Without Cigarette Paper there are no cigarettes.
HARRY H. STRAUS, PRESIDENT, ECUSTA PAPER CORPORATION, MAY 1943
Tobacco manufacturers by the early 1950s were facing a new kind of quandary. The question was no longer whether but why smokers were so often dying from cancer. The tide was clearly shifting to cigarettes as the major cause—but what precisely was it about cigarettes that made them deadly? Arsenic was known to be in tobacco smoke, and Roffo had implicated benzpyrene, but there were lots of other candidates. By the 1950s compounds on the industry’s list of suspects included arsenic, ethylene glycol (and its acrolein derivative), benzpyrene, chemicals released during the burning of cigarette paper and paper additives (including inks), tobacco flavorants of various sorts, gases released from safety matches and lighter fluids, a couple of different nicotine alkaloids, heat from the smoke itself, metals of various sorts (notably chromium or nickel), and radioactive isotopes that concentrate in tobacco leaf (potassium 40 was suspected in the 1950s, then polonium 210 in the 1960s). Paraffin was sometimes named, as were various aldehydes, phenols, and polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons known to be in smoke.
It is also true, though, that a handful of scientific stragglers were still holding out for non-tobacco causes of the epidemic. Wilhelm Hueper at the NCI thought it was air pollution; Joseph Berkson from the Mayo Clinic blamed tuberculosis; and R. A. Fisher in Britain and Otmar Freiherr von Verschuer in Germany blamed the human genetic constitution.1 Some diehards denied even the very fact of increase. Milton Rosenblatt, a New York physician and TIRC intimate, as late as 1964 denied that lung cancer rates had increased over time, characterizing evidence to this effect as an artifact of measurement: more people were being X-rayed, so more cancers were showing up.2 There are lots of struggles over these questions in the months leading up to the Plaza Hotel conspiracy and the drafting of the “Frank Statement.”
One little-known aspect of this run-up to conspiracy is a collaboration between American Tobacco and the Ecusta Paper Corporation to investigate whether tar from the smoke of tobacco alone, without the paper in other words, was capable of causing cancer. The collaboration began in 1952 and continued to a certain extent even after 1953,3 by which time blame was squarely in the court of tobacco—rather than the paper or some other non-tobacco cause. Ecusta’s involvement in cancer research grows out of the American Tobacco-NYU-SKI-MCV collaboration, from this effort to find out what part of the smoking process was causing cancer.
This idea of cigarette paper causing cancer was nothing new in the 1950s. Henry Ford as early as 1916 had published a letter from Thomas A. Edison of lightbulb and phonograph fame, announcing that “the injurious agent in cigarettes comes principally from the burning paper wrapper.” Edison was already known for his policy of employing “no person who smokes cigarettes”; here he asserted that the principal toxic substance in cigarettes was the acrid unsaturated aldehyde known as acrolein. Acrolein was already recognized as a powerful chemical irritant; the compound had been identified in cigarette smoke prior even to the twentieth century and gained further notoriety following its use as a chemical warfare agent in the First World War. So it wasn’t such a big step for Edison and others to blame acrolein for cancers and other kinds of ailments thought to stem from “chronic irritation.”4
Of course while Edison and Ford were crusading against the “little white slavers” it was not yet even suspected that cigarettes might cause lung cancer. Pipe smoking was often blamed for tumors of the lip or throat, but cigarettes were generally thought to be a “milder” form of smoke, with the danger lying only in their seductive appeal to the young and weak. Cigarettes were for dandies and sissies, and were widely regarded as a cheaper and less obnoxious form of tobacco use. And were not yet even a very common way to smoke. Americans smoked only 2.5 billion cigarettes in 1900—compared with the 330-odd billion smoked in 2011. Cigarettes wouldn’t surpass cigars and pipes as the dominant form of smoking until the 1920s and 1930s.
