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.

Despite the bizarre choice of poison, there were no stories in the press, and no details in Dollinger's obituary. All of which led to speculation inside the research compound about a cover-up. This of course was more than a decade before nicotine became a routine subject in the media as the Food and Drug Administration tried to reclassify cigarettes as delivery devices for the drug. In 1982, although the scientific community was studying nicotine in a preliminary way, there was precious little awareness of it outside the cigarette companies. It would have looked terrible if the active ingredient in cigarettes was publicly identified as a poison so strong that a woman could kill herself with it.

However, to Farone, this line of thinking led to nothing definite. He heard from another Philip Morris chemist and boyfriend of Dollinger's that she had developed moral scruples about her employer, that she felt so-called safe cigarette work, which concentrated on removing the poisons from cigarette smoke, wasn't really taken seriously at the company. But the boyfriend later denied these statements, and said simply that Dollinger had a history of suicide attempts.

In the end it didn't really matter whether the Dollinger suicide was intended to send a message or was an act of private desperation. For the few dozen at the Philip Morris Research Center privy to the details, the circumstances of her death were profoundly distressing and ignited a debate that Farone remembers "very quickly turned into a microcosm of this broader discussion about are you being used or are you doing something good -- all of those kinds of issues that go through your mind when you're working for a cigarette company."