Lanza, Anthony

Dr. Anthony Lanza, chief of the Industrial Hygiene Division in 1917-18 and associate medical director of Metropolitan Life Insurance Company from 1926 to 1947. At Met Life and later, he oversaw research on the hazards of silica dust, asbestos, and chromium on behalf of manufacturing companies. (Courtesy of the National Library of Medicine, History of Medicine Division.)... 

The aim of the new foundation seems to have been to replicate the functions that the Bureau of Mines and Industrial Hygiene Division had performed under friendlier federal administrations. When explaining why Metropolitan Life, largest sponsor of the latter agency s dust research, should join the foundation, Anthony Lanza commented that... 

The foundation committee, which was chaired by Anthony Lanza and counted Royd Sayers among its members, proposed a value of 5 million silica particles per cubic meter of air. The choice of this number was an exercise of discretion, carried out by a body responsible to its corporate sponsors rather than the general public. The committee recognized, in a publication intended for the foundation s membership, that it lacked the knowledge upon which to base such thresholds. 32... 

The target that proved to be Hueper s undoing was chromium. His attention was drawn naturally to this industry, where a cancer hazard had been identified before the war. Hueper s work on chromium began before he joined NCI, in t946, when he was asked to consult at the Baltimore plant of the Mutual Chemical Company. At this point he crossed paths with two men who epitomize the opposite poles of the chemical industry s response to environmental hazards Anthony Lanza of Metropolitan Life and Omar Tarr, Mutual s technical director. 

The Donora investigation had been neutered, but the wider implications of the disaster still could not be ignored. It fell initially to Anthony Lanza, who was to help the Donora defense prepare its cross-examination of Clarence Mills,23 to present the lessons of the pollution episode as industry wanted them to be learned. Lanza s reassuring conclusions were laid out in a talk given May 24, 1949, to the national association of air pollution specialists and reprinted as a pamphlet ... 

The edifice of scientific orthodoxy erected by Royd Sayers, Anthony Lanza, Robert Kehoe, and their collaborators was under assault from more than one direction. On one side was the wave of popular and media attention that followed Silent Spring. From another came advances in environmental science, knocking out the underpinnings of the scientific defenses that polluters had labored diligently to build. 

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