Tobacco companies are like cockroaches; they spread disease and don’t like the light.
STANTON GLANTZ, CIRCA 1996
Medical research was not a high priority for the tobacco industry prior to the 1950s. The publication of strong epidemiological studies in 1950 changed this, causing worries that people were going to stop smoking in consequence of fearing for their lives. All the major companies had been involved in health-related research, but the scope, scale, and urgency of such projects would dramatically increase in the 1950s. Teague’s “Survey of Cancer Research” was part of this, as was American Tobacco’s work with the Medical College of Virginia, but there were other projects that were even more ambitious, including some so secretive that some researchers didn’t even realize they were working for Big Tobacco.
One of the most important involved a collaboration organized under the rubric of “Air Pollution Studies” conducted at New York University, the Sloan-Kettering Institute (SKI), and the Memorial Cancer Center of New York, with major funding from the American Tobacco Company and other cigarette manufacturers, channeled secretly through a foundation known as the Damon Runyon Fund. The collaboration is significant, in that it quickly became the nation’s largest lung cancer research effort and the biggest to explore the possible role of tobacco. It is also significant because
a) the principal investigators—Anthony J. Lanza at NYU and Cornelius P. Rhoads at Sloan-Kettering—understood their goal as helping the tobacco industry clean up its act;
b) the tobacco industry hid its role in organizing the effort;
c) the industry—led by the American Tobacco Company—tried to control the research at every turn; and
d) despite efforts to control the research and its publication, the collaboration ended up helping to prove the tobacco–lung cancer link, though this was never publicly admitted.
Ernst Wynder was actually one of the beneficiaries, insofar as he was part of this collaboration in the period during which he was conducting his mouse-painting studies. This is one of the great untold ironies: Wynder’s earthshaking research—which rattled tobacco stocks and drove a stake into the very heart of Big Tobacco—was partly funded by the world’s largest tobacco manufacturer.
The collaboration is also notable in that it prefigures the kind of merger of research and public relations that would come into operation with the establishment of the Tobacco Industry Research Committee in 1954. The TIRC would be more thoroughly under the control of the industry, but that is largely the result of lessons learned from these earlier collaborations.
The Damon Runyon Memorial Fund for Cancer Research, Inc., was founded in 1947 as a nonprofit devoted to the fight against cancer. Its namesake was the prolific New York sportswriter and short-storyist famous for his “Broadway Stories,” better known today as the Broadway hit Guys and Dolls. (The play opened in 1950 and ran for twelve hundred performances.) Runyon died of cancer of the throat in 1946, after a life of socializing with the likes of Al Capone, Jack Dempsey, and Babe Ruth. Following his death—quite likely from smoking; he had begun at age nine or ten and quit only when tumors in his throat made it too painful—a friend of his, Walter Winchell, a conservative gossip columnist and nationally syndicated radio announcer, took to the airwaves to call for contributions to combat cancer in Runyon’s name. Buoyed by top-notch publicity and promises to keep “attacking the cancer cell from all sides,” the campaign quickly gained the support of “Mr. and Mrs. America” but also of celebrities such as Milton Berle, Marlene Dietrich, Jimmy Durante, William Randolph Hearst, Joe DiMaggio, Bob Hope, and Ed Sullivan, all of whom served on the board of the Fund. By 1950 the charity had given out more than $3 million in ninety-three grants and eighty-eight fellowships to eighty-four institutions in thirty-seven states, making it one of the nation’s leading supporters of cancer research. The American Cancer Society must have been green with envy.1
The idea for a tobacco industry collaboration (code named “Air Pollution” research) seems to have come from John H. Teeter, executive director of the Runyon Fund, who in September of 1950 sent letters to the presidents of American Tobacco, Philip Morris, R. J. Reynolds, and the other tobacco makers asking for their help to fund a broad program of cancer research.2 Teeter enclosed clippings from the press about recent research linking tobacco and cancer, noting that it would be good to get the industry’s “reaction.” Hiram Hanmer at American was one of the first to react, arranging a meeting with Teeter in October of 1950. Hanmer thanked him for a clipping from a recent issue of the Science News Letter implicating arsenic in lung cancer causation.3 Teeter then explained that the Runyon Fund had on file a request from NYU for a grant in the amount of $150,000 to support a long-term project on lung cancer—including $50,000 for “tooling up” and $50,000 per year for operations thereafter. Teeter realized this was an ambitious sum, given that the eleven projects currently funded by the National Cancer Institute (NCI), the American Cancer Society (ACS), and the Runyon Fund itself totaled only $96,768 altogether.4 American Tobacco agreed to fund the collaboration—with minor contributions from the other manufacturers—provided certain conditions of confidentiality could be met. The Runyon-NYU-SKI collaboration would become the best-financed lung cancer research project in the world, albeit one with its ultimate source of funding hidden.