The situation was different after 1950. Smoking was being confirmed as the principal cause of lung cancer, and cigarette paper was often cited as the reason why. Wynder had proposed testing paper tars for cancer activity in February of 1952, by which time the American Tobacco Company was also sending its trusted envoy—Dr. Harvey Haag—to speak with Sloan-Kettering and others about “the cigarette paper tar situation.”5 American Tobacco had also hired H. J. Rand & Associates to explore this paper tar problem, following the advice of Bruce F. Barton, an advertising executive with cigarette accounts who, in October of 1951, was worried that one of the company’s competitors would beat American to the punch and produce the world’s first “cancer proof” cigarette paper: “I shudder at the thought of some day reading in the papers that science has proved that it is cigarette paper, not the tobacco, that can be a contributing factor in cancer, and that one of our competitors has a paper that is cancer proof.”6
H. James Rand, a Cleveland inventor (and grandson of the founder of Remington Rand Inc.), was hired to avoid this prospect. Rand was convinced that tobacco was innocent; tobacco was at most “an extremely weak carcinogenic material.” He also believed that additives such as diethylene glycol or sulfurous fumes from matches posed little harm. Sulfur dioxide was indisputably an irritant, but the quantities inhaled by a smoker were not sufficiently large (.0023 grams per twenty matches) to be “a conceivable factor in carcinogenesis.”7
Cigarette paper, by contrast, had been “notoriously ignored in efforts to isolate a carcinogen from cigarettes.” Rand was a follower of the Hungarian novelist, chemist, and inventor Istvan Tamas, who had developed a synthetic cigarette paper (made from purified methyl cellulose) that was supposed to make cigarettes cancer-proof. To test this, or really rather to prove it—Rand clung obsessively to his idée fixe—Rand and his colleagues isolated tars from the smoke of cigarette paper and looked for the telltale signs of carcinogenic spectra. Spectrographic analysis showed fluorescence in the 400 to 440 mµ (millimicron, nanometer) wavelength range with peaks at 405 and 434 mµ, wavelengths “characteristic of carcinogenic substances” such as methyl-cholanthrene, dibenzanthracene, and benzpyrene, all powerful carcinogens. Rand claimed that fluorescence was a better indicator of carcinogenic potency even than mouse experiments, and concluded that “of all the substances connected with the smoking of cigarettes which might be investigated or have been investigated for carcinogenesis, only the paper tars exhibit the characteristic fluorescent spectrum [of a true carcinogen].” Cigarette paper tars had not been tested in experimental animals while tobacco tars had been “virtually exonerated of carcinogenic action by animal experimentation.”8
All of this was news, and rather disturbing, to the world’s largest maker of cigarette paper. On March 6, 1952, Hanmer had returned to Richmond and called Lawrence F. Dixon, vice president at Ecusta, to let him know about Rand’s experiments. Dixon soon thereafter spoke with the vice president for R&D at Olin, Ecusta’s parent company, bringing him up to speed. (Olin had bought the Ecusta Paper Corporation in 1949 and was licensed to produce cellophane, “one of the most important agents of protection and preservation” in the cigarette business.) Olin’s president, John M. Olin, and Ecusta President John Haynes were also apprised of the situation, probably by Rand himself.9
This paper-cancer question was complicated by the fact that cigarette manufacturers were increasingly using the woody stems and ribs of the tobacco plant to make cigarettes, blurring the paper-tobacco boundary. Paper after all is most often made from wood, which from a chemical point of view is essentially cellulose. Processed tobacco also contains a great deal of cellulose—especially when made from stems and ribs, as was being done with the turn to reconstituted tobacco sheet. Tobacco manufacturers in the 1930s and 1940s had begun using stems and stalks in cigarette filler—mainly to squeeze more money out of every tobacco plant—and the question arose: could this new use of woody parts be what was causing all this cancer? And if woody stems burned pretty much like paper, maybe it didn’t really matter whether it was the leaf or the paper that was responsible, since both were pretty much the same from a chemical point of view. Plausibility for such a dilemma was increased by the fact that lots of other things were being shown to cause cancer when burned and rubbed onto the skins of mice—including tars from the smoke of yeast, turpentine, sugar, rice polishings, and human skin.10
