Chapter 20, Part 1

By Frank Tursi, Susan E. White and Steve McQuilkin
JOURNAL REPORTERS
© 1999 Winston-Salem Journal

They should erect a plaque to Jim Fredrickson in a prominent place in the lobby of the Reynolds Building because he saved R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Co. tons of money. Anti-smoking groups should name an award in his honor because Fredrickson may also have saved the lives of an untold number of smokers.

Few people outside RJR's labs knew any of that when James D. Fredrickson died in April 1987. No newspaper stories lamented his passing and praised his accomplishments. The standard paid obituary that appeared in the Winston-Salem Journal two days after his death noted merely that he was a ''master scientist'' at RJR. There was no mention of his discovery in 1963 that revolutionized the tobacco industry.

The R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Co. was once the largest cigarette company in the United States with a powerhouse of best-selling brands: Winston, Salem and Camel. But times changed, and as the case against smoking became more pronounced in the 1960s, RJR failed to adapt to the marketplace. Its rivals would eventually rush past it, and RJR's efforts to catch up would have a profound impact on the company and the cigarette industry.

By then, Reynolds, like the other tobacco companies, had been working diligently for almost 10 years on ways to make cigarettes less hazardous to smokers. Though company executives publicly had argued that the medical case against cigarettes was overstated, its scientists had quietly spent much of the 1950s looking for the magic bullet that would solve the growing health problem. Responding to the industry's critics, they had tried different filters to selectively remove or reduce suspected carcinogens in tobacco smoke. They had investigated ways to treat the tobacco itself to extract the chemical precursors of the harmful compounds.

''We did the best we knew how at the time under the circumstances,'' said Murray Senkus, RJR's director of chemical research throughout most of the 1950s who became research director in 1961. ''As I look at it now, we explored all avenues that were floating at the time.''

All that lab work succeeded in producing a Winston that, in 1963, contained 40 percent less tar and almost half the nicotine of the original version introduced nine years earlier. By then, company scientists had given up on the rather naive notion that they could find the ''super carcinogen'' among the thousands of compounds in cigarette smoke and successfully remove it. Instead, they focused on reducing all the compounds in the smoke.

What better way to do that, Fredrickson reasoned, then by cutting the amount of tobacco in each cigarette. The logic was simple: Less tobacco meant less tar and suspected carcinogens sucked in by smokers. RJR could, of course, make its cigarettes thinner or shorter but that risked driving away customers. The trick was to keep cigarettes the same size while reducing the amount of tobacco that went in them.

The process Fredrickson eventually came up with is not terribly different than the one used to pop corn. He impregnated tobacco with various solvents under pressure. The solvents entered the cells of the tobacco and evaporated when the tobacco was heated very quickly, disrupting the cell structure and actually swelling or puffing the backbone of the tobacco. The benefits were quickly apparent: Expanded tobacco took up more space in the cigarette, which meant less tobacco was needed.

There were initially serious drawbacks, however. Fredrickson tried 15 different solvents, including ethyl alcohol, hexane and pentene. All are components of gasoline and are highly combustible. Mix hexane gas with air, for instance, and run for cover. To solve the problem, Fredrickson settled on Freon 11, an extremely inert substance that was developed by General Motors for automobile air conditioners. It's neither flammable nor explosive.

RJR scientists are rightfully proud of their contributions in developing or perfecting most of the methods currently used by tobacco companies that have reduced the average tar and nicotine content of a cigarette by about 70 percent since the early 1950s.

However, none was as important as Fredrickson's puffed tobacco. Without it, low-tar and ultra-low tar cigarettes would probably not be possible.

Reynolds, for instance, combined expanded tobacco, called G-13, with an efficient filter to produce Vantage, which was introduced in 1970 and was the first successful low-tar cigarette. That was also the year that G-13 was first used in Winston.

Currently, every RJR brand contains at least 20 percent expanded tobacco. Ultra low-tar brands can contain as much as 50 percent. Now, though, the company uses carbon dioxide to puff its tobacco. It stopped using Freon 11 in the late 1980s because of its harmful effects on the Earth's ozone layer.

Reynolds either licensed the process to other tobacco companies or the companies later developed their own, and now most major brands of cigarettes in the world also contain expanded tobacco.

Along with its ability to lower tar and nicotine content, Fredrickson's discovery had an added benefit, noted David E. Townsend, RJR's vice president for product development and assessment. ''Jim Fredrickson probably saved more money for this company than any one individual in the history of R.J. Reynolds,'' he said.

Tobacco is the most expensive raw material in a cigarette. Senkus did the math: Before Fredrickson's discovery, it took a gram of tobacco to make a regular-sized cigarette, which meant a pound of tobacco made about 450 cigarettes. Puff the tobacco, though, and the company can squeeze 750 cigarettes from that pound, which sells at auction for about $1.80. If RJR makes more than 100 billion cigarettes a year . . .

