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Penetrating the Universities

Only a knave or a fool can support [the] tobacco industry. It is dastardly. This is the Age of the Hollow Man. Let it not be known as the age when our finest thinkers sell out.

CHARLES B. HUGGINS (NOBEL LAUREATE) TO CLARENCE COOK LITTLE (CTR SAB CHAIR), JANUARY 17, 1968

Those who can make you believe absurdities, can make you commit atrocities.

VOLTAIRE

In 1963 Senator Maurine B. Neuberger of Oregon wondered whom future historians might indict for “our failure to find even a partial solution to the problem of smoking during the first 10 years after its dangers were revealed.” There was plenty of blame to go around, and the distinguished senator pondered the options:

The tobacco industry, for its callous and myopic pursuit of its own self-interest? The government, for its timidity and inertia in failing to formulate a positive program of prevention? The medical profession, for abdicating its role of leader in this crucial area of public health? Or is the individual—smoker and non-smoker alike—incriminated by his failure to accept responsibility for his own and his society’s well-being?1

Nearly fifty years have passed since Neuberger’s queries, and our answer must be “all of the above”—and more. The senator makes no mention of those many journalists, advertisers, and PR agents who so faithfully served the industry, nor of the farmers and trade unionists who went along with the doubt campaign. She doesn’t mention the myriad providers of paper, filters, and flavorants to the industry, who must have known their ultimate fate. And there is no mention of those legions of lawyers who, like those at Shook, Hardy and Bacon or Covington & Burling, provided intimate counsel to the industry, directing research, cultivating experts, shredding or sequestering documents, and aiding and abetting in other ways the denialist conspiracy.2

Also absent from Neuberger’s list, however, is academia, which is striking given how thoroughly our colleges have been captured. Thousands of scholars have worked as consultants for Big Tobacco, and many hundreds have worked as witnesses in litigation. And not just in the United States, but all over the world. This massive—and deadly—collaboration is little known, a virtually undiagnosed black mark on modern scholarship.

OFF-TOPIC DATA CHAFF AND QUID PRO QUO

We’ve already seen how the Medical College of Virginia by the 1940s was “sold American”: especially through its Department of Pharmacology, the college supplied the industry with talent for more than seven decades, as it still does today. But the MCV was not alone in providing help. Dozens of world-class universities have serviced the industry, defending cigarette makers in court or in hearings, spewing off-topic data chaff to distract from looming harms, lending the imprimatur of intellect to the world’s deadliest business enterprise. Professors from places like Harvard, Yale, Johns Hopkins, Stanford, UCLA, and other beacons of learning have been happy to serve, and in a variety of capacities. Taking money from the industry’s distraction organs (CTR, CIAR, etc.) has been the most common, but scholars have also appeared for the industry in films or on television, along with evaluating grants, organizing symposia, publishing books and articles, and countless special arrangements. Scholars serve as expert witnesses for the industry in court or before Congress and write briefs for lawyers, advising them on everything from soft spots in statistical reasoning to tricky ways to challenge a cancer diagnosis.

Prior to the 1990s, in fact, there seems to have been little reluctance to take such funds. Harvard administrators in 1964 actually solicited money from Reynolds, offering that such donations (for medical research) would be of “incalculable value” in demonstrating the “interdependence of good health and industrial achievement.” Here is how Harvard approached the Camel coterie:

By making a major unrestricted grant for teaching and research in the medical sciences at Harvard, the R. J. Reynolds Tobacco Company would enjoy enormous public relations benefits, starting with the initial announcement of the gift and continuing, for generations to come, with the association of the R. J. Reynolds name with a steady stream of advances in medical knowledge. The Company would set an example of incalculable value in demonstrating the interdependence of good health and industrial achievement.3

Reynolds for its part agreed that academic investments would be wise “in the matter of the Company’s public ‘image’ ”—and so on October 8, 1964, gave $50,000 to the illustrious East Coast university. Harvard Medicine Program Officer Lawrence O. Pratt was gratified, assuring the company of the university’s intent “to create with your initial gift the R. J. Reynolds Teaching and Research Fund” for Harvard:

The creation of such a fund will have a number of advantages. We will be able to utilize income from the Fund to support basic research in fields that hold special interest to your company. Because the gift is unrestricted, the Dean of the Harvard Medical School will be able to utilize these new resources, like a good quarterback, in ways which promise maximum yardage in advancing knowledge.4

Reynolds later worked with other Harvard deans, including Robert H. Ebert, who succeeded George P. Berry as dean of the medical school in 1965. Dean Ebert was equally appreciative, praising the makers of Camel cigarettes (in 1970) for providing “a significant part of the unrestricted capital available to the Medical School for teaching and research purposes.” Ebert invited the cigarette maker to visit the Harvard campus: “We would welcome the opportunity to demonstrate how the Reynolds Fund is contributing to progress of medical science and education.” Reynolds was agreeable, noting that Dean Ebert had long had an interest in lung infections—and smoked a pipe.5