Ecusta in the meantime was continuing to provide other tobacco companies with experimental papers. American Tobacco had the closest ties to Ecusta, but other manufacturers had started working with the papermaker. Philip Morris had Ecusta running tests to identify the papers used in Camels and Cavaliers exported to France, for example, and Ecusta had helped test Philip Morris’s Dunhill brand fashioned from chlorophyll-impregnated paper. Ecusta also supplied Lorillard with chlorophyll paper—for testing to oxidize acrolein and to “stop cigarette breath.” There is no evidence Ecusta ever organized animal experiments for Philip Morris, though we do know that the two companies were communicating on the cancer question, judging from a letter of October 30, 1952, in which Ecusta expressed its hope that “the problems common to your organization and to ours will bring us closer together.” The “problems” referred to here included the growing number of poisons identified in tobacco smoke, especially soot, arsenic, and aldehydes but also carbonyl compounds, benzpyrene, and the broad class of compounds known as polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (see the box on page 214).11
American Tobacco’s primary interest throughout the Ecusta collaboration was to find out whether tobacco could be exculpated as a cause of cancer. One way this was pursued was to see whether tar extracts from the smoke of paper-free cigarettes were carcinogenic. To prepare for this, Ecusta’s two leading researchers, Jim Rickards and Milton Schur, visited American Tobacco’s Richmond laboratory on September 18,1952, to confirm plans to produce a number of “experimental cigarettes.” These were normal cigarettes in every other respect, apart from being wrapped not with paper but with an experimental (and “fantastically expensive”) purified cellulose known as “Rand tape.”12 The goal seems to have been to determine whether cigarettes wrapped in something other than Ecusta paper could still cause cancer. Animal experiments were not yet under way, and these early tests seem to have been confined to chemical analyses of smoke using spectroscopy, chromatography, and other analytic techniques.
Planning for Ecusta’s animal experiments began in earnest in the winter and spring of 1953. Ecusta scientists drafted a set of instructions detailing how to prepare cigarette smoke condensate,13 and set about designing their own set of animal experiments parallel to those of the NYU–Runyon Fund group.
This cannot have been a pleasant process for Ecusta, given what was at stake. Recall that while strong evidence was accumulating that cigarettes could cause cancer, it was not yet clear precisely how—whether it was from the paper, the heat, the arsenic, the polycyclics, or even fumes from safety matches or lighter fluid. Cigarette paper in these critical years (early 1950s) was a serious candidate, and Ecusta was the world’s leading producer. Imagine their worry: what if it turned out that they and not, say, Reynolds or Lorillard or Liggett or Philip Morris, were responsible for tens of thousands of deaths every year from smoking? The prospect must have been quite daunting.
And we know they were worried. On January 14, 1953, Ecusta’s Milton Schur met with Drs. Lanza and Nelson to find out how the NYU-SKI-American Tobacco “air pollution” (i.e., cigarette cancer) project was going—and asked if he could speak frankly. Schur cautioned that the two men didn’t seem to understand that “what industry wanted most was to have them suppress irresponsible publications which might be damaging to industry.” The whole question of cigarettes causing cancer was “in very much of a muddle.”14
Equally muddled, or rather hanging in the balance, was whether the Ecusta Paper Corporation should be considered part of “the tobacco industry.” Schur seems to have implied as much, and for good reason. The company produced both filters and papers for cigarettes and was actively involved in cigarette testing, including testing for safety. And when cigarette manufacturers launched their campaign to dispute and distract from the hazards in December of 1953, the papermaker was cordially invited to collaborate. Quite wisely they refused—albeit for reasons that don’t seem to have left a paper trail. This refusal to join the industry’s denialist conspiracy was probably the best business decision ever made by the company, allowing it essentially to vanish from the cigarette wars of subsequent decades. And ever since, cigarette paper makers have been pretty much invisible in the annals of tobacco history—even though people throughout the world inhale the smoke from about 300,000 metric tons of cigarette paper every year. The papermakers are given a free pass, and whatever role paper may play in cancer causation disappears behind a cloud of smoke. Keep in mind that even if paper contributes only one part in a hundred to the total cigarette death toll, we are still talking about four thousand people killed every year in the United States alone. And more than ten times that globally.
