Mystery at Rohm & Haas

THERE IS GOOD science, and there is bad science. The former can be replicated. It can be proven. The latter is guesswork and gaps, hunches rather than cold, unshakable certainty. The distance between the two, the good science and the bad, is an infinitesimal divide. It’s the difference between innovation and failure, industry and paralysis, and sometimes, without exaggeration, between life and death. Throughout his career with the Rohm & Haas chemical company, Tom Haag knew good science. His first job there was lab assistant; he was just out of high school, and Dwight Eisenhower was in the White House. Except for two years the Army claimed, he would spend the next 38 climbing through the ranks of Rohm & Haas, from chemist to lab chief to R&D and marketing. By Haag’s own estimation, his invention — acrylic latex semi-gloss paint — has resulted in $4 billion in profits. Some might call that great science, with a capital G.

When Haag retired in 1991, his title stretched across his clean white business card: director of corporate development. The company’s Spring House compound in Lower Gwynedd Township, Montgomery County, had become his second home when it opened in 1963. He walked away from Rohm & Haas on very good terms, with a quarter of a million dollars in his pocket, and a four-bedroom sanctuary in Beach Haven Inlet to share with his wife, Dot. He had Rohm & Haas — the nation’s sixth largest chemical company, with $8.2 billion in revenue last year — to thank, and he was grateful.

Haag hadn’t thought of Wayne Kachelries for years, but in his Shore house on an August morning in 1996, memories of his long-lost co-worker stirred as he perused the Wall Street Journal. He read about an Amoco chemical plant in Illinois where an unusual number of brain cancers had been discovered — four malignant tumors since 1982. Amoco responded by closing 39 labs and offices, and launching an investigation.

A few details reached out to Haag: The Amoco employees all worked in the same building. They probably worked with some of the same chemicals that Wayne Kachelries once handled at Spring House. And Kachelries, at age 44, died of brain cancer.

After a couple phone calls to Rohm & Haas went nowhere, Haag, then 61, sat down and wrote to a man he knew by his first name: the company’s medical director, Phil Lewis. Applications chemists like himself, Haag explained, regard synthesis guys like Kachelries, who are often exposed to high levels of dangerous low-molecular chemicals, “as coal miners regard canaries.” Haag’s curiosity spilled onto the page: Did Kachelries have the same type of cancer as the Amoco workers? Were there chemicals in common between his old friend and those “poor fellows”? Haag understood all the ways in which the Haas family has quietly shaped Philadelphia, with charitable gifts measured by the millions each year. With lives possibly at stake, Haag knew he’d hear back soon. “By receipt of this letter,” he wrote, “I fully transfer the burden of this troublesome thought to your back.”