Authors: Richard Kluger
The ACS also asked Jesse B. Steinfeld, the Nixon administration’s young and surprisingly activist Surgeon General, to order a corroborative review of the beagles study. A former cancer specialist at the University of Southern California, Steinfeld knew Auerbach to be a dedicated and meticulous investigator and felt that accepting the ACS request, as he later put it, “would have been playing into the tobacco industry’s hands” and would have left the Surgeon General open to second-guessing every controversial medical study that came along. Since the beagle slides had been reviewed by a National Cancer Institute pathologist and were open for review by any legitimate investigator, Steinfeld told the ACS that he was satisfied to let things stand, in the belief that the new Auerbach-Hammond study offered fresh insight into the nature of the dose-related pulmonary changes caused by smoking.
Following through now on the industry’s drive to besmirch the beagles study even before it saw print, James Bowling, in his dual capacity as Philip Morris publicist and head of the Tobacco Institute’s public-relations oversight committee, and company attorney Alexander Holtzman traveled to Chicago on the eve of the annual AMA convention toward the end of June and tried to get the presentation of the Auerbach-Hammond paper on the smoking dogs struck from the program. Visiting AMA President Gerald Dorman in his hotel room, the Philip Morris operatives reached
JAMA
editor Hugh Hussey on the telephone and asked him to corroborate for Dorman that the reviewers of the beagles paper had serious reservations about its validity. They also presented Dorman with a letter from Cullman arguing that the beagles data were “unpublished and unsubstantiated in any way” and that if the AMA permitted the authors to take the platform at its convention, it would be “lending its facilities and authority to providing additional publicity for a study which has been and is being seriously questioned by the scientists who are reviewing the findings for the AMA’s official journal.”
Although unsuccessful in its effort to have the beagles paper muzzled at the convention, the industry had helped shake the confidence of AMA hands. Soon after the convention, the paper was returned to Auerbach and Hammond with the balance of the reviewers’ comments and a request for revisions if they wished the study to be freshly considered.
JAMA
editor Hussey later told a reporter from
Nature
magazine that the beagles paper was not worthy of publication “in the form in which it was received” and that the suggestions for revision were “quite fundamental”. The authors would concede only that the microphotographs could benefit from reshooting, but they were not otherwise
prepared to tone down their conclusions in the vain hope of satisfying two dozen reviewers, some of them paid by a rogue industry with its knives out.
Soon thereafter, Auerbach received a letter from an old friend, Dr. Katharine Boucut, editor of the
Journal of Environmental Health
, a second-string but creditable AMA publication. Boucut said she was aware of the travail the authors had been enduring, and if they were willing to bring the beagles slides to her office in Philadelphia, where they could be examined by reviewers of her choice, she would gladly publish the paper as soon as possible. This turned out to be in December; in the interim, tobacco industry publicists toured the nation trying to plant articles on what they characterized to the press as the beagles fiasco. Kentucky Congressman Tim Lee Carter, a bare-knuckled champion of the industry and his state’s Burley tobacco growers, claimed in the
Congressional Record
for August 14 that the
New England Journal
“had rejected the [beagles] research papers outright”—even
JAMA
had not done that—and lashed out at Surgeon General Steinfeld for his “uncritical acceptance of this research … a clear reflection of the superficial and biased manner in which the information which goes into these [Surgeon General’s] reports is evaluated.” In mid-October the new president of the Tobacco Institute, North Carolina country lawyer Horace Kornegay, a former district attorney and three-term U.S. representative from his state’s sixth congressional district, its tobacco-growing heartland, did his part in the operation to trash the beagles study. Kornegay, who, as one top tobacco industry publicist put it, had “a puppy-dog likability” in private, revealed a quite different persona as successor to the velvet-gloved Earle Clements. With a painful shrillness that would typify his pronouncements on the smoking and health issue, Kornegay declared that the as yet unpublished beagles study as showcased at the Waldorf “may be one of the great scientific hoaxes of our time,” was a publicity stunt to attract the attention of Congress (then considering a ban on broadcasting cigarette commercials and other regulations) and “is not the first time that tobacco products have been unfairly accused and the public misled by such misuse of science”—he did not cite other alleged instances.