Gifts of this sort were often “unrestricted,” but donors clearly expected some kind of payback. Within a matter of weeks after announcing its first big grant to Harvard, for example, Reynolds had one of its attorneys ask Professor A. Clifford Barger from the medical school to testify on its behalf before a congressional committee investigating smoking. Barger soon thereafter began reviewing grant applications for the CTR and started dipping himself into this pot, receiving Special Project funds after gaining the approval of “all six General Counsel” of the industry. Barger was attractive to the companies because, as lawyers working with Shook, Hardy and Bacon explained, when it came to heart disease Barger “believes that his experimental work shows that stress and not smoking is involved.” This was music to the industry’s ears, which is why David Hardy in 1969 recommended increasing Special Project money for Harvard in the hope again that “Dr. Barger might consider giving us a statement for hearings.” The rationale was familiar: “Dr. Barger is, we believe, sympathetic to our cause insofar as heart disease is concerned, and he feels that stress and other factors are of much greater importance than the unproved case against smoking.” Barger received $30,000 that year in Special Projects money, plus another $150,000 in 1972 in regular CTR funds to determine, among other things, “whether nicotine enhances performance of the squirrel monkey.” The professor by this time had a big team of Harvard scholars working on the industry’s dime—the psychiatrist Peter B. Dews, for example, but also J. Alan Herd from physiology, Roger T. Kelleher and William H. Morse from psychobiology, and several research and technical assistants as well. Barger also had a cozy relationship with the CTR, reviewing and approving grant applications by colleagues who were also reviewing and approving his own applications. As late as 1984 Barger was still presenting lectures to RJR’s Board of Directors, reassuring them that heart disease had “unknown” causes despite “many suspects.” His colleague Peter Dews as recently as 1994 was advising Philip Morris on “scientific points regarding nicotine addiction” to address claims raised in litigation, while serving also as a member of Reynolds’s Scientific Advisory Board. Dews in at least one instance traveled to Philip Morris headquarters in New York to deliver a lecture (to the Board of Directors) on legal matters so sensitive that even today the speech remains “privileged content” and barred from public inspection.6

It would take many thousands of pages to chronicle the full extent of Big Tobacco’s penetration of academia; the scale of such collaborations is simply too vast. From 1995 to 2007 alone, University of California researchers received at least 108 awards totaling $37 million from tobacco manufacturers for training, service, and research. From a global point of view most such collaborations have been in the realm of agriculture: tobacco companies rely on experts to improve tobacco yields, and thousands if not tens of thousands of scholars have been harnessed for this purpose. Here I shall restrict my focus to health-related collaborations, which present us with the most disturbing breach of academic integrity. Given limitations of space I shall highlight only a few examples from some of our more prestigious universities, organized more or less chronologically.

A FEELING OF GOODWILL

The 1930s was a turning point in tobacco-academic collaborations. Outside expertise was needed to solve certain technical problems, but the companies were also beginning to realize that university ties could burnish the industry’s prestige and credibility, both of which had suffered from the first great wave of “health scares” centering around publicity of poisons in tobacco—notably lead, arsenic, and carbon monoxide but also poisons produced by the use of humectants (including acrolein) and nascent cancer grumblings. A. L. Chesley, American Tobacco’s top scientist in the pre-Hanmer era, as early as 1931 had pushed the company to use its talents to help “withstand the assault” of competitors and anti-tobacco propagandists; the goal was to make the company’s research department “the leader in this field” so that anyone wanting to know about tobacco “will think first of asking us for such information.” AT&T’s Bell Laboratories was to be a model, but external research contacts were also to be cultivated. Chesley’s recommendation: “We should establish a feeling of good will, probably by research work, with several of the leading colleges, such as Columbia, Johns Hopkins, the University of Iowa, and some University on the Coast. . . .”7

American led with its MCV collaboration, but by the 1940s most of the companies had joined in the action. Lorillard funded a graduate fellowship (in tobacco chemistry) at Ohio State in 1946, by which time the company was also paying JAMA editor Morris Fishbein large sums to promote its cigarettes. C. L. Albright from the physics department of the University of Richmond studied the extent to which Pall Mall stained the fingers (in 1940), while Philip Morris funded the Mellon Institute of Industrial Research to improve methods for measuring acrolein in cigarette smoke. Brown & Williamson in 1947 established a fellowship at the University of Louisville to research the chemical constituents of tobacco leaf, and Lorillard in 1946 funded yet another postdoctoral fellowship, this time in physiology, “to study cigarette smoke from the standpoint of throat irritation.” This last-named initiative was made urgent by the publicity given to Angel H. Roffo’s demonstration of a cigarette–cancer link in the 1946 issue of Reader’s Scope.8

Universities were not always proud of such arrangements. Ohio State’s contract with Lorillard barred the tobacco giant from using its name in advertising, for example, and Yale was not entirely pleased with its appearance in a series of Reynolds ads extolling nicotine’s wondrous power to raise one’s blood sugar. Professor Howard W. Haggard’s work had been cited in a series of ads that ran in 1,100 newspapers in the spring of 1934; neither Haggard nor Yale had approved the use of their names, however, and there was the added complication that the professor was already under contract with several other tobacco firms, endorsing other tobacco products. Haggard and his colleague Yandell Henderson, from Yale’s Applied Physiology Laboratory, were on the payroll of at least three different cigarette companies by this time. For Brown & Williamson, for example, they had been investigating the toxicity of the menthol added to Kool cigarettes, concluding in a letter to the company’s law department that the compound was “entirely without any harmful effect whatever, either general or local, upon those who consume these cigarettes.” Haggard and Henderson also suggested mentholating the paper in the packaging just prior to transport (to avoid evaporation), an idea later taken up by a number of cigarette makers. Haggard had also helped certify the cleanliness of American Tobacco’s facilities, but it was not always easy to entice such collaborations. William Esty, head of Reynolds’s chief advertising agency, in 1934 reflected candidly on tobacco’s difficult relations with academia:

Nearly all scientists and college professors have an instinctive distrust of business men, especially advertising men. There is some justification for their feelings, since in the past their confidence has been so often betrayed by commercial interests. Professor Haggard especially has reason to distrust tobacco companies and advertising men. He was one of the party which was taken on a special train for a junket to the Lucky Strike factory. Like the others in the large party, he was promised a $1,000 tee simply to inspect the factory and report on its sanitary conditions. The party of visiting scientists was whisked through the factory in a perfunctory way, then entertained at a barbecue and mint julep spree and poured back on the special train. Professor Haggard wrote a letter to the American Tobacco Company stating that he found sanitary conditions to be very good in the factory, then the Ethiopian in the wood pile emerged. American Tobacco Company sent him a long statement to sign, in which he commended their toasting process and other features, obviously to be used in Lucky Strike advertising. Properly resentful, Professor Haggard returned the statement unsigned and said he would return their check if his first statement was not satisfactory.9

Esty realized that such men had to be approached carefully, and subsequently looked for scholars more favorably disposed to business enterprise.

