Chapter 5, Part 3

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

RJR scientists spent their first couple of years in the company's nascent research department tearing apart tobacco leaves, searching for chemical compounds that might be of commercial value.

The focus of the research changed in 1953 when Dr. Ernst Wynder of the Sloan-Kettering Institute in New York published his startling findings that the tar from cigarette smoke produced cancer on the skin of mice.

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.

''The minute this thing hit the press there was speculation by people like Wynder that there were certain components in there that were giving the problem that they saw in the mice,'' Murray Senkus, a former director of research, explained.''We revved up. . . . The research department responded immediately to these speculations and responded in a very constructive way.''

Claude Teague, one of Senkus' scientists, searched the literature that year and concluded in an internal report that the studies ''tend to confirm the relationship between heavy and prolonged tobacco smoking and the incidence of cancer of the lung.''

He recommended that all the chemicals and flavor enhancers that the company added to tobacco be carefully examined for their possible role in causing cancer.

''In view of the facts presented in this report it is recommended that management take cognizance of the problem and its implications to our industry, and that positive research action be planned and initiated without delay,'' Teague wrote.

Alan Rodgman, an RJR researcher, had a good idea about where to begin. He told his bosses in a 1954 memo: ''Although a major part of the sales of this company consists of cigarettes, what the company is really selling is cigarette smoke. The company therefore should be concerned with the physiological properties and composition of cigarette smoke.''

Though the cigarette itself was fairly simple -- no more than some cured, shredded tobacco and flavors wrapped up in porous paper -- no one at the time really knew what happened when a smoker lit one. The heat inside a lit cigarette can approach 1,500 degrees. At such temperatures, the heat breaks down the tobacco in a process scientists call ''pyrolysis.'' In the two-tenths of a second that it takes the smoke to travel from the hot ember to the smoker's mouth, gases from the decomposed tobacco cool and condense as the smoker draws them down the cigarette. What comes out is a smoky aerosol composed of a complex mixture of gases and millions of microscopic particles.

By 1929, scientists knew that cigarette smoke contained carbon monoxide, ammonia, aldehyde, furfural and -- of course -- nicotine, which the tobacco plant produces to fend off pests. Researchers added to the list in the late 1940s: pyridine, pyrrole, phenol, azulene and hydrogen sulfide. In 1954, formaldehyde and antracene were among the 90 compounds thought to be in tobacco smoke. A third of them, Rodgman would later find, were identified incorrectly.

Which of those compounds might be inducing the tumors on Wynder's mice was anyone's guess. The possibility, of course, existed that the offending substance had not yet been found. The prudent course, research director Kenneth Hoover decided, was to allow Rodgman to look for it.

That's what he would do until 1965 when he was promoted to section head. He then supervised the work until he retired in 1987. In the early days, Rodgman and three other scientists -- Lawrence C. Cook, Max A. Wagoner and Bruce W. Woosley -- smoked the cigarettes themselves and used crude equipment to separate the compounds and crystallize or boil them. Eventually 25 people worked on the smoke project, and technological advances over time _ column chromatography, liquid chromatography, gas chromatography, mass spectrometry _ allowed Rodgman and his researchers to identify compounds they couldn't see.

''You were finding the hairs on a gnat's ass,'' Rodgman said.

Rodgman's lab became the most advanced in the industry. Wynder and other anti-smoking researchers -- ''the enemy,'' Rodgman calls them to the chagrin of company lawyers -- often visited the lab, which identified more than half of the 4,800 known chemicals in cigarette smoke.

By 1964, Rodgman's researchers would analyze the smoke from 20,000 Winstons and 10,000 Camels and would find 17 compounds that triggered tumors on mouse skin. Benzopyrene was the first.

Public Enemy No. 1

Benzopyrene became the first suspect after the tumors appeared on Wynder's mice. Scientists by then knew that benzopyrene, among a class of compounds called polycyclic hydrocarbons, was present after organic material was burned. It had been found in gasoline exhaust, coal tar, wood soot, and burning leaves. Reader's Digest speculated in an article in January 1950 that benzopyrene was in cigarette smoke as well.

Its propensity to trigger cancer had been known since 1910 when benzopyrene was identified as the cause of the scrotum cancer that chimney sweeps in England had developed. Coal tar painted on the backs of mice in 1932 produced tumors, and benzopyrene was considered the culprit.

That it was found in cigarette paper in 1954 and tobacco smoke the next year didn't surprise Rodgman. ''The evidence was suggestive but not conclusive,'' he said. Rodgman set out to prove it.

He and his co-workers set up a 32-foot-high glass column in a stairwell in the research building and packed it with aluminum-oxide powder. They placed the residue from the smoke of Camel cigarettes at the top of the column and poured solvents over it. As the solvents washed down the alumina, the chemical compounds in the smoke residue separated. Ultraviolet light shined through the column revealed fluorescent bands, the signature of polycyclic hydrocarbons. Rodgman found benzopyrene and four other polycyclic hydrocarbons: naphthalene, anthracene, pyrene and flouranthene.