As if eager to deliver the coup de grace in an onslaught he had initiated nearly a year earlier, Joseph Cullman appeared on the CBS television interview show “Face the Nation” at the beginning of 1971, just after the TV ban had gone into effect, and used the occasion to try to bury the beagles study for good. As finally published, he claimed, the findings had been “materially changed,” as a result, he implied, of all the criticism aimed at them. Challenged on this statement by CBS science editor Earl Ubell, one of the interviewers, Cullman said the original number of reported cancers—twelve—had been reduced in the published version to two. Ubell produced the published paper and cited its findings of twelve beagles “with invasive lung tumors.”
That was not the same thing as cancer, Cullman insisted; Ubell disagreed. Besides, Cullman said, some of the nonsmoking dogs developed tumors as well. Only two of them, Ubell parried, and neither case was invasive. The investigators, Cullman went on, “did not claim, as they originally had, that they got any lung cancers from smoking cigarettes”—precisely the point of the whole study. In a more sweeping rebuttal still, Cullman stated, “We do not believe that cigarettes are hazardous; we don’t accept that.” In short, one of the tobacco industry’s leading spokesmen was denying the validity of the “dangerous” label that the U.S. government had affixed to his product. And in his ultimate display of brass that Sunday morning, Cullman remarked, when asked about a recent study which found that smoking mothers gave birth to smaller babies than nonsmoking mothers, “Some women would prefer having smaller babies.”
This cavalier, not to say brutal, attitude was further demonstrated several months later in the Philip Morris annual report, which crowed about the company’s role in discrediting the beagles experiment. Yet in an interdepartmental memorandum on February 17, 1971, by Philip Morris research and development director Helmut Wakeham—shortly after Cullman’s “Face the Nation” appearance and shortly before publication of the annual report—the beagles study was hardly dismissed as worthless science. Wakeham noted that “the so-called tumors were microscopic neoplasms. So the test was not conclusive, but it was a lot closer than skin-painting.”
Auerbach himself came to regret only his complicity in the ill-advised ACS decision to hold the press conference in advance of scholarly review and publication, but at the time he had felt beholden to the organization for funding his studies on smoking. His corporate detractors, though, he felt were venal: “Anyone could have come to our place to review the slides … .” Perhaps the most even-handed judgment on the beagles episode was offered by Ernst Wynder’s close associate in tobacco research, chemist Dietrich Hoffmann, who considered Oscar Auerbach “a wonderful human being, beyond corruption,” who had accomplished “fantastic pathology” in his studies of cell changes in human smokers. “But I would not have done the beagles study,” Hoffmann remarked long afterward. Science cannot replicate the human smoking experience with laboratory animals, he said, nor was it necessary to, as the die-hard tobacco industry insisted. “Even so,” Hoffmann added of Auerbach’s labors with the dogs, “he did get some lung tumors, so the study was added evidence.”
II
IF
the Tobacco Institute’s Horace Kornegay needed instruction from the resident staff in the strategy the industry had adopted to deflect the health charges against it, he got it in a revealing memorandum to him on May 1, 1972, from the institute’s assistant vice president for public relations, Frederick Panzer. A former presidential aide in the Johnson White House, Panzer wrote to Kornegay to register his dissatisfaction with the industry’s defensive tactics. These, he said, “while brilliantly conceived and executed over the years helping us win important battles,” had not been a vehicle for victory. Instead, they amounted to no more than “a holding strategy, consisting of creating doubt about the health charge without actually denying it; advocating the public’s right to smoke, without actually urging them to take up the practice; encouraging objective scientific research as the only way to resolve the question of health hazard… .”
Just how “objective” and effective the industry-sponsored research was, Panzer may not have known. But others in the cigarette manufacturers’ pay surely did. One of them was R. J. Reynolds Tobacco’s general counsel, Henry Ramm, who in a November 30, 1970, memorandum to the Council for Tobacco Research executive committee wrote that while in no way wishing to disparage “the stalwart work” done by the council under its first scientific director, Clarence Little, asked for a more conscientious effort from that time forth. Many of the industry’s joint research grants in the early years, Ramm thought, had “little if any direct application to the use of tobacco,” and “[i]n view of the millions of dollars of annual sales of our industry our expenditures for health research have been of a minimal order.” The RJR counsel asked the CTR “to program the research more specifically than has been possible in the past,” and in a spasm of conscience added, “When the products of the industry are accused of causing harm to users, certainly it is the obligation of that industry to endeavor to determine whether such accusations are true or false.”