The industry vastly increased funding for scholars in the 1950s and 1960s, following proof and certification of the lung cancer hazard. In 1955 alone the TIRC offered fellowships to seventy-nine medical schools, with only two refusing the money. Trolling wherever they could for support, the companies offered lucrative stipends and retainers to keep scholars in their pockets. Herbert Arkin, for example, was a City College of New York statistician hired by Philip Morris in 1950 to analyze the extent to which different brands of cigarettes irritated the throat. Philip Morris scientists had gathered the data, using “a colorimeter and photo electric cell” to gauge the reddening of tissues at the back of the throat. Crunching company-supplied numbers, Arkin found that whereas Lucky Strikes caused significant irritation, Philip Morris cigarettes produced none (big surprise). Arkin was later hired to dispute Hammond and Horn’s studies financed by the American Cancer Society and published an article in Current Medical Digest warning that the methods being used to link smoking and cancer were “fraught with dangers of misinterpretation.” Newspapers publicized his skepticism, with headlines announcing, “Prof. Questions Cigaret–Cancer Link” and “Smoking, Lung Cancer Link Questioned.” Quotes from Arkin and other industry-financed skeptics were later used by Lorillard at FTC hearings to defend its Old Gold advertising.10 Dozens of other scholars were paid for similar services, and by the end of the 1950s it was hard to find a serious scientific doubter who had not taken money from the companies.

What we really see from this point on is the emergence of two scientific communities, one independent of the industry recognizing the reality of tobacco harms and one dependent on the industry servicing its various technical, legal, and political/PR needs. The distinction is not really captured by “leaders” versus “laggards,” since many of those co-opted were bright lights in their own fields. Which is also why it’s not really right to talk about science versus pseudoscience. The science supported by the industry was typically not of a particularly low quality but rather simply irrelevant to the question of whether tobacco caused harms. The genius of the industry was to create a new kind of science in its macro-sociologic aspect, which I like to call distraction science or red herring research. Science of this sort could be advertised as “related” somehow to smoking and health while never running the danger of implicating smoking in any kind of harm. Decoy research could be used to distract attention from the “main issue”—the deadly harms of smoking. Much of this was basic research in molecular or cell biology and the like, one purpose of which was to allow the industry to say, “Look how much research we are funding!”

“Alternative causation” was a focus of much of this research, and scholars were employed both to conduct such research and to summarize its value for litigation. Richard E. Shope, a distinguished virologist at the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research, worked for Philip Morris attorneys in the late 1950s, for example, preparing an analysis of “The Possible Role of Viruses in Cancer” for use in litigation.11 Work of this sort was needed to buttress the claim that tobacco was only one of many possible causes of cancer and that we might as well blame a virus of some sort, or stress on the job or air pollution, or even baldness or bird mites (birds fluff their feathers, releasing lung-infesting mites). The utility of such arguments was typically higher if the industry’s hand in generating them could remain hidden, which maybe why Shope failed to disclose his industry connection when he wrote a guest editorial titled “Koch’s Postulates and a Viral Cause of Human Cancer” for Cancer Research. Robert Koch had developed criteria for disease causation in Germany in the 1880S, as part of an effort to formalize how to identify infectious disease agents. The idea was that if a germ of a particular sort really does cause a particular disease, then one should be able to find that microbe in the body of the afflicted patient. For complex diseases such as cancer, however, Koch’s postulates were not terribly useful. Cancers are most often not caused by germs, and the same effect might have many different causes. As summarized by Shope, however, the first of Koch’s postulates required that “the investigator should find the agent in every case of the disease.”12 The Rockefeller virologist seems not to have realized that cancer was different: tobacco could be causing a disease even if it could also arise by other means. Lung cancer could derive from exposure to radioactivity or coal tar or metals or a number of other bodily insults, including smoking. The disease is basically a train wreck in the DNA of your lungs, without one single type of exposure being the cause-all in every instance. Shope was myopic on this point, and seems not to have realized that causal models developed for microbial disease were inadequate for understanding chronic, slow-acting, DNA-scrambling diseases caused by toxic pollutants.

Shope was a relatively benign collaborator, but Harry S. N. Greene, chairman of Yale University’s Department of Pathology, was closer to what we could call a tobacco hack—a hired gun paid to appear as a witness in regulatory hearings. In 1965 testimony before the U.S. Congress Greene dismissed Wynder et al.’s celebrated mouse-painting studies, claiming that cancer had also been produced in mice “by a variety of common innocuous substances such as salt, sugar, egg white, and cellophane.” Epidemiology was also not to be trusted—because it was based on “statistical judgment.” Greene had earlier reassured lawmakers at the Blatnik hearings, “If I have a bad cold coming on I smoke a lot of cigarettes and usually wake up in the morning without a cold.” The man may have felt a certain bitterness from having failed to produce tumors by means of tobacco extracts placed under the armpits of mice, and we should probably not overlook the fact that by the time he was testifying for Blatnik he had already been smoking for some forty-odd years. British tobacco manufacturers in 1958 recognized Greene as quite out of step in refusing to admit health harms, listing him as one of only a handful of serious scholars still willing to deny any causal link.13 Industry headhunters scoffed when his name was put forward as a candidate for the job of scientific director at the CTR—the job C. C. Little eventually took—calling him “crazy.”

