Former Philip Morris employee says tobacco company thwarted attempts to make safer cigarettes
Updated November 25, 1998
1:27 p.m. ET
MIAMI (Court TV)— According to a former Big Tobacco scientist, Philip Morris, the nation's largest cigarette company, stopped efforts to make safer cigarettes and never gave explicit reasons for its decisions.
Ian Uydess, who worked for Philip Morris from 1978 to 1989, testified on behalf of thousands of sick Florida smokers in a $200 billion class-action suit against the tobacco industry. Uydess told jurors that Philip Morris often ended experiments aimed at making safer cigarettes even after the tests showed promising results. One project, Uydess said, used bacteria to get rid of nitrates, a major component of the cancer-causing nitrosamine. But Philip Morris stopped the project after three months of cautious promise.
"We were told it was shelved, that the company wasn't going to use it for product quality reasons or whatever, which really surprised me," Uydess testified. "When I tried to find out what was going on, I was told basically just to go back and do my work."
Uydess also said that Philip Morris terminated research on plants that seemed to suggest a way to remove cadmium, a lung irritant, from tobacco. Again, the program director gave no good reason for shelving the project.
"I thought he was going to tell us what a good job we did," Uydess said. "We walked into the conference room and sat down. He looked at me, looked at the group, and said, 'You guys have done some good work, but as of this moment in time, the cadmium program is over. It's ending here.'"
Uydess' testimony was the latest in a series of damaging evidence against the tobacco companies shown to jurors over the past two weeks. On Nov. 18, former Philip Morris researcher William Farone claimed that his former employers used elaborate plans to defend itself in tobacco suits. Farone said Philip Morris conducted tests on animals in Europe so that their results would be inadmissible in U.S. courts. He also accused a former colleague, Dr. Thomas Osdene, of helping Philip Morris cover up its knowledge of smoking's hazards by destroying test results.
The testimony of both Uydess and Farone undermine the tobacco companies' claim that they did not know about the dangers of smoking and that they conspired to hide that knowledge from the public. In their lawsuit the Florida smokers claim that smoking is addictive and that R.J. Reynolds, Brown & Williamson Tobacco Corp., Lorillard Tobacco Co., and the Liggett Group engaged in an industry-wide conspiracy to hide smoking's hazard's from the public.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