Hanmer had originally been looking for—and obtained—a parallel collaboration with Duke University. Duke had long-standing ties with Big Tobacco, dating from the establishment of Trinity College in 1892 with funds from Washington Duke, patriarch of the American Tobacco Company. In 1924 Washington’s son, James Buchanan “Buck” Duke, had granted the college an endowment of $40 million in exchange for which it was renamed “Duke University,” the world’s only university still today named after a tobacco tycoon. (There are, however, scholarships, buildings, and even entire divisions within other institutions so named: the George Weissman School of Arts and Sciences at Baruch College, for example, honors a man who once, as vice president for marketing at Philip Morris, expressed his pride in having “our greatest strength in the 15–24 age group.”)5 American Tobacco developed close ties with several Duke scholars, including Paul M. Gross and Marcus E. Hobbs from the chemistry department, both of whom had earlier worked with Liggett to identify the chemical constituents of tobacco smoke.
Duke University officials in the 1950s were initially reluctant to accept Runyon funds, worrying about potential negative publicity from the tobacco taint (pro or con) and infringements on academic freedom. American Tobacco made it clear from the outset, however, that they did not want any of their Runyon-funneled funds publicized. Duke administrators were agreeable; indeed they themselves wanted to make “doubly sure” no publicity would come from any such collaboration. The fear seems to have been that the tobacco association might pop up on Walter Winchell’s popular radio show. Winchell reported regularly on cancer research, and American Tobacco had to strike special deals with Teeter, Duke, and NYU to make sure these new collaborations would be kept under wraps. Teeter told Hanmer that the Runyon Fund was happy to provide however much or little publicity a donor wanted; he also agreed that the research could be limited to study of the “chemical and physical properties” of tobacco smoke, avoiding the third rail of smoking and health. Hanmer transmitted to his superiors his belief that limiting the project in this manner (and avoiding publicity) “would remove any fear of linking Duke University or the tobacco industry with cancer or any possible damaging effect of tobacco on health.”6 NYU, with feisty young Ernst Wynder on staff, would prove somewhat harder to control.
Even with “Air Pollution” as the nominal rubric of the collaboration, and even though the tobacco focus (and backing) was deliberately hidden, the cigarette sponsors were still not entirely pleased with the nomenclature used to characterize the collaboration. Hanmer told Teeter that American Tobacco “had been avoiding the use of the word ‘pollution’ because of its unsavory implications” and would prefer the phrase “air-borne materials.” Teeter assured him that such hot-button words could be avoided—though project terminology did continue to slip around a bit. Lanza at NYU talked about “inhalation cancer,” while Paul Gross at Duke liked the more neutral term aerosols. And Teeter in correspondence with Philip Morris talked about research into “airborne infection.” Hanmer was pleased with the project’s overall tenor, however, especially its sheltering of tobacco. Tobacco would be studied but only as “an extremely small” part of the whole, allowing the “spotlight” to be taken off tobacco. Hanmer confided to his superiors:
I have gotten the impression that they [esp. Teeter] are trying to make this project as broad as possible and are almost as desirous as we are of getting the spotlight off tobacco, feeling that this is an extremely small phase of studies which involve traces of a great variety of metals, organic chemicals, automobile exhaust gases, and anything else which gets into the air in the form of fine particles or traces, mainly from industry plants throughout the country.7
Hanmer was happy to hear that Runyon was willing to keep the industry’s role quiet (Teeter would “adapt himself to our convenience”) but also seemed pleased that research at NYU and elsewhere (he mentions the Trudeau Foundation and Notre Dame) was “far removed from the clinical phase.”
By 1952 the collaboration was under way. American Tobacco had given $100,000 to the Runyon Fund, Ecusta Paper had given $15,000, and the other tobacco companies had coughed up $10,000 or less. The first industry money came to Runyon in 1951, and by 1953 the American Tobacco Company had contributed three annual gifts of $50,000 each.
