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By Root 686 0

science, grander still were the victories in court. In 1994 a federal court granted $4.25 billion—that’s billion with a b, the largest product liability settlement to that date—in a global settlement to compensate women nationwide for maladies allegedly resulting from leaking implants. Because the main manufacturer, Dow Corning, subsequently declared bankruptcy, the money was not paid out and legal wrangling continued. By 1998, when Dow Corning reached an agreement to pay $3.2 billion to settle claims and emerge from bankruptcy, a rigorous review of more than one hundred studies, published in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute, had concluded that implants do not cause breast cancer—the most serious disease the lawsuits alleged. Little or no scientific evidence existed to connect implants to any other disease either. Large studies had found no association, for instance, between implants and connective tissue diseases, and research published in the Journal of the American Medical Association suggested that lifestyle choices, rather than implants, might be factors in some of the women’s ailments. Comparing women with implants to other women, the scientists discovered that those with implants tended to be heavier drinkers, have more sex partners, use hair dyes, and take birth control pills.46

Marcia Angell accurately observed in a commentary in the New England Journal of Medicine, “Despite the lack of published epidemiologic studies, the accumulated weight of anecdotes was taken by judges and juries as tantamount to proof of causation.” But anecdotes do not accumulate on their own. Enterprising attorneys aggressively solicited them. A television commercial urging women to call a particular law firm at a toll-free number declared, “Joint pain, fatigue and autoimmune diseases are associated with breast implants.” A headline in a newspaper ad asked, “ARE DREAM BREASTS TO DIE FOR?”47

Some firms became litigation factories. One pair of attorneys in Houston, John O‘Quinn and Rick Laminack, mass-produced suits on behalf of more than 2,500 women. Described as “the lawyers from hell” in a cover story in Fortune magazine, O’Quinn and Laminack grossed around $100 million in implant settlements. In addition to hordes of paralegals and file clerks who worked exclusively on implant cases, they employed a full-time nurse and set up their own courtroom where they rehearsed witnesses.48

Recognizing the need to make their carefully molded anecdotes sound to judges and juries like medical facts, lawyers worked also with highly paid physicians. Some of these docs ran what Gina Kolata and Barry Meier of the New York Times described in an investigative story as “assembly-line practices” for certifying plaintiffs as legitimately ill. One physician in Houston, whose income in 1994 was $2 million, told the Times he had seen 4,700 women with implants, at least 90 percent of whom came from referrals from lawyers. Law firms typically paid the lion’s share of his fee, and in turn, he authenticated 93 percent of the women as ill, thus qualifying them to collect part of the multibillion-dollar settlement or to sue on their own.49

Not all medical professionals were treated so hospitably, however, by the implant-milking attorneys. Prominent medical researchers whose findings might hamper the litigation caught hell from plaintiffs’ firms. Following publication of the Mayo Clinic study, O’Quinn and Laminack subpoenaed huge numbers of documents from Marcia Angell and the New England Journal of Medicine, which published the study, while another Houston law firm, representing 3,000 women in implant suits, went directly after the scientists at Mayo. Sherine Gabriel, one of those researchers, told Kolata that responding to demands for thousands of research manuscripts, data bases, and the medical records of women in their studies was exceedingly stressful and compromised her ability to do research.50

The assaults had a chilling effect. Scientists at other research centers, concerned for their careers and the costs of lawsuits, vowed not to do implant