William Anthony Farone

William Anthony Farone, Ph.D. is a former Philip Morris Director of Applied Research, and is considered in lawsuits to be an anti-tobacco expert. Dr. Farone was hired at Philip morris to make safer products and to find business alternatives outside the tobacco industry for Philip Morris.

Background
Dr. Farone has a Ph.D. in Physical Chemistry (1965), an M.S. in Chemistry (1962) and was awarded his B.S. in Chemistry with honors in 1961. All of his degrees are from Clarkson University in Potsdam, New York. All seven years of his education were obtained with fully paid fellowships. Dr. Farone carried double majors during his undergraduate years and also has a strong background in business, mathematics, organic chemistry and engineering.

Dr. Farone spent eight years as a top scientist at Philip Morris, and was charged with creating a safer cigarette that would provide smokers with the desired pharmaceutical effects of nicotine but with less risk to health. Farone was fired from the company. Farone has given government officials and trial lawyers valuable information on industry practices from the upper reaches of Philip Morris' internal company research.

Testimony
Dr. Farone claimed in his testimony in the Donald A. LaBelle case in July, 2000 that it is possible to make safer cigarettes, and that the means for doing so was known to the industry. He indicated that the only way to really know if you've made a safer cigarette is to test it for biological toxicity, and failure to do that means that you haven't shown that it's safer. He contended that as early as 1936 it was possible to make cigarettes safer than those that were being marketed to the public at that time. He maintained that the industry deliberately manipulated the levels of nicotine by changing the ratios of nicotine and tar in their products. The witness noted that Philip Morris continually denied causation and addiction of nicotine, but that both of those concepts were accepted when he was working as a Philip Morris scientist. He argued that some of Philip Morris' statements about the relationship between smoking and disease were unethical. He suggested that Philip Morris purposefully kept the smoking/health controversy alive.