Are There, At Last, Reliable Biomarkers of Past Benzene Exposure?
A dozen years ago the National Law Journal had a write-up on a benzene / acute myelogenous leukemia case Herschel Hobson and I tried to verdict up in Texarkana, TX in Judge Folsom's court. The case was noteworthy as it was the first time the so-called benzene fingerprint defense had gone to a jury. Over Herschel's objection that it was junk science not generally accepted in the scientific community I got to put on evidence that benzene-induced leukemias are like therapy-related leukemias (t-AMLs), that the plaintiff didn't have the signature loss or deletion of chromosomes 5 and/or 7, and to argue that the plaintiff's leukemia could not therefore have been caused by benzene. Fate was with me however and so Herschel was quoted in the article as saying that the biomarker defense was all a bunch of baloney; or words to that effect.
The effort to identify markers of past benzene exposures continues and is intensifying. Interestingly, it's one of the plaintiffs bar's key experts who's leading the charge. For two brand new papers on the topic see (gated) "Chromosome-Wide Aneuploidy Study (CWAS) in Workers Exposed to an Established Leukemogen, Benzene" and (free) "Global Gene Expression of Profiling of a Population Exposed to a Range of Benzene Levels".
I must admit though that while putting on new science is exciting it's often not the game changer we'd like to believe. What almost certainly carried the day in that case was that the widow on cross examination opened the door to claims she'd made against other defendants over her husbands leukemia. Through another lawyer Herschel didn't know about she'd sued three dozen defendants in New York claiming that asbestos had caused her husband's cancer. (In the past recycling plaintiffs was not uncommon and I've seen a single family recover full damages from each of the asbestos, silica, benzene and butadiene defendants). As she read her New York complaint asserting that asbestos was the sole cause of her husband's cancer and that she was entitled to $40 million from each defendant the jurors one after another crossed their arms and sat back in their chairs. And that, was that.