The two key scholars in the New York phase were Cornelius P. Rhoads, director of the Sloan-Kettering Institute, and Anthony J. Lanza, director of NYU’s Institute for Industrial Medicine. Lanza already had a long record of assisting the world’s most powerful chemical, petroleum, lead, and asbestos companies with their cancer quandaries, with the point in each case being to minimize or deny such hazards. Teeter talked a lot about “cross-fertilization” between the industry’s expertise and academics supported by the Fund, but Lanza and Rhoads were also eager to help tobacco solve its public relations predicament. Rhoads bragged to Hanmer about how effectively Lanza had dealt with “the petroleum industry problem,” and the hope was clearly that NYU could do for tobacco what it had earlier done for Big Oil and Big Chemicals: help restore confidence in the industry and its products. Rhoads also hoped—and apparently believed—that whatever in tobacco smoke was causing all this cancer could be neutralized, removed, or filtered out, rendering cigarettes safe.8
Rhoads’s optimism is easy for us to belittle as 1950s naïveté, and it is true that many scholars at this time had simplistic views of disease causation. Diseases were often imagined as having single causes, and magic bullets were sought that would either eliminate the causal agent or cure the disease once caused. Malaria had succumbed to quinine and scurvy to provisions of lime juice—so why not a miracle cure for lung cancer? Penicillin was the most recent wonder drug, and time enough had not yet passed for resistant strains of bacteria to spoil the euphoria. Chronic disease was just beginning to surpass infection as the dominant disease pattern, but diseases caused by long-term chronic exposures were still novelties for many people. Hopes were therefore high that cancer, too, might fall to a magic bullet: an Australian newspaper in 1954 announced that “Every Country is Looking for a Single Chemical to Smash the Disease.”
Also important to realize, though, is that tobacco industry researchers already regarded the idea of a penicillin-like therapy for cancer or a cleansing of carcinogens from tobacco as naive. Hiram Hanmer in November 1953 ridiculed Rhoads’s “false hopes” for a quick fix: “He [Rhoads] knows nothing about tobacco technology, nor the difficulties that might be involved in ‘neutralizing, removing, or filtering out’ the mouse carcinogens said to be present in cigarette smoke.” Hanmer also noted that “the therapeutic chemical agent which he [Rhoads] hopes to find is referred to somewhat derisively as ‘Rhoads’ cancer penicillin.’ ”9 Cancer prevention was part of neither man’s mind-set—neither Lanza nor Rhoads; Hanmer is more inscrutable. Rhoads also thought that medical technology was progressing so fast that cancer would soon be cured anyway. So it didn’t much matter whether you ever found a way to prevent it.
Collaborating in the American Tobacco-Runyon Fund “air pollution” project were a number of scientists working under Rhoads and Lanza. Norton Nelson, director of research at NYU’s Institute of Industrial Medicine, was a member of the team, as was William E. Smith, professor of medicine at NYU and an expert in the realm of carcinogenic bioassays. Others involved in the project conducted animal experiments of various sorts (tobacco tar painting, for example), identified tobacco constituents, or used radioactive tracers to study nicotine metabolism. The NYU organic chemist Alvin I. Kosak studied the chemical composition of tobacco smoke and Sid Laskin, a physicist with expertise in pharmacology and instrumentation, organized C 14 tracer projects to study nicotine metabolism. Kanematsu Sugiura and Ernst Wynder were involved in animal experiments, reporting to Nelson. It is one of those interesting ironies of history that Wynder’s famous demonstration of the carcinogenicity of tobacco tars (with Graham and Croninger) was part of this larger, industry-financed project. No one seems to have noticed this link; Wynder’s subsequent funding from Philip Morris (in the 1960s and 1970s, to the tune of several million dollars) has been well documented, but his earlier dependence on cigarette money has escaped notice. When Wynder published his influential mouse-painting experiments he was a resident in medicine at the Memorial Cancer Center “collaborating on the N.Y.U. investigations”; the tobacco source of the funds was so carefully hidden, however, that Wynder may not even have known the industry was funding his work.10
The secrecy surrounding this collaboration was always a matter of concern. On February 26, 1953, Hanmer reported to his superiors that Lanza “does not know that we are making a contribution” to the Damon Runyon Fund. Lanza was “very keen” to have an advisory committee appointed that would include representatives from the industry and told Hanmer et al. that since the industry would receive “much unfavorable publicity regardless of their attitude” it would be “to their advantage to declare themselves in support of scientific research directed toward the solution of this whole problem of smoking and cancer.” Hanmer, however, was wary of publicity and didn’t want his company joining any formal committees. Instead, he advised that his company participate as “silent collaborators.”11 Hanmer didn’t (yet) see how his company could benefit from publicity of the sort Lanza was describing; the hope was still that the cancer problem could be quietly contained or controlled.
