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EXCERPTS FROM:Why did a Philip Morris scientist kill herself by drinking nicotine?

By Dan Zegart, Salon.com

                    June 6, 2000 | It had snowed, an event rare enough in
                    Richmond that it seemed to put a strain on everybody and
                    everything. Diana Dollinger had been holed up in her apartment
                    virtually all weekend, scribbling notes, worried she was getting
                    fat. These were neurotic obsessions. She was in fact an
                    attractive, svelte twenty-eight-year-old, an entry-level
                    researcher well thought of by other chemists at Philip Morris.

                    She left behind a few relatives in the Richmond area when she
                    died very early one Monday in January 1982, but no one
                    claimed to know why she had drunk liquid nicotine, 100
                    percent pure, straight out of a brown bottle she'd smuggled
                    home from the Philip Morris Research Center. She died a
                    death experienced by several rats at the research center, but
                    few people anywhere in the world. The victim loses control of
                    its limbs and collapses as the bowels and bladder discharge,
                    and the end comes in a wrenching, gasping convulsion.

                    Diana Dollinger would have had to go to
                    some trouble to get the brown bottle,
                    because nicotine wasn't used in the Physical
                    Research Division building where she was
                    part of a unit that analyzed how tobacco
                    burns, an essential but unglamorous branch
                    of the company's product research. It got
                    William Farone, then-director of applied
                    research at Philip Morris, who supervised
                    Dollinger's unit and others, wondering
                    whether there was a message in her method.

                    "If you've got a choice, why pick that
                    particular chemical?" he said to another
                    scientist. Indeed, a chemist at Philip Morris
                    would have been among a select few in the
                    country who could appreciate just how nasty
                    nicotine really is. Many at the research
                    center learned the hard way that merely
                    leaving a bottle of the clear liquid open in a
                    warm room brings on a wave of coughing
                    and gagging, followed in short order by
                    dizziness and nausea. A few drops on a
                    small cut on the skin are fatal within minutes
                    unless the victim gets a shot of mecamylamine, which blocks
                    nicotine's effect and is another thing that would be found at
                    Philip Morris and very few other places.

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