The U.S. tobacco industry resisted developing safer cigarettes because doing so would have been seen as a tacit admission that smoking is dangerous, a former Philip Morris Inc. scientist testified yesterday.

William A. Farone, a chemist who directed applied research at Philip Morris from 1976 to 1984, said the absence of commercially successful, low-risk cigarettes from the market is the result of the industry's decades-long refusal to acknowledge that smoking causes disease, rather than technical limitations.

"We know enough about the toxins in cigarettes to reduce at least some of them," Farone told a federal judge. Farone appeared as an expert witness for the U.S. Justice Department in its $280 billion racketeering suit against his former company and other U.S. cigarette makers.

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