Ecusta remained at the center of the tobacco industry’s cancer consternations in the spring of 1953. On April 7, for example, Schur sent Hanmer a copy of a press release on Wynder’s mouse-painting paper, the published version of which would make such a splash eight months hence. Schur noted that Wynder’s article was probably not yet in finished form and might well have a qualifying statement inserted “as a result of my request . . . to the effect that production of cancer in the skin of mice has not been proven to indicate that smoking has a tendency to produce lung cancer in man.”15 The chief scientist at the world’s largest cigarette paper company was hoping he could control the conclusions reached in basic scientific research on the crucial issue of the day: whether cigarettes cause cancer.
In May of 1953 American Tobacco was working with Ecusta to establish how much acrolein was in cigarette smoke. Paper-and tobacco-wrapped cigarettes were compared, with the result that paper-wrapped cigarettes yielded significantly higher levels of this poison. A little over a month later Hanmer asked Schur if he could test Ecusta’s new experimental filters, which were supposed to remove aldehydes from cigarette smoke.16
By this time, though, the Ecusta Paper Corporation was producing data showing that regardless of how they were wrapped, cigarettes yielded tars capable of causing cancer in experimental animals. In one crucial series of tests done in late May or early June, Ecusta researchers compared the tars from cigarettes wrapped in various kinds of paper against tars from paper alone. Tars from these different sources were painted on the shaved backs of mice, following which skin tissues were examined to see whether the tars had destroyed the sebaceous (sweat) glands. This was the “accelerated” bioassay developed by William E. Smith, the New York University pathologist also involved in the Runyon Fund-Sloan-Kettering collaboration. Ecusta summarized the results of these studies on June 9, 1953, in a remarkable chart (see Figure 25), showing that regardless of the kind of paper used to roll the cigarette—whether Minnesota or California flax or the purified cellulose known as Rand film or even burley leaf—in each case the “estimate of carcinogenicity” was positive (caused cancer, in other words). By contrast, tars from cigarette paper alone showed only a “mild” carcinogenicity. And a solvent control was negative—producing no cancer at all.
These were powerful findings, and apparently the first-ever industry experiments to show clear evidence of carcinogenic action from tobacco tars. Ecusta sent this chart to Lorillard’s director of manufacturing, who forwarded it to the company’s director of research, Harris Parmele, asking that the information be kept “very confidential” since Ecusta was making these tests “independent of other laboratories with which you are familiar”17—that is, the American Tobacco Company.
It is hard to imagine today how frightening this all must have been. Cigarettes were being accused of causing cancer, and the industry’s own experiments were confirming the charges. One response was to try to verify these results, using other methods. A letter of June 24, 1953, has Rickards thanking Hanmer for his “extremely interesting and fruitful” visit one week before, when a new series of whole smoke “impingement” experiments was first put into motion. The collaboration had already resulted in infrared absorption curves for the combusted papers from Ecusta, and the search was on for better ways to identify carcinogens in the resulting smoke—and to see what kind of impact these would have on biological tissues. Larson and Haag were requesting data, and while we don’t have direct evidence that they or even Hanmer had been given the “accelerated” test data from Ecusta’s carcinogenicity chart, this is probably safe to assume. Rickards was also producing experimental filters for use in American Tobacco’s experiments.18 On July 1, 1953, Hanmer sent Schur five cartons of experimental cigarettes wrapped in different kinds of paper; he also requested samples of the filters Ecusta was designing to help reduce some of the aldehydes in cigarette smoke.
Having already demonstrated carcinogenicity through mouse painting, the idea was now to augment the realism of the animal tests—by using whole smoke blown onto the shaved backs of mice rather than smoke condensate painted onto the shaved backs of mice. Plans for these new experiments first show up in a letter of July 7, 1953, from Milton Schur to Hanmer. Rickards had met with Larson and Haag in Hanmer’s Richmond office on June 18 and now, two weeks later, the plan was to launch these so-called smoke impingement tests. The idea was to confirm—or ideally, disconfirm—the “positive” results already obtained at Ecusta, along with the mouse-painting experiments of Wynder et al. that, while not yet published, were looming on the horizon.