But just eight months earlier, Ramm’s company, presumably with the knowledge of its chief lawyer, had abruptly fired twenty-six research scientists and shut down their four-year effort with laboratory animals that were being tested for the effects of tobacco smoke. The researchers’ notebooks were seized, and no explanation was given for the shutdown, which occurred just a month after the ACS press conference on the smoking beagles.
The RJR biological studies had been the source of heated intramural debate in Winston-Salem. Most of the lawyers and many of the managers opposed the program based on the fear that serious research might in fact conclude that smoking was detrimental to health and thereby put the company and the rest of
the industry in an indefensible position when embroiled in product liability suits. But company chairman Bowman Gray, Jr., while publicly disparaging the health charges, had supported a conscientious effort to learn the truth, and so the Reynolds research building at the corner of Chestnut and Belews streets in downtown Winston-Salem was converted into a sprawling, yellow-brick complex that included a room with special drainage and ventilation for animal experiments. The facility, soon dubbed the “mouse house,” was staffed by eager beavers like biochemist Joseph Bumgarner, then in his late twenties, who recalled, “We were young and idealistic, and we were going to change the world … . I never remember thinking we were going to hurt the company. That was not a consideration. Our goal was: if there is a problem, let’s try to fix it—if there is a fix … .”
The major Reynolds biological study, involving rabbits, had suggested that emphysema may have been due in part to the effect of cigarette smoking on surfactant, a substance in the lungs that prevented the tiny alveoli from sticking together each time they exhaled air. Fifteen years after closing down the biological lab, Reynolds officials would claim that this effort was halted because the nasal tubes delivering smoke to the rabbits caused infections and thus made the results unreliable. Why halting the whole enterprise was preferable to just remedying the problem with the tubing was not explained. According to another scientist who worked on the rabbits project, Johns Hopkins-trained Anthony Colucci, a fourteen-year RJR veteran before being let go, “It wasn’t about bad science or a business decision. The decision … was made because Reynolds did not at that time want to be collecting information that might be detrimental to itself—which would be telling the public what its product does. Ignorance is bliss.”
Nor was Reynolds an exception to the tobacco industry’s baleful attitude toward pursuit of the truth about smoking and health, especially by outside investigators whom they funded. The closer they came to damaging findings, the more likely the industry was to withdraw its backing. In that vein, nothing could have pleased the tobacco manufacturers more than the laggard project under the certified aegis of the American Medical Association that the industry was funding to the tune of $15 million—two-thirds of it authorized at the outset in 1964 and the balance as the inquiry dragged on into the 1970s without producing a hint of structured findings. By far the largest outside research effort paid for by the cigarette makers, the AMA’s Education and Research Fund project on tobacco drew the fire of the industry’s own research directors when they gathered at Scottsdale, Arizona, in May 1970 to hear the progress report. According to James Mold, assistant director of the Liggett R&D program, too much of the AMA-ERF effort was being devoted to the refilling of old ground, like the properties of nicotine, and far too little attention paid to carcinogenesis. The consensual memo produced by the industry research heads on July 7
following the 1970 evaluative process found that not more than half the program was relevant to smoking and that “little of scientific significance” would emerge from the program.
Why did the lushly financed AMA-ERF project yield so little? Part of the answer resided in the attitudes of even the most highly regarded scientists connected with the undertaking. Among these was the NCI’s Paul Kotin, no longer a member of the Council for Tobacco Research advisory board but suspected by some at AMA headquarters of being an industry partisan on the AMA-ERF guiding board in charge of dispensing grants. The whole effort, Kotin conceded a dozen years after the project breathed its last, was “a total fiasco. We were chasing the obvious in terms of the state of knowledge.” But they were not chasing the causes of lung cancer, because, to Kotin’s way of thinking, there was no further point to it after the definitive findings of the 1964 report to the Surgeon General. Nor were they exploring the nature of tobacco’s addictive properties, because the chairman of the AMA-ERF project, Maurice Seevers, was on the same pro-industry hobbyhorse he had been riding while a member of the original Surgeon General’s Advisory Committee—namely, that smoking was purely and simply a habit from which withdrawal could be readily achieved without notable metabolic changes. “And Mo [Seevers] got real unhappy when challenged on his position,” Kotin recalled.