Jump to full article: The Missoulian, 2008-04-18
Author: VINCE DEVLIN of the Missoulian
Intro: Twenty-eight years ago, scientist Victor DeNoble was sitting around with a bunch of drunk monkeys when the telephone rang.
Executives with Philip Morris, the giant tobacco company, wanted him to come to work for them.
DeNoble was studying alcohol addiction at the time - hence, the drunk monkeys, including his favorite, Sarah - but Philip Morris wanted him to apply his knowledge of addiction to nicotine.
Specifically, they wanted him to create a man-made chemical to replace the nicotine in cigarettes.
The reason?
It takes nicotine just seven seconds to go from the lungs to the heart to the brain. . . .
"They told me, 'We kill 130,000 people a year with heart attacks,' " DeNoble told a crowd at Salish Kootenai College on Thursday. "I said, 'You kill 130,000 people a year?' And they said, 'Well, we don't kill them, but the nicotine does.' "
The problem for tobacco companies, DeNoble said, is that if you removed nicotine from cigarettes, no one would smoke. You wouldn't crave the high you get from it.
What the company wanted was for DeNoble to create a drug that would still hook people and keep them addicted, without harming the heart.
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