"We did what scientists so often do which was to use ...estimates without questioning them," said Marvin Schneiderman, a statistician at the National Cancer Institute.

There's one thing wrong with that statement: It should read, "We did what government regulatory scientists do." And it illustrates why NBC commentator John Chancellor is underscoring a disturbing reality when he wistfully recalls, "I can remember when you could win an argument by citing government statistics."

Government statistics are no longer trustworthy in such sensitive and significant matters as human health, cancer and the environment. For almost a generation, the American public has been the victim of a hoax, perpetrated by its own government, that cancer is caused by environmental factors, and particularly industry, and not by personal habits, primarily smoking.

But now the myth of environmental cancer caused by industry has been finally laid to rest, among scientists at least, by perhaps its most important originator.

Marvin Schneiderman, cited above, was one of nine contributors to what is known as "the estimates document," the report, prepared in 1978 for the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, that launched America's great asbestos hoax. This document, using figures originally developed by the late Dr. Irving Selikoff, projected that 58,000 to 75,000 people would die each year from asbestos related cancer, about 17 percent of all cancer fatalities.

Based on that projection, the U.S. government upped the number of cancers presumably caused by industrial exposure from 2 percent to as much as 40 percent. The Age of the Environment has dawned,: the United States was in the middle of a cancer "epidemic" caused by our own industrial civilization.

Ten years later, Mr. Schneiderman was the Environmental Protection Agency's principal scientific authority in what the agency hoped would be a precedent-setting ban on asbestos, which is used primarily for as fore protection in buildings and in brake linings.

Last month the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals threw out the ban when the EPA failed to make a case for even 13 to 15 asbestos related cancer deaths a year, among heavily exposed brake workers.

EPA Administrator William Reilly, in the words of the National Association of School Boards, had provided Congress with "a broad indictment of the EPA's lack of scientific basis for its policy pronouncements." EPA's own Science Advisory Board asked Mr. Reilly why the scientific basis for the government's asbestos policy had never had "the benefit of review" by the board.

Why? And why did 58,000 to 75,000 asbestos-related cancer doubtless eventually fall to 13 to 15--and those unprovable in court? The answer lies in environmental ideology, not in science.

Real scientists--those private and government researchers who submit their work to peer review in professional journals can't be blamed. The "estimates document" was never submitted for peer review, and the "contributors" have never admitted actual authorship.

Immediately denounced by Science and Lancet, the document was castigated by Sir Richard Doll of Oxford the epidemiologist who conclusively proved the relationship between smoking and lung cancer, in his definitive study "The Causes of Cancer." "No arguments based even loosely upon [these estimates] should be taken seriously," Sir Richard wrote. "It seems likely that whoever wrote the OSHA paper did so for political rather than scientific reasons . . by those who wish to emphasize the importance of occupational factors . . . in newspaper articles and . . . journalism."

Not all journalists were conned. In 1984, Edith Efron published "The Apocalyptics: Cancer and the Big Lie," which was hailed by Dr. Bruce Ames of the University of California at Berkeley, the nation's leading authority on carcinogenesis, as the "Silent Spring of the counterrevolution."

By 1985 when I published a series of articles on asbestos in the Detroit News, it had become obvious, largely through the work of Malcolm Ross of the U.S. Geological Survey, that only heavy asbestos exposure among workers with risks multiplied some 80-90 times over by smoking--was dangerous.

Further, those dangers were largely limited to the past, primarily to the World War II era, when exposure was completely unregulated. Mr. Ross conclusions were affirmed by the American Medical Association and by a study commissioned by Congress, from the Health Effects Institute in Cambridge, Mass. headed by former Watergate prosecutor Archibald Cox.

"We made the inappropriate estimate that short term exposures were just as nasty, as carcinogenic, and deadly as long-term exposures," Mr. Schneiderman told the Journal of the NCI in April. "Now it looks as if you have to have continuous exposure to cause the worst effects."

So the great industrial cancer epidemic is over. In fact, it never was, as communities with the financial and intellectual resources to study the issue came to realize. Newton, Mass., with two biologists on its town board, rejected a $3.5 billion asbestos removal proposal last winter. An $8.5 million asbestos removal referendum was rejected in New Canaan, Conn., in June by a vote of 2-to-1.

But to date, casualties of the "estimates document" include more than a dozen corporations in bankruptcy thousands thrown out of work, and well more than 150,000 asbestos tort cases clogging the courts. Schools and private property owners have already spent some $27 billion of an estimated $150 billion for asbestos removal, although an EPA guidance document, released almost surreptitiously two years ago advised that removal is "often not [emphasis EPAs] a building owner's best course of action" and that improper removal could "create a dangerous situation where none existed before."

The United States has paid an enormous price because questions weren't asked earlier. There is no excuse for not asking them now--particularly on behalf of poorer communities, where scarce financial resources would be better spent for virtually any other purpose.