MORE ON HARVARD’S ENGAGEMENTS

Whereas some kinds of co-opting were planned to be invisible, others were supposed to be quite up front, allowing the industry to brag about the collaboration. Sponsored research channeled through the TIRC/CTR was displayed in artfully prepared “annual reports,” for example, and the industry’s many other high-price gifts and grants were always widely publicized. But some collaborations were supposed to be more circumspect.

The University of Kentucky in the 1960s, for example, established a Tobacco and Health Research Program in Lexington headed by Gus W. Stokes, associate dean of the school’s College of Agriculture. The program was supposed to assess “the nature and magnitude of the relation of smoking to health,” but even Philip Morris recognized this as a stretch, given the absence of any kind of “epidemiological unit which might approach the statistics.” Stokes directed the program into the 1970s, when it was renamed the Tobacco and Health Research Institute with new financing from a half-cent per-pack tax on all cigarettes sold in the state. Industry-friendly research was organized with support from Brown & Williamson, which both bankrolled the institute and helped vet grant applications. In this instance, however, the tobacco maker asked not to be identified as a sponsor; the university was also not to identify “any information supplied by Brown & Williamson” as coming from the company.14 Publicity of industry-sponsored research has always been carefully stage-managed, given the dangers of exposing inconvenient truths.

Lawyerly influence was also felt at Harvard’s Tobacco and Health Research Program, established via hefty grants from the companies in 1972. The program was actually the brainchild of the Tobacco Institute, which approached Gary L. Huber, chief of respiratory diseases at Boston City Hospital’s Harvard Medical Unit. Huber had always been willing to play ball with the companies, pleasing them with his willingness to defend the “constitutional hypothesis” and the possibility of a “safe” cigarette. Huber thought it significant that some people must be more vulnerable to harms than others and at one point confessed to his Reynolds handlers, “As a chest physician, I would like to know which of my patients I should ask to stop smoking.” The Harvard project made the industry look good and so was handsomely endowed, absorbing $7 million over an eight-year period. Research topics ranged from animal models for emphysema to smoke chemistry, experimental filters, and human smoking behavior, but the industry seems to have been caught off guard in 1978 when Huber announced, on the basis of human experiments, that low-tar cig arettes probably were no safer and might even be extra dangerous insofar as smokers “consistently held the smoke from the low tar cigarettes in their lungs a longer time in an apparent effort to extract more satisfaction from them.” This was clear evidence that “low tar” didn’t necessarily mean “safer”—and a deep challenge to the industry’s principal business strategy of health reassurance. Charles Waite, medical director at the Tobacco Institute, when confronted with these findings conceded that people smoke “for nicotine” and “self-regulate their own dose levels” but derided Huber’s experiment as “artificial” and flawed by virtue of using too small a sample size. Waite also claimed that the companies had never implied that low tars were any safer—which was also not entirely accurate.15

Huber’s Harvard program fell on hard times after this point. Tobacco industry lawyers had always supervised his work, but attorneys from Lorillard, Shook, Hardy, and Brown & Williamson now started cautioning that he was “getting too close to some things.” As Huber’s relationship with the industry soured, his money faucet was turned off. By 1980 the industry had decided his work was not worth the embarrassment; his Harvard grant was axed, the program closed. Huber many years later learned (or so he claimed) that he had been used as a pawn in the industry’s doubt-mongering campaign, wasting fifteen years of his career to discover what the companies already knew from work in their own laboratories. Attorneys suing the industry showed him documents demonstrating his role in this scheme, and he agreed to testify against his former benefactors in court, exposing their duplicitous manipulation of science.16

Harvard has had many other engagements with the industry. The physical anthropologist Carl Seltzer in the 1950s tried to correlate propensity to smoke with body type, and the 1964 Surgeon General’s report has an entire chapter on “The Morphological Constitution of Smokers” featuring Seltzer as an authority. (Nonsmoking Harvard sophomores supposedly had anatomic traits tending toward “the extreme masculine form.”) Seltzer liked to play up his Harvard connection even though he never held a permanent position, living mainly off tobacco industry contracts run through either the Peabody Museum or the School of Public Health. Seltzer testified for cigarette makers in numerous public hearings and in 1972 appeared as a nerdy white-coat in the Tobacco Institute’s denialist film, Smoking and Health: The Need to Know. Seltzer here characterized smokers as “more aggressive, outgoing, extroverted people—hard driving, full of tension,” implying that personality traits such as these might well be causing them both to smoke and to succumb to heart disease. His bottom line: “We do not know whether or not there is a causal relationship between smoking and heart disease.”

Harvard atoned for some of this in 2002, when its School of Public Health decided henceforth to refuse all sponsored research from the industry. Right-minded universities were starting to wake up to the dangers of such collaborations: more than a dozen banned tobacco-industry sponsorship in the 1990s, and in the new millennium these were joined by the Karolinska Institute (which hands out the Nobel Prize in medicine), Johns Hopkins, Emory, the University of Berlin, and several dozen others—many of which are in Australia, which has one of the world’s strongest tobacco prevention movements. Several of these schools had suffered public relations embarrassments when concerned journalists exposed their faculty as having aided and abetted the world’s largest industrial killer.17

SPONGING UP FOR BIG TOBACCO: SAFE TOPICS AT WASHINGTON UNIVERSITY

Academic collaboration takes many different forms,18 and in some instances the school owes its very existence to cigarette philanthropy. Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, fits this bill, but so does the Bowman Gray School of Medicine in Winston-Salem. Bowman Gray Sr. was R. J. Reynolds’s powerful president (from 1924 to 1931) and later chairman of the board (1931–35), steering the company through its turbulent post–trust bust years. When Gray died in 1935, a bequest of $750,000 from his estate was granted to Wake Forest School of Medicine on the condition that it relocate to Winston-Salem, a hundred miles to the west, where it joined with the local Baptist Hospital to become a four-year medical college. Bowman Gray for more than half a century was one of only two American medical schools named for a tobacco magnate (Duke was and remains the other). Bowman Gray changed its name to Wake Forest University School of Medicine in 1997, feeling perhaps that a medical school honoring a tobacco baron might not be in the best interest of public relations. No such taint seems to have attached to the Weissman School of Arts and Sciences at Baruch College, named for Philip Morris President and CEO George Weissman (and his wife), or to Wills Hall at the University of Bristol, honoring W. D. & H. O. Wills, the British tobacco magnates. One wonders whether students or even faculty know what line of work their benefactors were in.19