Tobacco executives at this time were of two minds about supporting cancer research. There was hope that the cancer problem could be solved by filters or additives or some other manipulation, but there was also fear that research might simply exacerbate the problem—by making the dangers more widely known or well established. Industry chiefs were therefore divided over the value of collaborating even with friendlies such as Rhoads and Lanza. A. Grant Clarke of Reynolds, architect of the “More Doctors Smoke Camels” campaign, and Robert N. DuPuis of Philip Morris were especially suspicious of the collaboration, whereas Harris Parmele of Lorillard and Hanmer of American Tobacco were generally supportive. Even Hanmer had his doubts, however, and often sent agents to keep tabs on the NYU work.12
Wynder’s participation was always a sore spot for the industry. As early as 1950, in a letter to his president, Hanmer had characterized the young medical scholar as “somewhat more of a fanatic than a scientist.” The American Tobacco Company would keep a close watch on Wynder over the next several years. Lanza, for example, after a November 5, 1953, meeting, reassured Hanmer, “I am not worried about Wynder. If we should shoot him tomorrow, another Wynder would bob up. I am worried about Graham. His is a big name in medicine. People listen to him, but he keeps shooting off his mouth.”13 Hanmer was increasingly bothered, though, by the fact that Rhoads seemed unwilling or unable to silence this young émigré upstart. (Wynder was born in Germany in 1922 and fled to New Jersey with his parents in 1938 to escape Nazi persecution.) Rhoads tried to argue that Wynder had “nothing to do with the tobacco research” supported by Sloan-Kettering (and therefore American Tobacco), but Hanmer pointed out that Wynder was listed as a participant in two of the five projects his company had been asked to support. Rhoads reassured Hanmer that Wynder had been “deliberately taken off tobacco work,” but Hanmer countered that Wynder had lectured at an American Cancer Society meeting only two days previously and not on “circumcision, oral cancer and diet”—projects Rhoads said Wynder had been working on—but on tobacco and cancer. Rhoads confessed that while he could “control Wynder’s work and his publications,” the man was still free to speak wherever he wished.14
Wynder was in fact becoming the tobacco industry’s number one enemy, a kind of Roffo nouveau and the target of a great deal of vituperative industry rhetoric. In one of his memos documenting the meetings of November 5, 1953, Hanmer claimed that Wynder had turned to tobacco only after failing as a surgeon; the young physician was “impetuous,” immature, and “an out and out crusader.” Hanmer also claimed to have reasons “to doubt his intellectual honesty.” Evarts Graham, by contrast, was a distinguished surgeon who had received “all the honors the medical profession could bestow upon him.” Alton Ochsner at Tulane was equally distinguished, and though “fanatical about smoking” was “probably intellectually honest because he refrained from condemning tobacco until he learned of the research being done by Wynder and Graham.” So ruled Hanmer from his perch as research director of the world’s largest tobacco corporation.15
PR was always paramount for the industry when it came to matters of smoking and health. The companies wanted friendly research, but they also wanted to make sure research could be packaged and publicized in ways that would help sell cigarettes. And in the years leading up to the conspiracy launched in December of 1953, the industry was not at all eager for the public to find out it was financing cancer research. (This represented a change from some of the braggadocio of earlier correspondence—and contrasts also with the approach taken after 1953, when the industry wanted everyone to know it was supporting research.) Runyon Fund officials were instructed on this need for secrecy and were happy to comply. The charity appreciated the industry’s money and was happy to grant Hanmer’s wish that “no publicity be permitted other than publication of results of research in accredited scientific journals.” The net effect, though, was for this vital tobacco connection to go unnoticed in the popular press. When the Wall Street Journal cited Runyon Fund officials as prominent among those “refusing to accept as a fact any relationship between smoking and lung cancer,” no mention was made of the fact that the world’s largest tobacco company was bankrolling the Fund. Because this had been kept secret.16