In the introduction of his company report on Sept. 18, 1956, Rodgman contradicted the public pronouncements of numerous industry executives who were fond of blaming gasoline fumes, road tar and other everyday substances for the rise in lung cancer. ''There is, however, no direct evidence to implicate these other environmental factors which are also known to have increased in prevalence in the last four or five decades,'' Rodgman wrote, summarizing the conclusions of English researcher Richard Doll, ''and it is a reasonable presumption that the changes which have taken place in tobacco consumption (in amount and in method) are responsible for the major part of the real increase in mortality.''

He noted that the experiment removed all doubt about the presence of benzopyrene and similar compounds in cigarette smoke. He recommended that ''. . . a method of either complete removal or almost complete removal of these compounds from cigarette smoke is required.''

Finding the ''super'' chemical in smoke that was responsible for the cancer and removing it would dominate the research inside and outside the industry for much of the decade.

''My feeling at the time was that, OK, if they're harmful to mice and other animals, we'd be better off if it wasn't in there,'' Rodgman now says of his benzopyrene report.

While industry officials consoled smokers with the notion that animal tests weren't conclusive, Rodgman was just as adamant in another report in 1959: ''There is no evidence that any of these compounds will produce cancer in man. Nonetheless, there is a distinct possibility that these substances would have a carcinogenic effect on the human system. Medical experience has shown that man responds to various chemical substances in the same manner as experimental animals.''

Benzopyrene is still in cigarette smoke in minute quantities, though Reynolds and other companies tried to remove it. Rodgman, though, isn't as worried about it anymore. He said that his fears diminished after Wynder and other anti-smoking researchers in the late 1950s said that benzopyrene wasn't the threat they thought it was. By then, toast and charcoal-broiled steaks were found to contain higher levels of the compound than cigarettes, a fact that industry scientists still enjoy throwing into the debate about smoking's effects on health. They never mention, of course, that no one has ever been known to inhale a piece of toast or a charbroiled steak.

''I have probably handled more benzopyrene than all of the anti-tobacco people put together,'' Rodgman noted. ''Then you'd go through a whole step of reactions, and every compound I made was tumorigenic (tumor-producing) in an animal in some way or another, and I've still got all of my fingers and I'm still here.''

Though they may not have been pleased with the discovery, Edward A. Darr, RJR's president, and Henry Ramm, the company's general counsel, didn't stop Rodgman's smoke work. He went on to discover 43 polycyclic hydrocarbons in smoke. ''Mr. Ramm was more than just a lawyer. He was a very powerful man in the company, but he never said a thing,'' Rodgman said.

Rodgman would continue his smoke work, but much of it would remain relegated to in-house reports. Some results were presented at meetings of industry scientists in the mid-1960s and some were later published. But by then, Rodgman said, ''everybody and his brother'' knew that benzopyrene and similar compounds were in cigarette smoke.

''I have been criticized for not publishing that work,'' he said. ''But people don't understand that if you have a process that could be proprietary or give an indication that you're working on a certain kind of compound, your competitors will say, `Why are you doing work on polycyclics? They must be trying to find a way to lower it.' It will signal them about what you're doing and they'll start doing the same thing and beat you to the punch.''

Most of the tobacco companies, though, were doing similar research. Philip Morris was conducting far more extensive smoke experiments at the time and wasn't shy about it. Edward R. Murrow's See It Now television show in June 1955 presented a film clip shot in a Philip Morris lab in Richmond. Robert N. DuPuis, the company's research director, acknowledged Philip Morris' smoke work and offered worried smokers a comforting message: ''Our primary objective is to analyze all of the components of smoke. . . . So far we've found none that give us any cause for concern. If we do find any that we consider harmful, and so far we have not, we'll remove these from smoke and still retain the pleasure of your favorite cigarette.''

The Rand Corp., working with a grant from the tobacco industry, found benzopyrene in cigarette paper a year before Murrow's TV show. Research financed by Liggett & Myers confirmed its presence in 1955. The findings were never published.

RJR's reluctance to allow its scientists to tell smokers what they knew would become an ingrained part of company policy for the next 20 years. Despite his current description of the innocence of the policy, Rodgman at the time would continue to urge his bosses to allow him and the other scientists to publish their smoke work, much of which remained secret because it dealt with suspected carcinogens. Such a policy raised an interesting question, Rodgman noted in a 1962 report to Hoover: ''If a company pleads `not guilty' or `not proven' to the charge that cigarette smoke (or one of its constituents) is a factor in the causation of lung cancer or some other disease, can the company justifiably take the position that publication of data pertaining to cigarette smoke composition or properties should be withheld because such data might affect adversely the company's economic status when the company has already implied in its plea that no such etiologic effect exists?''

Hoover rejected Rodgman's recommendation that the company liberalize its publishing policy.

Researchers soon stopped asking their bosses to allow them to submit their work to scientific journals. ''We knew in research ahead of time that usually when you publish a paper, you present the manuscript to upper management for them to look at,'' Senkus explained. ''So, the likelihood of that being permitted to publish would not have been given. So why try? You don't fight the sergeant.''

• Coming Thursday: The Reynolds Way.