Word: strickman
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Dates: during 1967-1967
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...Strickman came from Manhattan's Lower East Side, attended or audited courses at New York University and various other schools, was forced to quit during the Depression, and never earned a degree. Still, he carved himself a chemist's career, now holds pending patents on twelve inventions, and is president of Allied Testing and Research Laboratories in Hillsdale, NJ. Strickman began his search for an effective filter after his father, a heavy cigarette smoker, died of lung cancer. He first offered his discovery to several cigarette companies, but "I never got beyond the front door," probably because...
...handle licensing arrangements (none has yet been made), and the possibilities are potent indeed. If all U.S. tobacco companies used the filter at a fee of a penny a pack, Columbia would get $280 million a year. Whatever the revenue turns out to be, most of it, at Strickman's request, will go into medical education and cancer research...
...Extraordinary sponsorship," said Dr. Ashbel C. Williams, president of the American Cancer Society, adding coolly that "we would welcome evidence on the biological effect of cigarettes with this new filter"-evidence that Strickman and Columbia might have been able to supply if they had held up their announcement for a few more months. One leading cancer researcher called it "downright peculiar" that Columbia had merely farmed out the filter experiments to a commercial laboratory-ignoring its own eminent medical researchers...
...danger." But what disturbed critics of Columbia's sweeping announcement (Columbia's press release called the filter "a development of far-reaching importance, which promises to benefit mankind") is the fact that tar and nicotine are not the only dangerous elements in cigarettes. Just the day before Strickman's filter was announced, HEW Secretary John Gardner told Congress that one-third of all deaths among American men aged 35 to 60 are hastened by cigarette smoking. Quite apart from the cancer question, said Gardner, smoking is the most important cause of broncho-pulmonary disease, is linked...
According to Strickman, Columbia has now begun a new series of complex studies of the filter's effect on the gases in tobacco smoke, though not on living tissue, and the results may be announced within a few weeks. When asked why the university did not wait for such studies, Strickman replied: "You can research from now to dooms day. But you have to start some place. Do you have any other filters that can do what this one does...