Bowman Gray’s scientific collaboration began in 1944, when a Tobacco Research Laboratory was established at the school with financial support from R. J. Reynolds. Nicotine metabolism was one early object of study, with the quest being to show that “even in heavy smokers” there was “no significant accumulation of nicotine in the blood.” Bowman Gray scholars later did radioisotope tracer work for cigarette manufacturers. The industry’s funding of such research was often not disclosed in publications: in 1948, when scholars from the school’s Tobacco Research Laboratory published on nicotine metabolism, the authors credited only the “Medical Relations Division of William Esty and Company, Inc.,” failing to reveal that the laboratory itself was a Reynolds creation. So, too, though, was the Medical Relations Division of Esty, Reynolds’s principal advertising agency, which had coughed up such wonders as the “More Doctors Smoke Camels” campaign.20

Washington University in St. Louis has been another big sponge for tobacco money. Chancellor Thomas H. Eliot announced an initial $2 million grant in the spring of 1971, noting that this was the largest tobacco industry grant ever awarded to a single institution. Millions more were eventually funneled into the School of Medicine, turning it into a hotbed of cigarette-friendly activism. The nominal purpose was to support basic research in tumor immunology, but the underlying goal was to generate good PR and political allies. President Nixon had declared war on cancer that year, and the Tobacco Institute wanted to be able to claim it was doing its part to help promote “early detection, treatment and possible prevention of cancer in man.” Newspapers reported glowingly on the collaboration, and Chancellor Eliot and TI President Horace Kornegay joined in praising the alliance as helping to “broaden man’s basic understanding of cancer.” The expressed goal was to better grasp the biochemistry of tumors, with the hope that cancer-specific antigens of the lung might be identified that could be used to help develop “blood tests to detect early lung cancer.”21

The irony of Big Tobacco spending millions to explore lung cancer treatment and prevention seems to have been missed by Washington University’s faculty taking the cash. The goal was clearly more than cancer cures; the industry also hoped to generate good PR and academic allies. Project director Paul E. Lacy, a distinguished pathologist and “father of islet cell transplants,” in 1978 agreed to write to Congressman John E. Moss, commending his cigarette benefactors for their “remarkable foresight and generosity” in supporting research. Lacy was equally effusive in correspondence with the Tobacco Institute, praising the “wisdom and vision of the Tobacco Companies and Tobacco Associates,” sentiments also echoed by the university’s new chancellor, William H. Danforth. Lacy outlined the kinds of questions made researchable by the industry’s “vision”:

The understanding of the basic cause of cancer in Man will be accomplished by determining the biochemical changes induced in cells by a viral agent or a chemical agent. Do the viral and chemical agents produce the same biochemical changes leading to cancer? Does a chemical agent pave the way for the action of a viral agent? Do both of these agents affect the repair mechanism for DNA in the cell?22

These were all of course “safe” topics, with tobacco conveniently overlooked in all this talk of viral and biochemical causation. Lacy’s codirector, a pathologist by the name of Lauren V. Ackerman, offered an equally friendly vision of cancer research, stressing the dangers (!) of treating man “as an experimental animal”:

The ultimate purpose of cancer research is to develop a means of eradicating cancer in Man. If cancer is to be eliminated by removal from the environment—this ever growing list of potential carcinogens—then the only practical resolution of the problem would be to treat mankind as an experimental animal, house them in a sterile environment, destroy the basis of their society and deprive them of their present human rights. Fortunately a new era is evolving in cancer research which provides some rays of hope towards achieving the ultimate objective of cancer research—the era of immunology of cancer.23

This was an oddly common worry, that nailing down cancer hazards would require the forcible isolation of smokers from non-smokers to see which developed cancer. The industry’s approach was presented as more sober, more “cautious,” more cellular.

Newspapers like the St. Louis Globe-Democrat swallowed this line, that tobacco firms were “Helping in [the] Fight against Cancer”:

For nine years, a prestigious group of researchers at Washington University has been quietly working with millions of dollars from the nation’s leading cigarette manufacturers in an effort to untangle the cellular snarl of cancer.

Through a better understanding of how cancer develops, they say, scientists may eventually be able to develop “gene therapies” through which the devastating disease could be prevented—or its victims cured.

At a time when many are groping for quick answers and magical cures, the Washington University team, led by the highly-esteemed Dr. Paul E. Lacy, is slowly and meticulously studying the behavior of genetic material and the intricacies of intracellular interactions.24

Washington University by this time was returning the favors. Professor Theodor D. Sterling from computer science was twisting biostatistics to exonerate tobacco, and Professor Joseph H. Ogura from otolaryngology was receiving $24,000 to carry out CTR Special Project 77, authorized to demonstrate “the significance of air pollution and nasal obstruction as influences on the development of lower airway disease.”25 (Not tobacco, in other words.) The historian of medicine Kenneth Ludmerer from the School of Medicine would later become one of the industry’s principal defenders in court (see chapter 24).

