The Lancet has retracted a 49-year-old unsigned commentary on the safety of cosmetic talc after two researchers discovered the author was a paid consultant to Johnson & Johnson, at the time a leading producer of talc products, reports Retraction Watch.
The anonymous commentary has been used for decades by corporate defence attorneys to claim scientific proof of talc products’ safety, according to critics. But one such attorney says the paper “would not be relied upon to any significant degree”.
Published in 1977, the article argued against government-mandated regulatory testing for asbestos in cosmetic talc.
Around that time, the US Food and Drug Administration was considering such monitoring, a task that ultimately became the responsibility of cosmetics companies.
The researchers behind the push for retraction, public health historians David Rosner and Gerald Markowitz, have served as witnesses on behalf of people who developed diseases as a result of exposure to asbestos products, including talc.
Rosner told Retraction Watch the two have been “confronted by attorneys for talc products” with The Lancet’s 1977 editorial four or five times in the past few years. Attorneys defending cosmetics companies “used it to basically say that the medical field did not consider asbestos in talc dangerous”, Rosner said.
The pair has amassed millions of documents collected during discovery processes, and a few months ago, discovered the 1977 article had been written by cancer researcher Francis JC Roe.
Roe, who died in 2007, worked for Royal Marsden Hospital and the Tobacco Research Council, but spent most of his career as an independent consultant. He wrote more than 200 articles, according to PubMed, many on toxicology, tobacco exposure and cancer.
In a letter published in The Lancet in 1979 – in which he referred to his own then-anonymous 1977 article as “balanced” – he disclosed that he was a consultant to the Cosmetic Toiletry and Perfumery Association.
Rosner and Markowitz uncovered a paper trail, included as a supplement to a letter published by The Lancet, revealing that Roe gave Johnson & Johnson an advanced copy of the article.
In a 1977 letter to Gavin Hildick-Smith, Director of Medical Affairs at Johnson & Johnson at the time, Roe said he had “taken into account your two points on the original … in a slightly different way from that proposed by yourself – but I think I have met your two points”.
Rosner and Markowitz say this indicates Roe shared the paper with Johnson & Johnson and sought the company’s input before publication.
“Roe’s conflict of interest with Johnson & Johnson was a clear breach of publishing ethics,” the editors of The Lancet wrote in a reply to the letter, also published, along with the retraction notice.
“In our view, had the editors at the time known of this situation and been aware of the author’s undeclared competing interest, they would not have published this commentary.”
In their reply, the journal editors said publishing unsigned commentaries “used to be standard practice”.
A representative from The Lancet told us the journal would only consider publishing an unsigned letter now “in rare circumstances where there are concerns about author safety”.
In those circumstances, the editors are still aware of author names and affiliations, the representative said.
Product litigation attorney Nathan Schachtman said Rosner and Markowitz are “big-time testifiers for the plaintiffs’ bar” and said he could say, “with some assurance, that an unsigned editorial that is 50 years old, from The Lancet (not a particularly important journal in the modern era when it comes to industrial or occupational diseases) would not be relied upon to any significant degree” in court.
Since 2009, J&J has faced lawsuits from more than 67 00 plaintiffs claiming the company’s talc products caused them cancer, with the bulk of cases involving ovarian cancer claims. The lawsuits have resulted in massive verdicts against the company, including a $4.7bn verdict in Missouri handed down in 2018, a $1.5bn award for a Maryland woman in 2025, and a $966m verdict awarded in 2025 to the family of a California woman who died from mesothelioma.
An appeals court later reduced the $4.7bn award to $2.1bn.
Last year we reported that a lawyer representing a unit of J&J asked the editors of the Journal of Occupational and Environmental Medicine to retract a paper on 33 cases of mesothelioma associated with cosmetic talc after the court-ordered release of the patients’ identities. The patients had exposures to asbestos other than cosmetic talc, the lawyer alleged.
The journal declined to take any action on the paper.
In 2024, the FDA announced it was proposing a new rule to require standardised testing for measuring asbestos in cosmetics that contain talc. This would have required manufacturers to use two different lab techniques to test for the presence of asbestos in their products.
The FDA withdrew the rule on 28 November 2025.
Rosner and Markowitz contacted The Lancet about this on 8 December, writing that the regulation “would have been a major advance in the nearly half-century effort to eliminate a key source of asbestos-related disease affecting generations”.
Experts called the withdrawal “enormously valuable” for Johnson & Johnson, as reported in The Cancer Letter, and suspected it “smacks of industry influence”.
In 2021, J&J created LTL Management to take on its talc-related liabilities and later formed Red River Talc LLC, for the same purpose. Through the subsidiaries, the parent company has tried filing for bankruptcy three times to resolve remaining talc-related lawsuits through structured agreements, but courts have repeatedly rejected the proposals.
After the last failed bankruptcy attempt in 2025, J&J said it would not appeal and instead “return to the tort system to litigate and defeat these meritless talc claims”, according to a 2025 press release. In the statement, the company said it has “prevailed in 16 of 17 ovarian cases tried in the past 11 years”.
A representative for J&J told us the company “strongly disagrees with the suggestion that a 1977 editorial in The Lancet reflects misconduct or warrants retroactive condemnation”, and said “the journal is being used as part of ongoing and underhanded litigation tactics”.
The statement – which can be read in full here – concludes:
“In short, the renewed focus on a nearly 50-year-old editorial arises entirely from certain plaintiffs’ lawyers desire [sic] to breathe new life into a tall tale in the hopes of reframing historical scientific debates for their present‑day courtroom narrative. That effort comes at the cost of besmirching Dr Roe’s good name, who the National Institutes of Health acknowledges made major contributions in areas such as carcinogenesis, cancer epidemiology, and cancer prevention over his 50-year career. It is shameful that these lawyers would involve The Lancet – one of the world’s oldest and most widely read medical journals – in such tactics.”
See more from MedicalBrief archives:
Johnson & Johnson’s appeal on $2.12bn talc verdict dismissed
J&J appeals order to pay $40m to two cancer patients
J&J offers new deal in baby powder cancer litigation