Tobacco researcher speaks at Westminster

By columbiatribune.com

FULTON — He was supposed to find a way to make a healthier cigarette. Instead, Victor DeNoble discovered that nicotine, like other drugs, alters the brain — research that later would help lawmakers take on the tobacco industry.

DeNoble is a former Philip Morris employee. He shared his story with about 30 people at Westminster College in Fulton last night.

DeNoble went to work for Philip Morris as a researcher in 1980. Executives there had told him nicotine was causing 138,000 deaths a year from heart attacks and strokes, and his charge was to find a substitute to replace that harmful component of cigarettes without altering its addictive properties.

In a secret third-floor lab, he and a fellow researcher did that work but also studied nicotine’s effects on the brain. Studying the brains of a mouse, monkey and human — preserved organs DeNoble showed the audience last night — he discovered that nicotine changes the chemical makeup of the brain.

“It was a really good experiment,” he said. “Oh, by the way, it got me fired.”

Philip Morris executives were not impressed with that work but kept him on because he was finishing his heart research. In 1983, the company patented a way to make cigarettes less harmful for the heart. Philip Morris attorneys, though, advised against manufacturing it because doing so would be admitting traditional cigarettes are dangerous, DeNoble said.

Company executives fired DeNoble in 1984 but not without first reminding him he signed a contract legally requiring him to keep his work secret.

He was allowed to return to his lab to kill the research animals, and DeNoble used the opportunity to gather top-secret documents. In a rush, he even threw a desk drawer into a box he smuggled out a side door.

DeNoble then enlisted an attorney to help him get that evidence to Congress. Later he discovered the lawyer instead sold the box back to Philip Morris.

It would be 10 years before DeNoble had an opportunity to share what he knew. When he learned that seven tobacco executives were going to testify before Congress in 1994, his wife recalled that he still had the desk drawer from his office.

In it, they discovered a 35 mm slide of his lab, proof of his research.

He anonymously mailed the slide to the FBI but made sure his fingerprints were on it so they could find him. Within days, he was ordered by a federal judge to testify under oath about his work, allowing him to sidestep his contract.

DeNoble then testified before Congress, countering tobacco executives’ claims that nicotine was safe.

Since then, the industry has paid $700 billion in fines and can no longer advertise cigarettes in cartoons, on billboards or at sporting events.

Yesterday was the first time Michelle Vaughan, an assistant professor of psychology at Westminster, heard DeNoble’s story. She’s planning to teach a course on addiction next semester and said the presentation armed her with new information.

Vaughan said she was impressed with DeNoble’s courage.

“It’s fascinating, just the way he put everything on the line repeatedly,” she said.