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.
The anonymous commentary has been used for decades by corporate defense 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 U.S. 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 last 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, Rosner told us. A few months ago, they discovered the 1977 article had been written by cancer researcher Francis J.C. 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 today, revealing Roe gave Johnson & Johnson an advanced copy of the article. In a 1977 letter to Gavin Hildick-Smith, the 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 prior to 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 today, 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.
Last year, a journal retracted a review article concluding the weed killer Roundup – which has also been the subject of extensive litigation – “does not pose a health risk to humans.” The move came years after documents released in a court case revealed employees of Monsanto, the company that developed the herbicide, wrote the article but were not named as coauthors.
Product litigation attorney Nathan Schachtman said he could “smell a similar public relations strategy here,” referring to the talc paper retraction. He also emphasized that Rosner and Markowitz are “big-time testifiers for the plaintiffs’ bar.”
Schachtman also 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, Johnson & Johnson has faced lawsuits from more than 67,000 plaintiffs who claim 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 $4.7 billion verdict in Missouri handed down in 2018, a $1.5 billion award for a Maryland woman in 2025, and a $966 million verdict awarded in 2025 to the family of a California woman who died from mesothelioma. An appeals court later reduced the $4.7 billion award to $2.1 billion.
Last year we reported that a lawyer representing a unit of Johnson & Johnson 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 standardized testing for measuring asbestos in cosmetics that contain talc. Proposed as part of the Modernization of Cosmetics Regulation Act of 2022, the rule would have required manufacturers use two different lab techniques to test for the presence of asbestos in their products.
The FDA withdrew the rule on November 28, 2025, saying in the agency’s announcement, “good cause exists to withdraw the proposed rule at this time.” The notice continued, “We are withdrawing the proposed rule to reconsider best means of addressing the issues.”
Rosner and Markowitz reached out to The Lancet about the documents on December 8, 2025. In the published letter, the duo wrote 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, Johnson & Johnson 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, Johnson & Johnson 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 last 11 years.”
A representative for Johnson & Johnson 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.”
“Suggesting that the editorial represents covert corporate advocacy fundamentally mischaracterizes the historical record,” the representative continued.
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.
The 49 years it took between publication and retraction of this article isn’t a record — a paper retracted 80 years after it was published holds that distinction — but it is among the top five. It sits between the 2020 retraction of a 70-year-old paper on attitudes about homosexuality and last year’s retraction of a 46-year-old paper on IQ tests, originally published in 1978. A total of 71 articles published in the 1970s have been retracted, according to our database.
With reporting by Alicia Gallegos and Kate Travis
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