Defectors Helping to Crack Wall Around Tobacco Firms

For Ian Uydess, the moment of truth came in front of the television set. It was a Sunday night in February and a whistle-blowing scientist named Jeffrey Wigand was revealing dark secrets about the nation’s cigarette business.

Uydess knew those same secrets. A former cancer researcher, he had been lured to Philip Morris USA in 1977 with the promise that he could help engineer a safer cigarette. But after 11 years, he left in silent fury as company officials first shelved his findings on how to remove poisonous nitrates from tobacco, then muzzled other scientists who were examining nicotine’s addictive nature.

Now Uydess had decided to go public, to give a sworn statement to the Food and Drug Administration. It wouldn’t be easy. There on television, Wigand was talking about how his former bosses at Brown & Williamson Tobacco Corp. were suing him for breaking his confidentiality agreement and how his marriage had collapsed from the stress.

Uydess’ wife, Carol, turned toward her husband, her voice tinged with fear. “Is that what’s going to happen to us?” she asked. “No,” Uydess said firmly, “it’s not what’s going to happen to us.”

Secrets Unlocked

Thus did Uydess, who was recently interviewed by The Times, resolve to join a small cadre of tobacco industry turncoats--many of them scientists--who, in their own parlance, have “come out,” helping to crack the once-impenetrable wall that the tobacco industry had built around itself. During the last two years, seven defectors--six named and one known only as “Deep Cough”--have come forward, as Uydess has, to cooperate with federal investigations of their former employers. It is a remarkable development for an industry that has kept a tight lock on its secrets for decades.

Most of the leaks are coming from industry short-timers, men whose first allegiance was to science rather than their companies. Wigand, for example, had spent 20 years in the health care and biotechnology industries before going to Brown & Williamson.

Victor DeNoble, a colleague and friend of Uydess who became one of the first to come out in 1994 when he testified before Congress, moved to Philip Morris from the National Institute of Drug Abuse. Uydess came from a research hospital in Rochester, N.Y., where as a cell biologist he specialized in the mechanisms of cell division.

“There were people who really became company men,” said DeNoble. “It’s funny, when I think back on it. Those are the people who today are vice presidents in that company. And there was a small group of other people--I consider Ian one of them, I consider myself one--who just never caught on to that corporate culture.”

What is emerging from their revelations is a portrait of a $45-billion-a-year industry that is in a quandary. The cigarette manufacturers, according to the whistle-blowers, had intricate scientific knowledge of the harm their product caused--and, they say, the technical ability to reduce that harm--and yet, fearing lawsuits, kept that knowledge to themselves.

It is an industry, according to Uydess and others, where lawyers routinely interfered with scientific research, laboratories were summarily shut down and experiments that became too sensitive were transferred overseas, where they could be continued away from the watchful eyes of lawyers and the government.

“It was,” said DeNoble, “a secret life.”

As to the controversial question of whether tobacco executives were telling the truth when testifying under oath before Congress that nicotine is not addictive, the defectors said their belief is simple: no.

The companies repeatedly have denied these allegations. Philip Morris thus far has said little about its three former employees--Uydess; William A. Farone, for seven years the company’s director of applied research, and Jerome K. Rivers, a retired plant superintendent--who recently gave statements to the FDA, which had sought their support in its effort to gain authority to regulate nicotine as a drug.

However, last month, when the FDA made the turncoats’ affidavits public, the maker of Marlboro began running full-page newspaper advertisements denying Rivers’ claim that Philip Morris manipulates cigarette nicotine levels. Company officials did not respond to several requests to be interviewed for this article, although the company issued a written statement disputing one of Uydess’ points.

Firm Fights Back

Compared with Philip Morris, Brown & Williamson has been more aggressive. When Wigand came out, the company released a 500-page dossier that portrayed him as a shoplifter and a wife-beater. Attorney Gordon Smith, who represents the company, said at that time: “The man is a master of deceit.” Wigand said the charges are false.

The tobacco business is used to defending itself. It has been doing so ever since the 1950s, when the first shreds of evidence about the dangers of smoking emerged. Today, times are particularly tough for an industry that traces its roots to the American Revolution.

In addition to the FDA inquiry, the Justice Department is conducting five tobacco-related grand jury investigations. Mississippi and six other states are suing the cigarette companies to recover Medicaid costs for smoking-related diseases. And a variety of class-action suits are wending their way through the courts.

Even one of the nation’s five cigarette manufacturers--the Liggett Group--has itself become a turncoat of sorts, agreeing last month to settle a major class-action lawsuit brought on behalf of all former smokers.

