Wakeham, Helmut R. R., Ph.D.
(PM R&D VP) Vice President and Director of Research & Development, Philip MorrisBiographical Information:
Helmut Richard Rea Wakeham was born in Hamburg, Germany, on April 15, 1916. His father, Rea Glenwood Wakeham (1886-1969), was the son of William Henry Wakeham (1858-1946), a Seventh Day Adventist pastor. Rea was born in Nebraska but his stay there was very brief as his father changed congregations frequently. Shortly after the turn of the century, William Wakeham settled permanently in Berrien Springs, Michigan, and became an Instructor in Religion at the Seventh Day Adventist-affiliated Emmanuel Missionary College (now Andrews University). But Rea Wakeham did not remain long in Michigan, leaving for Europe around 1903 to do missionary work for the Seventh Day Adventist-affiliated International Tract and Missionary Society. He spent nearly two decades in Europe and in 1912 he married Auguste Dorothea Beiss (1891-1976), a twenty-year-old native of Munich, Germany, in Watford, Hertfordshire, England, where the Seventh Day Adventist-affiliated Stanborough Missionary College was located.
The family's whereabouts during World War I are difficult to determine but there are a few clues. They were living in Hamburg when Helmut was born in 1916, and were still there in January of 1917 when Auguste Wakeham applied for a passport to travel to Austria-Hungary. By the war's end they appear to have been living in Denmark, and on February 15, 1921, Helmut Wakeham sailed for the United States with his parents and younger sister Olivia on the S. S. Stockholm. The family initially settled in Missouri, but soon relocated to Lincoln, Nebraska. Helmut Wakeham stayed close to home while receiving a Bachelor of Arts and Master of Arts degrees in chemistry from the University of Nebraska. He then earned a doctorate in physical chemistry from the University of California Berkeley, writing a thesis entitled, "The Effect of Temperature on the Structure of Mercury."
His first professional position was with Standard Oil Company of California, where he was involved in developing a practical synthetic rubber during World War II. He subsequently held research positions with the U.S. Department of Agriculture in New Orleans, the Institute of Textile Technology in Charlottesville, and the Textile Research Institute in Princeton, New Jersey. During these years he published some fifty articles in scientific journals. The majority of these related to textiles in some way ("Cotton Quality and Fiber Properties," "Thermodynamics of Stretching Cellulosic Fibers," "Determination of the pH of Textile Materials") but his published research also included more research on mercury and on such diverse topics as "Viscosities and Densities of Hydrogenated Cottonseed Oils" and "Isolation of Carotene from Sweet Potatoes." He also became involved in tobacco research in 1953 when Benson & Hedges hired him to do part-time consulting research on the cotton fibers in Parliament cigarettes.
In 1956 he accepted the position of Director of the Ahmedabad Industry Textile Research Association and spent the next two years in India. Wakeham returned to the United States in 1958 to become a technical assistant to the Executive Vice President for Operations and Subsidiaries at the Philip Morris Research Center in Richmond, where he remained for the rest of his career. His published writings slowed dramatically after joining Philip Morris, but he was involved in much of the company's research, earning promotions to Director of Research and Development in 1959 and to Vice President of Science and Technology in 1962. His precise title changed a few times in the ensuing years, but he remained a vice president with broad responsibilities for scientific research.
Helmut Wakeham's prominent position at Philip Morris was an intriguing one since the Seventh Day Adventist Church has always taken a strong anti-smoking position. Wakeham's practices do not appear to have been anywhere near as strict as those of his father and grandfather, but he was still a lifelong nonsmoker when he went to work for Philip Morris. That was so unusual in the corporate climate, indeed for any American male of his generation, that company president Joseph F. Cullman soon stopped by Wakeham's desk and noted the lack of an ashtray, before adding, "maybe you can be more objective that way."Such seeming contradictions continued to define Wakeham's career. In a notorious 1976 interview for the movie Death in the West: The Marlboro Story, Wakeham described himself as still being "essentially a non-smoker" and explained that he only smoked cigarettes for research purposes. Yet in that same interview, he used a very telling phrase to describe members of the anti-smoking movement. After maintaining that "there's a great deal of doubt as to whether or not cigarettes are harmful," Wakeham then contrasted "people who are trying to be objective with respect to this question" with a group he referred to as having a "missionary zeal to make the world stop smoking."
Similar contradictions characterized Helmut Wakeham's tenure at Philip Morris, as described at considerable lengths by Richard Kluger in his monumental Ashes to Ashes. Wakeham told Kluger that he rarely went a day without hearing from Philip Morris general counsel Paul Smith and that the two had "our share of confrontations." According to Kluger, "within Philip Morris's walls [Wakeham] had spoken out with candor that at times bordered on the courageous." Even so, Wakeham maintained that his budget continued to grow and he was given both the funds and the latitude to conduct wide-ranging research. The result was that Wakeham's internal memos contain revelations that have figured prominently in many tobacco cases. From the Cipollone case to the Department of Justice trial, lawyers have cited his comments about the potential health hazards of cigarettes and approaches to reducing and eliminating them as evidence of a contradiction between Philip Morris's public statements and the reports of its own scientists. Perhaps the best known are a February 18, 1964, memo in which Dr. Wakeham wrote that he had found "little basis for disputing the findings" of the recently released 1964 Surgeon General's Report and a 1968 memo in which he alluded to a "gentlemans [sic] agreement" between the major tobacco companies against doing biological research.
Even those oft-quoted statements were not Helmut Wakeham's best-known. Interviewed for the 1976 documentary Death in the West: The Marlboro Story, Wakeham tried in vain to stick to the company line about smoking without compromising his own scientific integrity. But this proved too difficult and finally he uttered the words that have gone down in the annals of tobacco industry history: "Apple sauce is harmful if you get too much of it." Video of Wakeham's extraordinary inappropriate analogy can now be found on You Tube.
After retiring in 1982, Wakeham continued to do consulting work for Philip Morris and also served as chairman of Megg Associates, Inc., in Richmond. Most of his time and energy, however, was devoted to a variety of non-profit initiatives, including the Boy Scouts of America and the Richmond Symphony Orchestra. Dr. Wakeham died on October 18, 2001, at his home in Cedarfield, Richmond, Virginia. Predeceased by his wife, he was survived by a son, two daughters, and three grandchildren.
Sources:
Allan M. Brandt, The Cigarette Century: The Rise, Fall and Deadly Persistence of the Product that Defined America (New York: Basic Books, 2007).
Richard Kluger, Ashes to Ashes: America's Hundred-Year Cigarette War and the Unabashed Triumph of Philip Morris (New York: Vintage Books, 1996).
"List of Technical Publications by Helmut Wakeham." No date. Bates: 1000244608-1000244613. http://tobaccodocuments.org/pm/1000244608-4613.html.
"Trial testimony of HELMUT R. R. WAKEHAM, Ph.D., July 9, 2003, RELLER v. PHILIP MORRIS INC.". 09 Jul 2003. http://tobaccodocuments.org/datta/WAKEHAMH070903.html.Helmut R. R. Wakeham, Ph.D.
"Draft Memo, 'Need for Biological Research by Philip Morris Research and Development' HELMUT R.R. WAKEHAM, PHILIP MORRIS INC.". No date. Bates: 1001607055-1001607061http://tobaccodocuments.org/mn_ex/EXHIB_bn1001607055-7061TE.html.