Rickards played a key role in the research design, instructing Larson on the age, sex, and strains of mice to be used. Schur and Rickards suggested to Larson the advantage of using only one sample of cigarettes, “one which has yielded positive results [i.e., cancers] by our solvent application method,” until the project had established “the frequency and duration of direct impingement treatment which will yield interpretable results.” Once this “rational basis of procedures” had been established, the group could then “run a whole series of samples by smoke impingement.” Schur also reported Larson’s remarks about publication rights being reserved by the Medical College of Virginia; this is interesting, because it shows that the project was not undertaken on the initiative of Ecusta but rather by the American Tobacco Company and its staff, including Larson and Haag. Schur allowed this question of publication to be “a matter which we leave entirely in your [i.e., American Tobacco’s] hands, knowing full well that you would not agree to any publication until the time would be propitious.”19
Rickards explained the design of the experiment in a July 8, 1953, letter to Larson at the MCV. Responsibility for designing, administering, and evaluating the experiments was to remain with Ecusta, but the animals were actually to be kept (and exposed) at the MCV under the direction of Larson and Haag. Following the methods of William E. Smith, the mice were to be male and eight to ten weeks of age; exposures would begin on a Monday and take place three times daily, five days a week. The mice were to be shaved, exposed to blown smoke, and after an appropriate length of time sacrificed to obtain a section of exposed skin that would be clipped out, preserved in formaldehyde, and then shipped to Ecusta for analysis. The original plan called for six different cigarettes to be tested on six animals each; it was later decided to use only one cigarette type—the one already shown to be “positive” for causing cancer in the condensate experiments.20
On August 18, 1953, Schur wrote to Hanmer noting that the smoke impingement tests were about to begin. Results were already coming in from the condensate experiments, and Rickards was on a two-week stint in Hanmer’s lab in Richmond, brushing up on infrared spectroscopy and fractionation column techniques (to identify smoke constituents). Schur and Rickards clearly knew they were on to something big: Rickards’s visit to American Tobacco’s lab had impressed on these men the gravity of the situation, judging from the uncharacteristically effusive tone of Schur’s letter of thanks to Hanmer: “We consider sacred all the information Jim [Rickards] obtained during his work at your laboratory, and we will keep it strictly confidential even within the confines of our own laboratory.”21
In this new set of experiments whole smoke—as opposed to extracted tobacco tars—was to be used to approximate what actually happens when smoke enters a smoker’s lungs. The plan was to blow smoke onto the shaved backs of mice to see if cellular changes of a cancerous or precancerous sort could be detected. Smith’s accelerated biological test would again be used to speed up the results; tissue samples would then be graded on a scale from 0 to 10, with 0 indicating no effect and 10 being complete destruction of the glands in question.22
The idea of using whole smoke to test biological reactions was an old one in the industry. The first mention in the internal documents dates from the mid-1930s, when American Tobacco scientists blew smoke into the eyes of rabbits to evaluate “the degree of irritation” caused by DEG-treated cigarettes. (Philip Morris used such tests, complete with graphic images of inflamed eyes, to advertise its cigarettes, though Harlow at one point confided that “a rabbit will scream if nicotine is introduced into the eye.”) Philip Morris had substituted DEG for glycerine to keep tobacco leaves pliable during manufacturing, and the question for companies like American Tobacco was whether such a substitute was in fact less irritating. Harvey Haag from the MCV and A. M. Ambrose from Stanford were hired to test for toxicity and found that while no great danger seemed to arise from low concentrations, the smoke derived from DEG-treated cigarettes was actually harsher than that from glycerine: “the edema [swelling] seems to be definitely greater.” Haag and Ambrose had published this in 1937, prompting internal grumbling from Philip Morris that Haag had failed to disclose his sponsorship by American Tobacco.23
