Chapter 5, Part 1

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

Wall Street had the jitters. Cigarette consumption was still falling, and tobacco stocks had hit the wall. Edward A. Darr, broad-shouldered and athletic-looking, exuded calm and confidence as he stood up at a luncheon meeting of the Security Analysts' Association in New York on Nov. 23, 1954, to speak about the ''lung-cancer scare.''

At the televised opening of RJR's research center were (from left) Roy Haberkern, Ed Darr, Reynolds' president, John Cameron Swayze of NBC, and John C. Whitaker, chairman of the board.

Darr, the president of R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Co., said that all was well on Tobacco Road. No ''substantial evidence'' had been found to advance the ''theory'' that smoking caused cancer, he told the analysts. So far, Darr said, it was guilt by association.

That argument remains a refrain of tobacco's defenders. Akin to the legal concept of reasonable doubt, it maintains that a potential public-health threat should be allowed its liberty until proven guilty.

Darr also was adhering to the plan hatched at a meeting of tobacco presidents in New York 10 months earlier. The companies' top executives had decided that, as part of their campaign to stop public panic, they would publicly argue the innocence of cigarettes. The presidents also formed the Tobacco Industry Research Committee with the avowed intent of conducting an honest investigation of health issues. Internal company documents and court testimony later revealed that the committee's other purpose was to shield the industry from attacks.

''They are going after the facts,'' Darr insisted that day in New York. ''If there is anything harmful in tobacco or cigarettes, we want to know about it quicker than anyone else.''

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.

He left unsaid what RJR and the other companies intended to do with any information they uncovered. As Alan Rodgman would find out, they would sit on it. At the time of Darr's speech, Rodgman had been in Winston-Salem for less than five months. A 30-year-old bench chemist, he was among thefirst scientists hired by Reynolds when the company built its first real research department in the early 1950s. He had known since he was 11, after reading a book on microbiologists, that he wanted to be a scientist.

Instead of hunting bacteria, Rodgman, a Canadian immigrant, would become a world-renowned expert on cigarette smoke. His groundbreaking research at Reynolds during the 1950s and early '60s uncovered thousands of chemicals in the smoke. Many were known to cause cancer in animals.

Reynolds built a research department to rival many universities and showered it with money for the best equipment and most qualified people. Like Rodgman, many of its scientists became experts in their fields, knowing more about smoking and health than their counterparts in government or at universities. There was one key difference: The RJR scientists had to keep quiet about what they knew.

Despite the urging of Rodgman and others in the research department, the company wouldn't allow its scientists to publish their most controversial findings in scientific journals. That's the primary way scientists disseminate and validate their work.

Instead, company officials choreographed an odd dance around the health issue. Publicly, they insisted that nothing was proven. Yet privately, company scientists responded to the mounting evidence to the contrary by searching assiduously for the offending compound, which many at first naively believed could be quietly removed.

Rodgman, who would spend 33 years with RJR, wouldn't always agree with the company's policies, as his reports through the years attest. The executives who ran the company in the 1950s and '60s were products of their time, he said in their defense, and didn't fully understand the immensity of the task they were confronting.

''In the '50s, when all of this stuff started, people, then as now, were terrified of the term `cancer.' Well, as they became aware about cigarette smoke, they became petrified -- this was both inside the industry and out in the general public -- of the term `carcinogen,' '' Rodgman said. ''And the one that everyone was in shock about was benzopyrene.''

The chemical was then considered one of the most potent carcinogens. Rodgman confirmed in 1956 that small amounts of it were indeed in cigarette smoke. He wasn't allowed to publish his work, but it did elicit visits from Darr and Henry Ramm, RJR's general counsel.

''Tell me about this,'' Ramm said, holding out Rodgman's internal report on benzopyrene.

Rodgman explained how he had crystallized the chemical, determined its melting point and ultraviolet curve, and even made a derivative.

''Does that mean it's really there?'' Ramm asked.

Two of those things would be sufficient proof for any scientific journal in the country, Rodgman explained.

''Why do you have to be so damn thorough?'' Ramm replied.

Darr later went down to the lab to ask why Rodgman was working on benzopyrene. ''Do we really need to be doing that kind of work?'' said the man who had assured the public of the industry's desire to quickly learn about any harmful substances in tobacco.

Building an R&D Department

William Owen McCorkle started a crude research department at Reynolds sometime in 1899. He had no formal training and was referred to as a ''flavorer'' or chemist. His main equipment was a Bunsen burner and an old cup with ''U.S. Navy'' printed on it. He kept the company's brand book, and McCorkle would boast that Reynolds could never fire him because he knew all the secret formulas. (Tilley footnote; history of RJR's early research department.)

Even as late as 1949, RJR had little in the way of a research department. What little work the company did took place in the Reynolds Inn, a decrepit building at Chestnut and Third streets that was built as a dormitory for female workers during World War I.

The research staff consisted of 25 people, three with advanced degrees. Much of their work was limited to blending and tasting cigarette tobaccos.

John C. Whitaker, the chairman at the time, thought that RJR should be doing at least as much as rivals American Tobacco Co. and Liggett & Myers, each of which had elaborate research departments. Whitaker hired Kenneth H. Hoover in 1950, showered him with a big budget and told him to build a modern research department.

Hoover began by raiding the labs at Commercial Solvents Corp. in Terre Haute, Ind., where he had worked before joining RJR. He brought five of the company's scientists to Reynolds to head the new department's divisions.

Murray Senkus, among Hoover's first hires, epitomized the type of talented scientist who would arrive in Winston-Salem during the next decade. A farm boy from Saskatchewan, Canada, Senkus had received a doctorate in chemistry from the University of Chicago. As a civilian contractor for the Navy during World War II, he was the first scientist in America to crystallize penicillin, making it more stable and thus more available to treat battlefield illnesses. Hired to head RJR's chemical-research division, Senkus would rise to director of research and would hire Rodgman and many of the other scientists in the department.

''Until the health scare, there was no reluctance on the part of new applicants to join,'' Senkus said. ''When the health scare came along, it was a little more difficult. But when we showed them the building, the kind of program we had, we still continued to get good chemists.''

The old Reynolds Inn was replaced in January 1953 with a $4 million research-and-development building at Church and Belews streets. It contained modern labs, a seminar room and a large open area on the north end where experiments that required big production machinery could be conducted. John Cameron Swayze televised the building's opening ceremony on NBC's Camel News Caravan.

By 1957, Hoover's department could boast $500,000 in equipment, a budget of $1.5 million and 151 employees, 26 of them with advanced degrees.

Among its assets was a library that was becoming one of the finest industrial libraries in the South. Frank Colby had built it from little more than a handful of magazines and a subscription to the Winston-Salem Journal.