WYNDER’S TAINT

There is a certain irony in Washington University’s collaboration, given that this is where Wynder and Graham had conducted their pioneering lung cancer epidemiology, published in 1950. The irony loses part of its punch, however, once we realize how closely Wynder himself ended up working with Big Tobacco. We saw in chapter 13 how much of Sloan-Kettering’s research in the early 1950s—including some of Wynder’s work—was industry sponsored, through monies clandestinely channeled from the American Tobacco Company via the Damon Runyon Memorial Fund. Sloan-Kettering continued to take funds from the industry in the 1960s and 1970s thanks to its tobacco-friendly director, Frank L. Horsfall, who thought cigarettes were getting “undue blame” for cancer (and liked the man-sized taste of Marlboros). Wynder in the mid-1970s expanded the research facility he had founded—the American Health Foundation—with financial aid from Philip Morris and even allowed the tobacco-allied firm of Ruder & Finn to handle public relations. Ruder & Finn sanitized press releases issued by the foundation, allowing the firm to boast to Philip Morris, “we have handled it so there is not one single mention of the problem of smoking and health.” Wynder ended up taking around $6 million from the industry over a period of several decades, during which time he supported efforts to make a “safer” cigarette and other smoke-friendly causes, denying even the secondhand smoke-cancer link. Wynder had made it clear—from the mid-1950s—that he wanted not to eliminate but rather only to “improve” cigarettes: as Philip Morris gleefully summarized it, he was not really “anti-tobacco” but rather “pro-improved tobacco.”26

Wynder never publicly acknowledged taking money from the industry, even though in at least one instance he seems to have allowed Philip Morris to ghostwrite a paper later revised for publication under his name. (Linking dietary fat and lung cancer, the paper fit nicely with the industry’s “alternate causation” obfuscation.) The industry also recognized Wynder as an ally in the secondhand smoke arena, characterizing him as a scholar who, despite being “against us on the primary issue” (i.e., death from mainstream smoke), might nonetheless be willing to “speak up in our favor on the ETS issue,” helping thereby to marginalize “the more rabid or silly antis.” Philip Morris’s funding for Wynder started drying up in the mid-1990s, when colleagues at his facility showed that exposure to sidestream smoke resulted in measurable levels of carcinogens in the bodies of non-smokers. Nicole Fields and Simon Chapman in an important review of this history have concluded that Wynder’s collaboration threw the companies “a decades long public relations lifeline.” And that even in retrospect, toward the end of his life, Wynder “realised the insidious effect of tobacco industry research support but failed to acknowledge this may have applied to his own association with the industry.”27

TOBACCO LARGESSE AT UCLA

UCLA has been another significant recipient of tobacco largesse. The university had taken tobacco money before, but a new level of involvement began in 1974, when the School of Medicine was awarded a multimillion-dollar grant to establish a “Program on Tobacco and Health.” As with all such projects, industry lawyers (notably Shook, Hardy and Bacon) played a key role in the decision to fund—with the companies also conceding that the decision “should be based more on public relations than on purely scientific grounds.” The project involved a number of distinguished faculty in the medical school, with topics including immunotherapy, early detection, the impact of silica dust and other environmental pollutants on bronchial ciliary function, and “a possible relationship between tobacco and disease, particularly lung cancer.” The goal was to advance our understanding of “complex interlocking systems which defend our airways against foreign invaders,” but one sentence in the proposal must have caught the tobacco man’s eye: Martin J. Cline, UCLA’s Bowyer Professor of Medical Oncology and chief of hematology-oncology, in a letter outlining his planned course of study reassured the makers of Kool, Viceroy, Raleigh, and Barclay cigarettes that “we have no strong scientific evidence that tobacco is causally related to cancer.”28

Flush with tobacco money, Martin Cline et al. studied how the lung defends itself, giving little attention to the primary agent known to be attacking it. Over $2 million had been shoveled to UCLA by 1979, with another million approved for an extension beginning that year. And Cline repaid the favor by helping the industry with its legal defense. Shook, Hardy and Bacon flew him to Kansas City to lecture its lawyers on cancer causation, and in 1997 he appeared as an expert witness for the defense in Broin v. Philip Morris, a class action suit brought by flight attendants suffering from maladies caused by exposure to secondhand smoke. Cline here testified that while smoking might well be a “risk factor” for certain diseases, it could never be conclusively determined to be causal in any given individual—even those who smoked three packs a day for twenty years. Cline also denied having any knowledge of smoking being addictive.29

Tobacco collaborators at UCLA have attracted their fair share of criticism from public health advocates, and for understandable reasons. An epidemiologist by the name of James Enstrom has taken much of this heat, by virtue of having been so willing to carry water for the industry. Enstrom, with a Ph.D. in physics from Stanford, first came to the industry’s attention in 1974, following widespread media hoopla surrounding his work casting doubts on whether tobacco abstinence alone could account for the low cancer rates of Mormons. The Tobacco Institute in its Newsletter commented favorably on his work, especially his view that there must be “some other factor beyond not smoking or drinking” behind Mormon longevity. Anne Duffin, a senior executive (and Special Projects director) at the Tobacco Institute, sought him out and in the spring of 1975 invited him to apply for a CTR grant, which he did with Lester Breslow as principal investigator (Enstrom was never a tenured member of the faculty). Enstrom asked Duffin to put in a good word for him at the CTR, adding that he was “distressed” about the one-sided nature of the evidence being presented on tobacco and cancer:

It is hard for me to understand how the rising cigarette consumption during this century could, by itself, be having a serious adverse [effect] on the health of Americans, when the age-adjusted death rate from all causes has steadily declined by about 1% a year for at least the last 40 years, including declines in every age group.30

Duffin politely declined to intervene on Enstrom’s behalf, explaining that a letter from her would be inappropriate since “the Council and the Institute have always operated autonomously, each assiduously avoiding the other’s areas of responsibility within the tobacco industry.” She did express her hope he would publish his “doubts in the cigarette hypothesis.” She also blind copied her encouraging words to Robert C. Hockett, research director of the CTR, with an attached comment: “Bob—Enstrom and I have exchanged info sporadically since we met at an epidemiologic meeting last yr. Soft soap here, I’m afraid!” So much for “assiduously avoiding each other’s areas of responsibility”!31