Now, though, in the summer of 1953, whole smoke experiments would be used to measure the carcinogenicity of tobacco as against cigarette papers. Rickards on September 9, 1953, wrote to Harvey Haag at the MCV, providing him with reference samples of mouse skin tissues graded according to whether the sebaceous glands were “intact” (i.e., healthy), “altered,” or “absent” (i.e., destroyed), along with an explanation of the grading system. And over the next two months, Ecusta and the MCV exchanged mouse skin samples in formaldehyde, evaluating the degree of destruction of tissue as an index of carcinogenic potency. Paul Larson sent one set of exposed samples to Schur on September 17, for example, and Schur responded on September 24, noting that the specimens would be examined within the next few days. Schur added that Hanmer, Rickards, Larson, and he himself were all looking forward to the results “with the greatest interest.”24
Bad news came from NYU on October 13, 1953, when Norton Nelson, director of research at the university’s Institute for Industrial Medicine, delivered a devastating “progress report” for the past year on Runyon Fund grant 231, titled “Investigation of the Chemical Nature of Environmental Carcinogens.” Recipients included the top research officers of the leading tobacco companies in the United States (Clarke from Reynolds, Cullman and DuPuis from Philip Morris, Hanmer from American, Parmele from Lorillard, Schur from Ecusta, and Tucker from Brown & Williamson), all of whom were instructed not to publish or circulate the report. The reason was evident from the very first sentence, which announced that “Tars collected from cigarette smoke have been shown to produce cancer on the skin of mice and rabbits.”25
That was shocking enough, but equally alarming were the final results of Ecusta’s whole smoke experiments, delivered to Larson at the MCV in a letter of November 6, 1953, marked “Confidential.” Milton Schur, Ecusta’s manager of research and development, reported that among the eight mice exposed to whole smoke “very strong” activity—meaning cancer or precancerous growths—had been found in five of the animals. “Mild” activity was found in one additional mouse and none in the other two. Rickards had obtained these results by telephone from “our pathologist” (apparently at Ecusta) and asked that all parties wait for the written report before exchanging views. Schur sent that written report to Larson on November 10, 1953, leaving no doubt about the strong biological activity of the tobacco tars tested. Ecusta had confirmed once again the industry’s worst fears—that smoke from cigarettes can cause cancer.26
November and December of 1953 must have been something of a nightmare for U.S. tobacco manufacturers. Bad news was followed by worse, prompting ever more desperate attempts to either explain away the bad news or keep it under wraps. Larson, for example, was not satisfied that Ecusta’s tests were adequate to establish carcinogenicity and challenged other aspects of the studies. Schur responded by pulling scientific rank, citing William E. Smith’s view that “any product causing the destruction of the sebaceous glands under the conditions of accelerated tests would probably produce papillomata and eventual cancer under the conditions of the recognized standard test.” Smith at this time was the chief proponent of the accelerated tests used in the Ecusta experiments; he was also a faculty member at NYU’s Bellevue Medical Center and an important figure in the NYU collaboration—and one of those who would suffer professionally for recognizing the cancer-causing capacity of tobacco. Smith in fact would shortly thereafter be purged from the NYU faculty (by Lanza in 1956), a decision upheld despite protests to the chancellor.27
Ecusta was quite happy with these results, and for obvious reasons. Experimental tests had seemed to exonerate cigarette paper and put the entirety of blame for cancer on tobacco. In subsequent correspondence of the company it is taken for granted that “either 3 or 4 malignancies and a small number of benign growths” had been produced in the mice exposed to cigarette smoke, with no cancers and only a few benign growths on the unexposed controls—consistent with the chart shown earlier to Lorillard. And tars made from paper alone showed no more tumors than the tobacco-free solvent controls.28
Quite apart from exonerating paper, however, there is another reason Ecusta must have been pleased. Ecusta by this time was manufacturing not just paper for the industry, but filters. And not just for American Tobacco, but for the entire U.S. cigarette industry. We don’t have documents showing filter makers cracking open the champagne, but it makes sense that a manufacturer of filters would stand to gain if people were to start demanding “safer” cigarettes. This may have been one reason Ecusta was willing to conduct such tests in the first place: the tobacco industry’s lemons would become Ecusta’s lemonade.