''Now you're talking some real money,'' Senkus said. ''That meant not millions to the company but billions.''

Compound of the Month

Tobacco executives throughout the 1950s assured their customers that any potentially harmful compounds found in cigarette smoke would be promptly removed. They left it to the boys in the lab to fulfill the promise. The scientists soon realized that it was easier said then done.

''They (company executives) didn't know a damn thing about science but they assumed we are going to get the answers with proper research,'' Senkus said. ''A very profound scientist knew at the beginning that you had a helluva problem, which probably would never be solved. As a physical chemist I had that feeling right from the very beginning. I had that feeling but that doesn't mean you shouldn't keep on trying.''

The problem was, of course, that tobacco smoke is a mixture of thousands of chemical compounds. To think that one or two could be selectively removed or reduced and the smoker would be better off was naive at best, Townsend said. ''I don't think that you'd find a toxicologist today who would look at a complex mixture like smoke and say, `Oh, it makes sense if you take one thing out it would probably be a lot better,' '' he said. ''In those days, the medical and public-health community was pretty much looking at a silver-bullet approach. Toxicologists wouldn't do that today.''

Not only was the science daunting, but the target kept moving, much to the frustration of such men as Alan Rodgman, a RJR chemist who directed the company's research into smoke composition.

Much of Rodgman's work to identify possible harmful compounds in smoke was in response to other scientists, primarily Dr. Ernst Wynder and his colleague,< Dietrich Hoffmann. They were considered the leading researchers in the country into the health effects of smoking, and their pronouncements and scientific papers in the late 1950s and '60s triggered almost immediate reactions in the labs of the country's tobacco companies. ''Once someone says something is there, not only do you have to show that they're telling you the truth but then you have to figure out how to measure it,'' Rodgman explained.

Wynder, Hoffmann and other outside researchers kept adding to an ever-growing list of compounds that they thought responsible for smoking's peril. Benzopyrene and other polycyclic hydrocarbons were first, followed by aza-arenes, phenols, aldehyde, ketone, nitrosamine, polonium-210. ''We used to laugh and say, `This is the compound of the month,' '' Rodgman noted.

Some of the compounds, like benzopyrene, produced tumors in lab animals, while others, like phenols, were thought to promote cancer by heightening the effects of cancer-causing compounds. Still others were thought to interfere or destroy cilia, the tiny hairs that help cleanse the lungs. All were found in tobacco smoke in trace amounts, which made removing them difficult.

''Here's what you have,'' Rodgman explained. ''Think of a ball with thousands of compounds in it -- we still don't know how many, but we know there are 4,500, 4,800. Floating in this little puddle is polycyclics. How do you selectively reach in and pull out a benzopyrene molecule or whatever?''

RJR's experience with benzopyrene illustrates the problems company scientists faced in trying to selectively remove or reduce individual compounds in cigarette smoke. Benzopyrene is formed whenever anything organic is burned, and Rodgman confirmed its existence in cigarette smoke in 1956. Because it was considered a potent carcinogen at the time, RJR researchers began looking for ways to reduce it. ''We did what we could based on observations from the outside -- extraction, filtration. We really responded very seriously,'' Senkus said.

Scientists experimented with a variety of metal nitrates, including palladium, platinum and magnesium, to try to change the burning temperature of the tobacco and thus prevent benzopyrene from forming. They looked at filter additives to reduce the compound in the smoke, but the most promising approach was to remove the substances in tobacco that formed benzopyrene when the tobacco burned.

RJR researchers found that solanesol, a long-chain hydrocarbon that was the primary precursor of benzopyrene, could be greatly reduced by treating the tobacco with the solvent hexane. They extracted tons of tobacco for two years, Senkus explained, before bringing in consultants to study building a plant to extract commercial quantities of tobacco. ''We took it very seriously. We took it very, very, very seriously,'' he said. ''Management was in on it . Management approved it.

The treated tobacco turned out to be very brittle, Townsend noted, and didn't hold up well in cigarette-making machines. In taste tests, smokers didn't particularly like the flavor of cigarettes made with the treated tobacco.

There was also the small problem of explosions. ''Hexane is extremely explosive,'' Senkus explained. ''And it would be difficult to foresee a large operation of that magnitude and it would be too hazardous to go into. So the thing was abandoned.''

Tests done on the smoke from treated cigarettes found lower levels of benzopyrene, but higher levels of phenol. ''But we gave it up because we couldn't very well say, `We've lowered the polycyclics and increased the phenol,' and have the anti-tobacco people jump all over our butt,'' Rodgman said.

Researchers learned a valuable lesson about tinkering with the thousands of chemical interactions that occur when a match is put to a cigarette. Unintended consequences, Townsend noted, are the likely result. ''When you try to take one thing out you upset the chemistry,'' he said. ''That ultimately was an important process to work through because it really confirms that general reduction is overall a more practical way to go because you're reducing everything across the board.''

• Coming Tuesday: One-Fanged Rattler