Jump to:

Council for Tobacco Research

Deposition of Freddy Homburger, M.D. [Deposition of Homburger in the Matter of Broin]

Date: 27 May 1997
Length: 148 pages
CTRMN041967-CTRMN042114
Jump To Images
snapshot_ctr CTRMN041967_2114

Fields

Master ID
Ctrmn00041967-2810
Related Documents:
Author
Bohan, A.H.
Homburger, F.
Depository Date
08 Sep 1997
Box
267
Type
TRANSCRIPT
UCSF Legacy ID
mmt30a00

Document Images

Text Control

Highlight Text:

OCR Text Alignment:

Image Control

Image Rotation:

Image Size:

Page 19: mmt30a00 Log in for more options!
18 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 assay carcinogenicity of cigarette tars, and that amounted by the '70s to close to a million dollars, probably around $800,000. Q. When did you first meet Dr. Little? A. Well, in probably -- probably in 1948. I know that, because it was the year after the big fire in Bar Harbor, and I was in the process of establishing a Council Research Unit at Tufts University School of Medicine, and Dr. Little was around as the scientist in genetics of the mouse. And so I contacted him to become an advisot of a small group of four or five scientists that should advise the Tufts Council Research Unit. And he came and he liked his trips to Boston, he told me, and we became friends. And he asked me the year after the fire, 1948, to come to Maine and give a talk on our work. And my wife and I were both overwhelmed by the beauty of Maine, and we bought some land there through the help of Dr. Little. We built a house there in 1952, and we have been going to Maine ever since every year, with the exception of two or three years. Now I cannot travel we don't go. But Dr. Little and I became really good DORIS 0. WONG ASSOCIATES C " T R 11 N 0 I ~ ~~~~ ~
Page 20: mmt30a00 Log in for more options!
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 19 friends, and when he retired and was offered the job as director of the Council for Tobacco Research, I told him he shouldn't do that unless they gave him protection for his salary to the tune of at least a million dollars. And he said, "Oh, I can't do that and I don't really need to ask that. They would never do that. I need this job, because I would like to go to New York as often as I can, and I need the money. And above all, I can do whatever I want to do because," and I quote him literally, "My sarcophagus is built." And that was his attitude, and that is what got him into deep trouble. But his basic interest at the time when he started this job at CTR was to develop an animal system that could test th e effect of inhalation of smoke, as th e smoker does, in an animal, and that is what we were basically supported for. And we succeeded in showing over the years that mice and rats were no t suitable, because they were extremely sensitive to the toxicity of nicotine and other things in cigarette smoke and died before o ne could give them sufficient exposure to even hope for development of a cancer. And then sheer luck brought a woman from DORIS O. WONG•ASSOCIATES C'-;"* - IsR 1-- 11 N C), L -1, 1 ~;~'G ,
Page 21: mmt30a00 Log in for more options!
20 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 Boston University to us who had a colony of inbred hamsters, Rae Whitney, and she allowed us to do whatever we wanted to using these inbred hamsters. And we found very soon that the Syrian hamster is not susceptible to toxicity of nicotine and can tolerate much larger amounts of smoke; and we developed a method where, when we used the appropriate strain of hamsters, we got an incidence of nearly 50 percent of cancer of the upper respiratory tract. And that is when the trouble started with the CTR. Q. Let me ask you a few more questions about Dr. Little. What was his reputation in the scientific community? A. He had an outstanding reputation as a scientist. And he had a somewhat difficult reputation as a manager and as a person, because in most jobs, like the presidency of the University of Maine and the presidency of Michigan University, he lasted only two or three years before getting in trouble with his boards about such matters as contraception, population control and so forth. And he was a very religious man with strong convictions and very little sense of difficulties in personal DORIS 0. WONG ASSOCIATES C,- 1°R P I N ~":~L -1- 1 S 18', r ~`
Page 22: mmt30a00 Log in for more options!
21 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 relationships. He got himself into a lot of trouble, and for a time I wondered whether it was a good thing to become a friend of Dr. Little. But he was a great man. Q. You respected him? A. I respected him, until I found out that he was really doing anything that the Council wanted him to do. This was three or four years before he died. Q. Do you remember when he died? A. He was 83 years old when he died, and he was born in 1899. So I don't exactly remember. 83 or 82. Q. And did you work with him whe.n he was at CTR? A. No. I worked with him at his laboratory in Maine. I went there each year until he retired. When he was at CTR, I can't say I worked with him. He knew what we were doing, and he gave us advice and the advice of our committee, but he didn't supervise any of our research directly. And I must emphasize that the support that we got then from CTR was conventional grant support, which means we could do with the data whatever we DORIS 0. WONG ASSOCIATES C I° R I-IN 041 c-48~"~
Page 23: mmt30a00 Log in for more options!