Ecusta’s experiments were never made public. The results were never published, nor were they even mentioned by any of the corporate principals over the subsequent half century of conspired silence. Nor are they mentioned in any published histories of tobacco or cancer research. By the time the results were in, however—in November of 1953—the cancer cat was coming out of the bag, big time. Word was getting out that the tobacco companies were supporting cancer research, and journalists and editors wanted to know why.
Some of the tensions surrounding this issue were already revealed at a November 5, 1953, meeting of the NYU-American Tobacco-Sloan-Kettering “Air Pollution” group—with all the principals of the collaboration present, along with Hanmer from American Tobacco, Parmele from Lorillard, and Schur and Dixon from Ecusta. Never before in the United States had researchers come together in such strength to discuss tobacco and health. The conversation was clearly tense, and the focus was not so much on results as on crisis management. Lanza started out with a statement that he and his collaborators were “constantly being sought out” by journalists wanting to know “what they were doing, the purpose of their investigations and who was financing them.” Hanmer summarized the event for his employers at American Tobacco:
[Lanza] said that the situation was becoming embarrassing and a statement could not be much longer deferred. He anticipated that unless they themselves made a statement, someone would endeavor to publish an article without benefit of guidance from them. . . . Dr. Lanza felt that such publicity might be both inaccurate and more damaging to the cigarette industry than an authorized statement from the NYU group.29
Lanza then went back over the history of the collaboration, recalling that it was actually the industry that had first approached NYU—in 1951—perhaps via Schur from Ecusta or Parmele from Lorillard, he wasn’t sure. Lanza and Rhoads had refused direct funding, suggesting instead that monies be channeled through the Damon Runyon Fund. Rhoads once again compared the tobacco situation to that of the chemical industry twenty-five years earlier, when beta-naphthylamine had been found causing bladder cancer in dye workers. The industry had responded with “very poor public relations”—but had eventually managed “to correct this condition.” Rhoads was hoping that tobacco could be rescued by a similar campaign. The more immediate difficulty, though, as Rhoads communicated to his tobacco hosts, was that the situation was now so hot that some kind of press release was unavoidable. Rhoads had thus far managed to postpone meetings with reporters from Fortune, Life, and Time but “sooner or later” would have to talk with them. Hanmer wanted their research to continue “without any publicity,” but Rhoads insisted this was no longer possible. The subject had become “a matter of widespread public interest.”30
That turned out to be an understatement. On November 30, 1953, Time magazine ran a story announcing that tars from cigarette smoke had now been proven to cause cancer in mice “beyond any doubt.” That was a quote from “famed surgeon A. Evarts Graham of St. Louis,” but it was also the headline for the article, which cited Graham’s revelation: “Dr. Ernest L. Wynder and I have reproduced cancer experimentally in mice by using merely the tars from tobacco smoke. This shows conclusively that there is something in cigarette smoke which can produce cancer. This is no longer merely a possibility. Our experiments have proved it beyond any doubt.”31 The industry by this time had decided it could no longer afford to keep silent, and in a press release of November 30, 1953, American Tobacco president Paul M. Hahn admitted his company’s role in helping to finance “the Damon Runyon Memorial Cancer Fund, which supports New York University’s Institute of Industrial Medicine, which is trying to find the cancer-causing factor in cigarette tar.” Time reported Hahn’s announcement, along with his claim that “no one has yet proved that lung cancer in any human being is directly traceable to tobacco.” Time also noted, however, that “study after study” had established “a correlation between prolonged cigarette smoking and lung cancer.”32
A final blow came on December 8, when Alton Ochsner, Ernst Wynder, and a number of other prominent medical scholars lectured at the Twenty-ninth Annual Greater New York Dental Meeting, announcing that medical men were now “extremely concerned about the possibility that the male population of the United States will be decimated by cancer of the lung in another fifty years if cigarette smoking increases as it has in the past.” The New York Times minced no words in reporting on the event:
Four Medical reports were presented here yesterday linking cigarette smoking and disease, particularly lung cancer, without qualification.
