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Kohnhorst, Earl E.

(BW President of US Business) Earl E. Kohnhorst was the Director of Research for Brown & Williamson. (PMI's Introduction to Privilege Log and Glossary of Names, Estate of Burl Butler v. PMI, et al, April 19, 1996). In 1994, Kohnhorst was Executive vice president and chief operating officer of Brown & Williamson Tobacco Corp. (LAT 8/2/94). He was also vice president for research, development and engineering, BWT in 1985. (LAT 8/2/94). In a 1/17/85 memo, BWT Corporate Counsel J. Kendrick Wells said he had advised Earl Kornhorst, BWT's VP for research, development and engineering, on the need to prune scientific reports from his files. Wells marked certain reports with an X to designate those that were Deadwood in the behavioral and biological studies area. The Janus studies, secret program of biological research on the effects of smoking which showed tumor growth in animals, should be treated as deadwood. These documents should be segregated, boxed and put in the basement for possible shipment to BAT Industries in England, but no one should make any notes, memos or lists of the documents (LAT 8/2/94). Kohnhorst wrote a 4/26/85 letter re: carbon monoxide . It mentions development of Fact cigarette prototype which was designed to deliver low carbon monoxide. It describes shredded dried stems process which results in carbon monoxide reduction (E. Kohnhorst LT 4/26/85).

Biographical Information:
Earl Eugene Kohnhorst was born in Louisville on April 15, 1947, the son of Robert L. Kohnhorst (who was born in 1911 and still alive in 2010) and the former Lali May Bratton (1922-1991). After earning a B.S. and an M.S. in chemical engineering at the University of Louisville, he began his career at Brown & Williamson Tobacco Corporation in 1971 as a process engineer.


The ensuing years saw Kohnhorst make his way up the company ladder on the operations side, becoming intimately involved in the processes used in engineering, research and development, leaf operations, and procurement of tobacco leaves. In 1974 he was named a supervisor and three years later he became the manager of Brown & Williamson's development center. He earned promotion to division head in 1978 and then to director of manufacturing, planning and engineering in 1980. Finally in 1983 he became a vice president, with responsibility for research and development and engineering.
In 1987 Kohnhorst was seconded into BATUS, the holding company that owned Brown & Williamson, where he worked as vice president of planning. After two years at BATUS he returned to Brown & Williamson as Executive Vice President of Research and Development, Engineering and Manufacturing. He was given the additional title of chief operating officer in 1993, effectively making him the number two person at Brown & Williamson. In 1997 he became operations director for British-American Tobacco (Holdings) Inc. He returned to Brown & Williamson in 1999 as president of U. S. operations and retired at the end of 2000.


Kohnhorst's years as a Brown & Williamson executive have been controversial as the result of claims made by whistle-blower Jeffrey Wigand, a company scientist. Wigand has maintained that he agreed to work for Brown & Williamson after being "told by Earl Kohnhorst and Alan Heard that I would be spending substantial energies on issues of new, safer products." But according to Wigand, once he was hired, it "became clear to me that Brown & Williamson had no desire to pursue a safer cigarette and, in fact, feared that such an effort would suggest that its current products were not safe."


There was more controversy after the release of a January 17, 1985, memo in which Brown & Williamson corporate counsel J. Kendrick Wells described a conversation in which he urged Kohnhorst to eliminate certain scientific reports from his files. Wells described the files as "deadwood in the behavioral and biological studies area" and suggested that Kohnhorst consider shipping them overseas. Whether Kohnhorst followed the advice is not known, but as reporter Myron Levin put it, "It was an interesting time to be cleaning house."


After retiring, Earl Kohnhorst and his wife, the former Mary Lou Pierce, moved to California. The couple have been generous benefactors to his alma mater and in recognition a laboratory in the engineering school was renamed "The Earl and Mary Lou Kohnhorst BioMEMS and Cardiovascular Mechanics Laboratory" in 2007.


Sources:
Allan M. Brandt, The Cigarette Century: The Rise, Fall and Deadly Persistence of the Product that Defined America (New York: Basic Books, 2007).
"Earl Eugene Kohnhorst," Marquis Who's Who (Farmington Hills, Mich.: Gale, 2009).
Richard Kluger, Ashes to Ashes: America's Hundred-Year Cigarette War and the Unabashed Triumph of Philip Morris (New York: Vintage Books, 1996).
Myron Levin, "Tobacco Firm Sought to Cull Studies as 'Deadwood,'" Los Angeles Times, August 2, 1994, 1.
J. Kendrick Wells, "Document Retention," Internal Brown & Williamson Memo,
http://legacy.library.ucsf.edu/tid/ydr36b00.


Synonyms

   @kohnhorst_e_e
   Kohnhorst, E.
   Kohnhorst, E.E.
   Kohnhorst, Earl E.
   Kohnhorst, Mr.
   *Kornhorst, Earl E.