Enstrom was attractive to the industry as a classic “we need more research” skeptic. From the 1970s into the 2000s he published a steady stream of articles challenging the significance of tobacco to health. The documents reveal a certain combative streak and sense of an uphill fight, as in 1997, when Enstrom requested $150,000 from Philip Morris’s director of scientific affairs to explore the health effects of environmental tobacco smoke (ETS), insisting that a “substantial research commitment” was required “to effectively compete against the large mountain of epidemiologic data and opinions that already exist regarding the health effects of ETS and active smoking.”32

Contrarian epidemiology of this sort has infuriated mainstream epidemiologists, but it has also raised the ire of a larger body of scholars who worry that Big Tobacco’s funding has so fundamentally compromised the scholarly enterprise that the only solution is to refuse all tobacco corporate sponsorship. Federal Judge Kessler in her 2006 ruling in USA v. Philip Morris commented on the flawed nature of Enstrom’s work, much of which was “litigation oriented”; the court also noted that the cigarette makers had gone so far as to organize a scientific collaborator for the man—Geoffrey C. Kabat, a long-standing Wynder sidekick—who went on to coauthor further denialist papers with Enstrom, including a much-criticized 2003 article in the British Medical Journal that found it “premature to conclude that environmental tobacco smoke causes deaths from coronary heart disease and lung cancer.” It may seem strange to hear a federal court weighing in on an epidemiologic dispute, but such has been the power of the industry to corrupt science that even distinguished peer-reviewed journals have not escaped the taint. Enstrom continues even today to defend his work against the medical mainstream, aided by a total of at least $1.4 million in research support from the tobacco racketeers along with an undisclosed sum from years of private consulting for their co-conspiring legal arms.33

UCLA’s dance with the devil got more press in 2007, when the university was found to have accepted a $6 million grant from Philip Morris to compare how children’s brains and monkey brains react to nicotine. Researchers defended the project as potentially of use for improving cessation methods, but the question then of course was, why would Philip Morris want to help people quit? And how could we ever be sure that research along these lines would not be used by the industry to design more addictive cigarettes? Skepticism was also directed at the fact that vervet monkeys were being used in these experiments: the monkeys were being fed liquid nicotine and later killed and dissected to understand how nicotine was affecting the primate brain. Teenage smokers were also enrolled in the study, with children as young as fourteen having their brains scanned to look for CNS effects.34 And parents were not told this was research sponsored by the cigarette industry. (The secrecy surrounding the project was such that UCLA refused even to provide a full copy of the grant to the chairman of the UC Board of Regents.) Much of the public’s attention was diverted when animal rights activists damaged the home of one of the investigators, but the more fundamental ethical issue remains: Should Big Tobacco be funding research into children’s brains? And should primates be sacrificed for this purpose?

We don’t yet have a good history of animal abuse in the cigarette industry. The topic deserves further study, as does the larger question of whether universities should be taking such money in the first place. Dozens of universities now have policies refusing tobacco industry–sponsored research, and several granting agencies now require such a policy as a condition for scholars or even institutions to apply for grants. Judge Kessler’s 2006 finding (upheld on appeal) that the industry has violated federal RICO racketeering laws may embolden such refusals: universities are not obligated to take money from everyone who offers it, and many of our finest have recognized this danger to scholarly integrity. Academic freedom is often invoked by those wanting to continue such relationships, but this is a hollow defense given the corruption involved in taking money from Big Tobacco. Universities do not have to take money from racketeers. Judge Kessler identified the industry’s sponsorship of research as central to the industry’s ongoing conspiracy to defraud the American public, and it is not such a big step from this to realize that scholars should not be in bed with such knaves.

DIE LUFT DES TABAKS WEHT

Harvard, Washington University, and UCLA have come into focus, but singling out these institutions may be a bit unfair, given that scholars throughout the world have gorged themselves on tobacco money. Indeed it may well be the rare institution that has not at one time or another dipped into this pot.

At Stanford University where I now teach, for example, at least eighteen faculty members have received monies (in the form of sponsored research) from the Council for Tobacco Research, with at least two of these—Judith Swain and Hugh McDevitt from the medical school—serving on its Scientific Advisory Board. Stanford pharmacologists were assisting the industry with its diethylene glycol studies as early as the 1930s, and by 1954 Bay Area newspapers were reassuring readers that “Stanford Tests Hint Cigaret Smoke May Prevent Some Cancer in Mice”—referring to the work of A. Clark Griffin, a Stanford biochemist who was also part of the American Tobacco-Runyon Fund-Sloan-Kettering circle.35 Stanford scholars received support from the TIRC/CTR throughout its forty-odd years of scientific misdirection, in addition to grants from the Center for Indoor Air Research and grants provided directly from the companies. The CTR and CIAR were dismantled under the terms of the 1998 Master Settlement Agreement, but Stanford professors continued to get money from Philip Morris’s External Research Program (PMERP)—which was really just the CIAR revived. And it was not until 2007 that the university’s last recipient of tobacco money, John P. Cooke, a professor of cardiovascular medicine, agreed to give up his Philip Morris grant in response to concerns that I and other professors—notably Hank Greely, Bernd Girod, and Robert Jackler—had raised about the ethics of such collaborations. Stanford’s Faculty Senate was split over whether to expressly bar its scholars from accepting such funds, but the issue was rendered moot shortly thereafter, in the fall of 2007, when Philip Morris terminated its External Research Program, realizing that the negative publicity outweighed any public relations value. (Funding in some instances was simply continued by the Philip Morris company without any links to the now-defunct PMERP.)36

