, which the country banned in 1977.
‘There were African-American families who lived in the community and were exposed to the chemical for many years, and now they can’t sell their property and they’re getting sick,’ Clapp said. ‘This summer, the case was settled and $700 million went to that community for medical care and community services such as youth programs and counseling.’
The witness fees Clapp receives from his work on these ‘toxic tort’ cases go to the Tellus Institute, the Boston-based non-profit environmental firm where he is a part-time consultant.
On Sept. 26, IBM lost its petition to a Santa Clara County Superior Court to have Clapp’s analysis of the ‘corporate mortality file’ excluded from the lawsuit, according to The Associated Press. A judge ruled that the cases of Alida Hernandez and James Moore, who worked in IBM’s South San Jose microchip assembly plant for much of the 1970s and ’80s, could proceed to a jury trial starting Oct. 14.
Due to the threat of negative publicity, the vast majority of environmental exposure cases against big companies, such as the one against IBM and the Alabama case, are settled out of court, sometimes for hundreds of millions of dollars, according to the AP.
‘These toxic torts are highly dangerous, and some of the lawsuits which they bring up are national news, such as the IBM case,’ Clapp said.