22 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 thought should be done. Q. When you were receiving grants from CTR, and you received grants from CTR from some time very early, would it be correct to say you may have received grants as early as the mid-1950s? A. No, it was the early '60s. Q. From then until you started doing contract work for CTR in the early '70s -- A. In 1970 they changed to contract. Q. During the period of time where you were a grantee, you were always free to conduct your research the way you thought appropriate, weren't you? A. Oh, yes, absolutely. Q. And you were always free to report the results of your research as you thought appropriate? A. Oh, yes, no question. Q. I want to ask you about a few other people and see if you remember them or if you ever knew them. I'm going to hand you a list, and I won't necessarily ask you about everyone on the list, but it may be easier. Actually, I was going to ask them in alphabetical order. DORIS O. WONG ASSOCIATES C `l ~ R H/ y / 04190 /T
Page 24: mmt30a00 Log in for more options!
23 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 We'll try without the list first, because I have a different order. I apologize. Do you -- did you know Howard B. Andervont, A-n-d-e-r-v-o-n-t? A. Yes. Q. Who was he, do you recall? A. He•was a researcher at the National Institutes of Health, and he also was an associate scientist at the Jackson Lab with Dr. Little. He was a mostly on mice at the Council of Research, and a very nice guy. Q. What was his reputation in the scientific community? A. Outstanding. Q. Did you know a Richard M. Bing, B-i-n-g? A. It sounds familiar, but I don't recall that I knew this man very well. Q. He was at Wayne State University College of Medicine? A. I don't think I knew him. Q. Did you know a McKeen Cattell, C-a-t-t-e-l-l, who was Professor of Pharmacology at Cornell University Medical College in New York? A. Cattell? DORIS 0. WONG ASSOCIATES E~.~ TR I-IN 0 ~-~ 1 9E S1'.~
Page 25: mmt30a00 Log in for more options!
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 24 Q. A. Yes. Yes, I knew him, but only slightly. Q. A Do you N know a Julius Comroe -- . Q. o. --C-o-m-r-o-e? He was a professor at Pennsylvania School of Medicine. A. Q. No. Did you know William Gardner? A. Oh, yes. Bill Gardner was the Prof essor of Anatomy at Yale. He examined me when I took the Board of Nati onal Medical Examiners. He was very brillian t and very informed and very respected anatomis t. But I must say he was on the Council later, a nd he didn't know anything about respiratory physiolo gy or experimentation, toxicology. But his reputati on as an anatomist was first class. Q. And you respected him in this field? A Oh e . , y s. Q. What about Robert Huebner, did you know him? A. For Robert Huebner I have nothing but contempt . We had a program with his outfit at the National Institutes of Health which involved to send him mice with certain tumors without telling them DORIS O. WONG ASSOCIATES CT R- ~ IN ~~4' 1 1 3 -9 1
Page 26: mmt30a00 Log in for more options!
25 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 which were the treated ones and which were the untreated ones. We got a telephone call from a senior technician that she couldn't do these experiments without knowing what was what. And we called Dr. Huebner and told him that this was not what we had agreed on. And he was not upset at all and said, "Well, if we can't do it, we can't do it." And that put an end to my respect for Huebner. Q. And that was your only dealing with Dr. Huebner? A. My only dealing. Q. Did you know Leon Jacobson? A. Yes, Leon was at Chicago, and he was a clinician and researcher, Council researcher of high reputation. And I didn't know him very well, but I respected his reputation. Q. And he had a good reputation in the scientific community? A. Yes, yes. Q. Did you know Paul Kotin? A. Oh, yes. Paul Kotin was one of the leading Council researchers of his day, and I respected him very highly, and he had a very good reputation. DORIS 0. WONG ASSOCIATES Ew.. "r iz N N 0 4 1 S51 9 2-
Page 27: mmt30a00 Log in for more options!
26 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 What happened to him is not quite clear, but he got involved in a marginal way with the whole problem of asbestosis-induced problems. And I don't know whether he lost some of his good reputation or not -- I didn't follow this -- and I don't know what he's up to now, if he's still alive. Q. But as far as your opinion of him, always very high when you worked with him? A. Very high at the time. Q. What about Clayton Loosli? A. Loosli? it was Q. L-o-o-s-1-i. I may be saying that wrong. He was a professor of medicine at the University of Southern California. A. I don't think I knew him. Q. What about Kenneth Lynch? A. Well, Ken Lynch was a pathologist, I think, in North Carolina, and I knew him only through his publications. And he was one of the very early pathologists who put together the idea that smoking might have something to do with cancer of the lung. I respected his reputation, and I worked in the same field while I was at Yale, but I never met him. Q. What about Stanley Reimann from DORIS 0. WONG ASSOCIATES C T R 11 N 0 4 1 SIS) ~"~
Page 28: mmt30a00 Log in for more options!
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 27 Pennsylvania? A. Stanley -- Q. A. Reimann. Reimann, oh , yes. He was mostly -- he was a Council researcher and mostly an administrator. He founded the Institute in Philadelphia. I met him a few times. He had a good reputation, not so much as an inspiring scientist, but as an organizer of new approaches, and I respected him. Q. What about William Rienhoff from Maryland, a profess or of surgery at Johns Hopkins? A I don't know . . Q. What about Sheldon Sommers? A. Sheldon Sommers, he's a pathologist who was at Boston University and then became a pathologist of the Council for Tobacco Research. Sheldon I respected w hen he was at B.U., and I knew him as a teacher a nd a researcher in some ways; bu t when he began wor ki ng wi th the Council , he became totally subjectiv e, an d it wa s he who wanted us t o change the terminology of the lesions we found i n hamsters and I had very littl e respect for him. Q. What about Edwin Wilson from Harvard? A. Oh, he was an old statistician, and he was DORIS 0. WONG ASSOCIATES ~ "('R 11N 041 SISK

Text Control

Highlight Text:

OCR Text Alignment:

Image Control

Image Rotation:

Image Size: