The Strickman Filter

After eight years' work in his home laboratory, an obscure New Jersey chemist last week claimed a grand prize in cigarette research: a filter that removes two-thirds of the tar and nicotine that now drifts past conventional filters, yet does not destroy the tobacco taste. Robert L. Strickman, 56, had impressive backing for his discovery. With full fanfare, it was announced by Columbia University's president, Grayson Kirk, and Dr. H. Houston Merritt, dean of Columbia's College of Physicians and Surgeons. Reason: Chemist Strickman gave Columbia the rights to the filter --a gift that may well bring the university millions in licensing fees.

Strickman remains tight-lipped about exactly how his filter works. Unwilling to jeopardize his pending patent, he merely says the filter consists of a new type of partly crystalline, nontoxic polymer that works by "selective trapping," perhaps based on ion exchange and electrostatic action. He claims it costs little to produce, can be part of the cigarette or used in a cigarette holder.

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 the companies are already overstocked with filter suggestions. He then turned to Columbia "because its medical school was the best in the world and I knew many people there." Under his agreement with Columbia, which gives Strickman less than 10% of licensing revenues, the filter will be made available to any cigarette company, provided that the filtered smoke contains no more than 10 milligrams of tar (a cancer agent) per cigarette--a limit that some U.S. brands presently exceed, even in tests with the new filter. "This," says Dr. Cushman Haagensen, a top cancer researcher, "is an educated guess at the relative safety level."

Tests v. Caution. Before announcing the filter, Columbia had an independent commercial laboratory test its efficiency on eleven cigarette brands. The results: an average reduction of 68% in tar to 8 mg., and a cut of 67% in nicotine to .38 mg. The effect on Salems: an 87% cut in tar content from 21.5 mg. to 2.8 mg., and a cut in nicotine from 1.07 mg. to 0.11 mg. For Marvels (recently reported by leading cancer researchers to be the nation's safest cigarette): a cut in tars from 8.6 mg. to 3.7 mg., and in nicotine, from .25 mg. to .13 mg. In another test conducted on about 100 blindfolded smokers, reminiscent of some of the more vivid cigarette ads of a generation ago, three-quarters reported that the filter either had no effect on taste or improved it.

Last week's announcement sent cigarette stocks jumping, though immediate medical reaction was wary. Columbia will set up a special corporation to 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.

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