The correlation between smoking and cancer was stated in unusually strong terms by leading medical specialists at the twenty-ninth annual Greater New York Dental Meeting.
The meeting also marked one of the first occasions in which medical researchers, reporting before a professional group, have joined in insisting firmly that it is indeed smoking, and not some other environmental factor, that has caused the great increase in lung cancer among males noted in disease statistics of the last two decades.33
The combined effect of Time’s stories and the New York Times article, together with pent-up lingering rumors about the NYU–Sloan-Kettering–American Tobacco collaboration, caused an outgassing of panic on Wall Street, with tobacco stocks falling more sharply than at any time since the Great Depression. On December 9, 1953, American Tobacco’s stock lost about 6 percent of its value; Reynolds’s lost closer to 10 percent.34 The cigarette trade was in danger of coming undone.
There are lots of different ways one could look at the cancer research funded by the tobacco industry in the early 1950s. One would be to regard these as essentially intra-industry squabbles over whether it was the paper, or the tobacco, or some additive or contaminant or method of processing that was causing all this cancer. This was not a debate that either side (paper or tobacco) wanted to air in public, which helps explain why the Ecusta experiments never saw the light of day.
One can also imagine, though, how differently things might have turned out if the experiments had exonerated tobacco. After all, this was still a period when experts could honestly doubt smoking’s link to the lung cancer epidemic; the case was closing, but it was not yet entirely closed. If Wynder et al.’s work had been refuted, the world surely would have heard about it, and loudly. As history and the facts of the matter had it, however, the Ecusta tests turned up positive: tobacco smoke blown onto the bare backs of mice caused cancers, as did the painting of tobacco tars.
The lucky twist for Ecusta was not just that paper was (relatively speaking) exonerated, however. They were also fortunate to have decided—in December of 1953—not to accept the tobacco industry’s invitation to participate in the prevarication project, despite “considerable pressure” from the rest of the industry.35 The company seems never to have lied to the public (about cancer), which is probably why it has never been sued. Ecusta did, however, continue to supply millions of miles of paper to the industry, along with equipment and facilities for tobacco’s various PR fronts. It also continued to research ways to make cigarettes “safer.” On June 1, 1954, for example, Cowan Dengler, Inc., a New York advertising company, invited Ecusta to try its “new, improved paper,” offered as a way to “reduce or eliminate the propensity toward lung cancer on the part of cigarette smokers which many medical authorities believe exists.”36 The Ecusta company itself never issued any kind of warning that the cigarettes they were helping make were causing cancer, even though they had helped to prove that fact in their laboratories.
Ecusta continued to work with the Tobacco Industry Research Committee and other industry research bodies—supplying the TIRC with tobacco tar distillates for use in industry-financed research, for example. The company also conducted research on the combustion properties of various kinds of paper and paper ingredients and as late as the 1980s was helping Philip Morris develop its adjustable “Dial-a-Taste” (or “Dial-a-Tar”) gimmick, a cigarette that was supposed to give smokers a choice in how much tar to inhale (aka Project Data). Ecusta developed state-of-the-art automatic smoking machines for the industry and helped BAT develop “Reduced Visibility Sidestream” cigarette papers.37
And other agencies continued mouse experiments—at great cost, and to no good end. From 1974 to 1984, for example, industry-funded scientists forced ten thousand mice to inhale the smoke from 800,000 cigarettes, looking for—and finding no examples of—squamous cell lung cancer.38 Such projects were oddly anachronistic: smoking had already been shown to cause cancer in humans, and post-1950s efforts to see how mice fared under such conditions are probably best characterized as pseudoscience married to animal cruelty. The industry kept hoping for ways to “spin” itself out of this grim charge of causing mass death, and while this worked for a time, history would eventually catch up with them.