Although the deal does not immediately provide any money to plaintiffs, the company has agreed to donate part of its profits over the next 25 years to pay for programs that would encourage smokers to quit. The other companies insist that they will not follow Liggett’s lead; the settlement has sparked a nasty feud in an industry that prides itself on never having paid a dime in legal damages.

“When you talk about the pillars of this industry, one of them was that they had no defectors; they presented a united front,” said Michael Pertschuk, former chairman of the Federal Trade Commission, who as a young Senate lawyer in the 1960s helped put warning labels on cigarette packages. “Now you’ve got the combination of Liggett and these defectors and it’s like a ship leaking [from] all kinds of holes.”

Uydess is one of the biggest leaks of all. “Ian is especially important to us,” said Mississippi Atty. Gen. Mike Moore, who will use Uydess as a key witness in his case for Medicaid reimbursement. Moore notes that unlike Wigand, Uydess was not fired. “Ian” he said, “has no ax to grind. . . . That’s why he is so credible.”

Ian Uydess never wanted to work in the cigarette business. He wanted to work for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.

It was the 1970s and Uydess was at the University of Rochester as a postdoctoral fellow in microbiology, working on biological experiments for the space agency’s Mars Viking program. One day, after he had joined the hospital as a research fellow, a form letter arrived from Philip Morris asking if the university had any graduate students who might be interested in jobs. It fell to Uydess to respond.

He’s Awe-Struck

When he called the company to say that no one was interested, he wound up with an invitation to Richmond, Va., to speak about the Viking project at a seminar of Philip Morris scientists. He was startled by the beauty of what he found: a gleaming research and development center eight stories high, set amid other buildings on a flat green expanse dotted with trees and gardens.

“It was really pretty neat,” he said. “The facilities were the best you could have and the air, the environment of the place seemed so much like an academic campus.”

His host was Farone, the director of applied research, who later became a defector. The two men hit it off and, before long, Philip Morris offered Uydess a job.

But not just any job. Uydess said that his hiring was part of an ambitious plan by the company to “produce a better product and better meaning specifically healthier, safer. I thought that was a kind of noble venture.”

Still, he was a bit incredulous. “ ‘I’m a nonsmoker,’ ” he said he reminded his recruiters. “ ‘My background is cancer research.’ They said that was great, that that gave me the kind of perspective that they wanted.”

He spent his first couple of years learning the intricacies of the structure and chemistry of the tobacco leaf. By 1981, he had been promoted to associate senior scientist. One of his earliest assignments was to try to find bacteria that would improve the company’s process of removing toxic nitrates from tobacco.

By 1983, after a brief stint at another company, Uydess was asked to take charge of that program. The method he helped develop was so successful, Uydess said, that the company built a pilot plant to test the process. Then, one day that autumn, he was told the project would be shut down.

His bosses’ first explanation, Uydess said, was flavor--the cigarettes didn’t taste good. That wasn’t so, he countered. Senior flavor chemists who smoked handmade cigarettes with the nitrates removed told him that, while “sometimes it was not the best, it would probably be no problem.”

Then, Uydess said, he was told that the process was not commercially feasible on a large scale--another explanation that, he said, didn’t wash because he and his colleagues had “worked those numbers out before he started.”

The real reason, he began to think, had to do with public relations--and legal liability. His invention, he believed, had put his employer in a terrible bind.

“By that time, the tobacco industry already had a history of denial in the areas of smoking and health. So I can imagine someone saying: ‘What are you going to do with this material? Are you going to use it to make cigarettes and not say anything? Are you going to advertise it. . . . ?

“If you try to advertise this better cigarette because it has reduced nitrate, it’s better than what? What you did before? So what you did before, you knew wasn’t good?’ You wind up having a legal argument about defensibility.” In a brief statement issued last week, Philip Morris said Uydess’ research on nitrate removal “did not produce sufficiently consistent results, including flavor characteristics.” The company had no comment on any other issues Uydess raised.

Meanwhile, there were other troubling developments. Management, Uydess said, had begun telling the scientists to be cautious about using certain terms. The word “addiction” was a definite no-no. “Carcinogen” was out. If harm to the smoker’s health had to be discussed, he recalled, it would be termed “biological activity.”

On April 5, 1984, another bombshell dropped. DeNoble’s lab was shut down.