So prior even to the denialist campaign launched in the final weeks of 1953, tobacco companies were major funders of cancer research. They did so surreptitiously, channeling money through third parties that could be operated as puppets, without anyone knowing who was pulling the strings. Tobacco companies by this time were nervous about the attention being given to cancer: Hanmer complained about his company being “in a goldfish bowl,” which was not where it wanted to be. The company wanted to be able to control discussions surrounding tobacco and cancer, but it also wanted to hide its role in orchestrating the effort. Hanmer was particularly worried about the NYU-SKI research getting out of hand: on December 1, 1952, he wrote to his superior, American Tobacco Vice President Preston L. Fowler, complaining that Teeter was “not controlling either the course of experiments or the publication of the results, even though Damon Runyon Memorial funds [i.e., American Tobacco funds] are being used for the purpose.”17
Hanmer was also worried that NYU would produce “positive results”—meaning a demonstrated tobacco-cancer link—no matter what. At his November 5, 1953, meeting with Rhoads, Lanza, Nelson, and Teeter, Hanmer challenged Norton Nelson of SKI: “will you not increase the concentration of the so-called cigarette smoke tars or the frequency of application until cancers or their equivalent are produced on mice?” Nelson replied that this was indeed one goal, but Rhoads confessed that he did not expect “any direct relationship between mouse carcinogens and human carcinogens” to be established during his lifetime. Rhoads also affirmed, though, that “cigarette smoke does contain a mouse skin carcinogen—‘That is a fact.’ ”18
The good news from Rhoads’s point of view was that he and his men could probably do for tobacco what they had earlier done for the petrochemical industry, namely, identify the offending carcinogens, which the cigarette manufacturers could then “neutralize, remove, or filter out.” Cigarettes would then “no longer be held responsible for contributing to lung cancer.” Hanmer queried Rhoads on this: “I want to get this perfectly clear. As I understand it, you are saying that the mouse carcinogen in cigarette smoke should be removed and that, if it is removed, our problem will be solved, although nobody knows whether there is any relation between the mouse carcinogen and the carcinogen which is alleged to cause lung cancer in man.” Rhoads at this point appeared a bit “nettled” and pointed out that tobacco manufacturers already recognized the need to remove carcinogens “because they are making filter tip cigarettes.” Hanmer responded that the two largest cigarette companies were not in fact selling filters, and that the others were doing so not because they had conceded a hazard but rather simply to take advantage of publicity emanating from the medical profession. Filters were “purely a merchandising and sales promotion proposition.”19
Hanmer was clearly annoyed by Rhoads’s “That is a fact” assertion (on mouse carcinogens in smoke), noting that the “fact” in question was based on Wynder and Graham’s unpublished two-year study reported at the April 1953 meeting of the American Association for Cancer Research. Hanmer was peeved: “The report has never been published in full, even in the Proceedings of the Society. The details are not known to us. This seems characteristic of Wynder’s work and makes it doubly suspect.” (Wynder had submitted his paper to Cancer Research in June 1953 but it did not appear until December, a month after Hanmer’s rant.) Hanmer was also bothered by the fact that Wynder was getting positive results while others had gotten “negative or only occasional positive results.” “Knowing Wynder,” he declared, “we would expect prejudiced experimentation.”20
Hanmer and his colleagues were hoping that whatever was wrong with cigarettes—and something clearly was—could be fixed. If there were carcinogens in the paper or the leaf or the pesticides, or in something having to do with the manufacturing, perhaps these could be eliminated or at least reduced to an acceptable level. Liggett & Myers’s research chief in 1954 observed that Standard Oil had been able “to get around their difficulties with cancer by diluting or blending their oil in such a manner that they never had a concentration of the carcinogenic principle in excess of 6% in their oils.” If carcinogens could be reduced in such a manner for petroleum, why not for tobacco?21
Tobacco industry researchers eventually decided they would have to accept the reality of “mouse carcinogens” in cigarette smoke, and the running together of these two terms—mouse and carcinogen—became a kind of dismissive mantra, with the implication that whatever was causing tumors in rodents might be perfectly safe for humans. Such would be the conspiracy’s public face for decades hence, but internally the companies knew better. The whole point of the animal experiments financed through the Damon Runyon Fund was to shed light on whether smoking might be hazardous to humans. Researchers close to the project admitted this, noting that inferences about carcinogenic potency as revealed through such experiments “can be satisfactorily transferred from animals to man.”22