Biography: Dr. Jeffrey Wigand and his contribution

Biography of Jeffrey Wigand
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Jeffrey Wigand was born in the city of New York, and he was the eldest of his five siblings. His family was catholic. They later moved to live near Poughkeepsie, where he went to college but left school in 1961, in order to join the Air Force that sent him to an air base in Misawa, Japan. While in Japan he was able to work in a hospital, learn the Japanese language and military arts. After going to Vietnam for a short while in 1963, he went back to the United States and acquired a bachelor’s degree in chemistry from the University of New York in Buffalo. In the same University he got a master’s degree and doctorate in biochemistry (Padwa & Jacob 74).
He worked in the medical department for a number of firms like Pfizer and Union Carcide. He later worked as the senior vice president of Brown & Williamson in Louisville. It was a challenging job for him because he had earlier worked in health firms, didn’t smoke, and believed cigarettes were harmful to the body. The pay check was high; he claimed by taking the job he would produce safer cigarettes thus reducing the side effects of cigarettes. He was the head of the research department at the tobacco firm, leading projects to create a safer cigarette. In his plans to produce both a low-tar cigarette and one that would ignite at a low temperature to reduce the smoking fire risk, he appointed a physicist, toxicologist, and an analytical chemist, but even before his effort was fruitful, he recognized the firm was not interested in his plans (Johnson 132).
He was fired in 1993 as a result of his verbal assertions about the bad effects of smoking, and in 1995 he turned out to be the most popular whistleblower as a result of his appearance on 60 minutes, and the statement he gave in a Mississippi case against bi...