Keynote address: potential of in vitro tests in asbestos-related problems.

Abstract

Clarification of particle-cellular interactions, in what Policard called the conflict of living matter with the mineral world, (1) has had slow development. Even the special potential of crystalline silica (quartz) was not fully understood until Collis' classic description of its unique biological properties in his Milroy lecture of 1915 (2). It was known that some individuals exposed to suffered severe lung damage (the knife grinders of Sheffield, for example). But it was equally known that others exposed to dust had no such consequence. Farm laborers in England, who worked in clouds of dusts, had the advantage of long life spans. Evidently, there were dusts and dusts, reacting differently with tissues. This was confirmed when Collis observed that workers exposed to quartz died much more frequently of tuberculosis than those with other kinds of exposure. Even against this background, elucidation of the mechanisms of silica's biological properties is still incomplete; while we have advanced our knowledge of these particles' intracellular activity (3), much study is now directed to membrane effects (4) and the question of immunological mechanisms (5). Problems associated with the activity of fibrous silicate minerals have remained incompletely explored, with equal delay. The first patient of whom we have record in whom asbestos was appreciated to be a health problem was an asbestos factory worker seen by H. Montague Murray in 1898 at the Charing Cross Hospital in London. -The man died the next year of respiratory insufficiency. An autopsy showed diffuse pulmonary fibrosis. The death was commented on in the records of a Departmental Committee of the British Parliament in 1906 (6). There were additional scattered references to the possibility of asbestos-associated respiratory disease in the following years (7), but the first documented case report did not appear in the medical