Is That Smoke, Or Do I Smell a Rat?

By SOPHFRONIA SCOTT GREGORY

This is a tale of rats and men. First the House committee hearings on the effects of smoking saw a procession of tobacco-industry executives standing shoulder to shoulder, swearing up and down that their products are not addictive. Then, last week, the laboratory rats testified otherwise -- by way of two researchers, Victor DeNoble and Paul Mele. Before the committee, the duo outlined years of secretive addiction experiments done at the behest of Philip Morris in the 1980s, work that was later allegedly suppressed.

In 1980 DeNoble and Mele were hired to find a substitute for nicotine that would have a less harmful effect on the heart. Philip Morris insisted on intense secrecy, so much so that laboratory rats were smuggled into the Richmond, Virginia, facility sometimes under cover of night. The researchers were instructed not to discuss the project with anyone.

DeNoble and Mele set up an experiment in which rats could administer - nicotine to themselves by pressing one of two levers. DeNoble said rats would thump the bar as often as 90 times in 12 hours to get the nicotine, vs. just 12 times a day for a saline solution. Even more telling, the researchers found that for nicotine combined with acetaldehyde, a product of burning cigarettes, the rats would press 500 times in 12 hours as opposed to 120 times in 12 hours for nicotine alone. "Our results demonstrated for the first time that nicotine shared common characteristics with other drugs that are delivered intravenously," says DeNoble.

It was not welcome news to the industry. At about the same time -- the summer of 1983 -- the family of Rose Cipollone, a lifetime cigarette smoker who died of lung cancer, had filed suit against Philip Morris and other tobacco companies, contending that they falsely represented the health risks of cigarettes. Philip Morris flew DeNoble and Mele to New York City to brief company executives on their research. According to Mele, however, when DeNoble explained that the rat experiment was a strong indication of the addictiveness of nicotine, one executive said, "Why should I risk a billion-dollar industry on a rat pressing a lever?" (In 1992 the Cipollones dropped the case.)

The scientists returned to Richmond only to hear talk of moving the experiments out of Virginia and as far away as Switzerland. Then in April 1984 a supervisor summoned DeNoble and ordered him to turn off the machines, kill the rats and turn over his notes. A few days later, DeNoble came to work and found that "the animals were gone; the data was gone. Everything was gone." Attempts by DeNoble and Mele to publish their findings were blocked.

As a result, a safer cigarette may have been lost. The researchers say they developed the nicotine substitute they were hired to find: 2'methylnicotine, which supposedly provides a nicotine-like high without distressing the heart. The discovery was never pursued.

With reporting by Dick Thompson/Washington