The two men had been sharing coffee and scientific insights for five years, as DeNoble conducted groundbreaking experiments on whether rats could become dependent on nicotine. His lab was so secret, DeNoble said, that its windows were painted black so that other Philip Morris employees would not know what he was doing.

Rats Put to Test

In November 1983, after a landmark lawsuit had been filed against the tobacco companies by a New Jersey smoker, DeNoble said he was visited by a Philip Morris lawyer and the company’s chief executive officer--an incident that he recounted both in a recent interview and in his congressional testimony. They watched in awe as his rats pressed levers to inject nicotine into their hearts.

This, DeNoble told the lawyer, was the same sort of test the National Institute on Drug Abuse employed to demonstrate “abuse liability.” “My God,” he recalled the lawyer as saying. “You’re making us look like a drug company.”

Rebutting DeNoble’s claims, Philip Morris has said that his experiments did not prove nicotine was addictive; DeNoble agrees, but he says the animal studies did prove that nicotine is “a drug of abuse.”

After that visit, DeNoble says, he was told to shut down his lab and kill all his animals; he was being fired. His friend, Uydess, was stunned. “I saw him afterward,” Uydess recalled. “He was white. He was clammy and sweating. . . . I couldn’t believe it.”

Discouraged, Uydess nonetheless pressed on with other projects, including a plan to remove cadmium, a heavy metal that the surgeon general has identified as a possible carcinogen, from tobacco. But that project, Uydess said, was also “summarily closed down”; his bosses told him, without explanation, he said, that the project was going to be handed over to an outside contractor.

By 1989, Uydess said, after nearly a decade of knocking his head against a wall, he woke up. It was on a flight home from New York, where he had delivered a presentation to company executives, that he said to himself: “I can’t justify this anymore.”

When he quit, he didn’t state his reason or raise a ruckus. He worked on his own for awhile as a consultant, then took another job in Richmond at a company called Pharmaco International, which does research testing for pharmaceutical firms.

An Epiphany

It was there, Uydess said, that he experienced an epiphany of sorts, a realization that the government’s failure to regulate cigarettes was folly. Every product he worked on at Pharmaco was controlled by the FDA to protect consumer safety.

Why, he began to wonder, was the cigarette industry exempt?

“Here,” he said, “is an industry whose product winds up in our lungs, in our saliva, in our stomachs. Yet this industry is totally immune from regulation. . . . This is absurd. . . . If the CEO for Philip Morris found that someone put a potentially toxic material in the cereal they ate every morning, they would go ballistic.”

While Uydess’ doubts mounted, he kept close ties to Philip Morris. Many of his closest friends still worked there, including his best friend, an experimental psychologist named Frank Gullotta.

Gullotta was trying, among other things, to look at the impact of nicotine on the electrochemical activity of the brain. To do this, he had recruited human subjects, volunteers from Philip Morris’ staff, measuring their reactions with an electroencephalograph, or EEG, machine.

But, Uydess said in his FDA affidavit, Gullotta’s lab, like DeNoble’s, was shut down about five years ago after his studies showed that some of the responses were similar to those for addictive substances, such as cocaine. Instead, Philip Morris moved Gullotta’s program to Germany.

The Gullottas and the Uydesses shared everything; birthdays, anniversaries, holidays. But there were some things that Uydess, the anti-smoker, and Gullotta, a heavy smoker, didn’t talk about.

One of them was Uydess’ decision to cooperate with investigators from the FDA.

FDA officials first contacted him two years ago as part of a nationwide dragnet of sorts--an effort to convert hundreds of former tobacco industry employees to the agency’s cause.

But it was not until two months ago that the investigators asked him to sign a formal statement, and it was then that Uydess had a decision to make.

In their minds, he and Carol played out the worst-case scenario. Pharmaco might not back him. Philip Morris could sue. He could lose his house, his job, all his money. He could lose his best friend. He could become a local pariah. The couple still lived in Richmond, the heart of Marlboro country.

“How will you feel if you don’t do it?” she asked him. “How could you go on and live with yourself?”

The last couple of weeks have not been easy.

Philip Morris has not sued, but the Uydesses said they are still waiting for the other shoe to drop. They are exhausted from a whirlwind of meetings, with the FDA, the Justice Department and lawyers for the state of Mississippi. They have, indeed, lost friends; the Gullottas no longer speak to them.

Ian Uydess said it will all be worth it, if only he can accomplish one thing. He wants to persuade his former employer--a company he still speaks reverently about--to do what it promised him nearly 20 years ago: make a safer cigarette.

Times staff writer Myron Levin in Los Angeles contributed to this story.