Stanford researchers have also done contract work for the companies and served as expert witnesses on their behalf.37 A remarkable example of the former is a 1996–97 grant from R. J. Reynolds to the university’s Aviation Safety Laboratory, designed to test the hypothesis that “nicotine enhances performance in non-smoking pilots.” In an experiment designed by Martin S. Mumenthaler and Jerome A. Yesavage from Stanford’s School of Medicine (Department of Psychiatry), sixteen licensed aircraft pilots were given nicotine polacrilex gum or a placebo and tested for performance on a Frasca 141 flight simulator. These nicotinized pilots were measured twelve times per second for physiological variables and scored on twenty-three flight performance criteria, then compared against an unexposed group of controls. Mumenthaler’s study was part of a larger Reynolds ploy to foster research into what they called the “positive aspects” area, meaning science that would spotlight the sunny side of smoking. And Reynolds must have liked the study’s conclusion that nicotine “may improve overall flight performance in non-smoking aviators.” Reynolds sponsored research for PR or commercial purposes; the whole point was to find “positive aspects” of smoking that could be disseminated “to both scientific and lay audiences.” And the company was delighted to be able to report its Stanford collaborators as having shown that “nicotine enhances performance of airplane pilots.” These words appear on Reynolds stationery with a reminder on the bottom of every page: “We work for smokers.”38

Another Stanford project involved Paul Switzer, a professor in the Department of Statistics hired to undermine the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s classification of secondhand smoke as a “Group A carcinogen.” The EPA had come to this conclusion in the fall of 1990, following which it circulated a draft report to obtain comments from interested parties. Switzer was hired along with a string of other scholars to evaluate the report, and the industry got what it paid for. Switzer denounced the EPA’s report as highly flawed and “problematic,” peppering his critique with pejoratives like “astonishing,” “equivocal,” “deceptive and pointless,” and “serious difficulties.” The Stanford statistician accused the EPA of imprecision, inconsistency, faulty interpretations, improper extrapolations, use of “crude and disputable” estimates of exposure, bias from confounding and misclassification, improper treatment of publication bias, reliance on inconsistent or improperly recorded data, and several other flaws.39

Switzer was well paid for his services, receiving a total of $647,046 from CIAR and other grants in one two-year period. He was also paid handsomely for private consultations with cartel law firms. In one three-month period in the fall of 1991 he received $26,900 from Covington & Burling for consulting on “health effects of exposure to ETS in the workplace” and an analysis of “epidemiology of spousal smoke exposure and lung cancer.” An invoice for the second half of 1995 records his earning $39,280 for further “professional and consulting services” with the same firm, including at least one trip to Paris (Switzer was then billing $265 an hour for work in his office and $395 an hour for travel). Richard Carchman, director of scientific affairs for Philip Morris USA, was his principal contact, though Covington & Burling was usually cutting the checks. And the industry made good use of his work, principally to thwart the enactment of smoke-free indoor air laws. Switzer’s belittlement of the EPA was prominently featured in industry propaganda, including a 1991 Philip Morris brochure titled “Environmental Tobacco Smoke: Rush to Judgment,” in which the Stanford statistician was the first of several authorities cited:

“I looked at [the draft report] . . . and thought to myself, How would I have graded it? . . . With all due respect to all the work put in, I would not be able to give it a passing grade.”

Dr. Paul Switzer
PROFESSOR
DEPARTMENT OF STATISTICS
STANFORD UNIVERSITY
40

Also crucial to this story is the fact that academic collaborations of this sort, even when theoretically public, are commonly unnoticed by colleagues. Trevor Hastie, chair of Stanford’s Department of Statistics, had no idea his colleagues had been working for the tobacco industry, earning many hundreds of thousands of dollars, until I brought this to his attention in 2007. He was understandably shocked.

I myself, though, was shocked to learn that several of my closest colleagues had been ensnared. I moved to Stanford in the summer of 2004, and it was several years before I learned that Timothy Lenoir, chair of Stanford’s Program in History and Philosophy of Science, had helped Philip Morris prepare its defense for a laryngeal cancer case and that Robert McGinn, director of Stanford’s Science, Technology, and Society Program, had provided an expert report to help Brown & Williamson keep its internal documents from becoming public. Imagine the gravity of this situation: Lenoir’s testimony helped perpetuate the myth that scientists were slow to recognize tobacco’s role in causing cancer; and if McGinn had prevailed—or rather the firm that hired him—many of the archives on which this book is based would never have seen the light of day. What price to trumpet darkness?41

ENRICHING STATISTICS

Many people I suspect will be surprised to learn how close such collaborations have been—and how far reaching. Consider again the case of statistics. I’ve highlighted Paul Switzer, but the fact is that hundreds of statisticians have worked for the industry, either as experts on staff for a brand name manufacturer or as consultants to the companies or their law firms or as witnesses at hearings or in court. This includes some rather distinguished scholars. Joseph Berkson at the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota, for example, was paid handsomely for his services (in the 1950s), as was Ronald A. Fisher, the eminent biostatistician and eugenicist. Prior to the 1960s, in fact, Berkson and Fisher were two of the most ardent critics of the “cigarette hypothesis”: Sir Ronald because he was a “blame-it-all-on-the-genes” hereditarian, and Berkson because he couldn’t imagine a single factor (like tobacco) causing so many different kinds of disease. Rumors swirled after Fisher’s death in 1962 that he had either reversed himself on his deathbed or explained away his truculence as opportunism. David Daube, the Oxford biblical scholar, recalls Fisher telling him shortly before his death that his defense of tobacco was simply “for the money.”42

Statisticians have often testified for the industry at hearings. K. Alexander Brownlee, a Fellow of the Royal Statistical Society and author of two textbooks on statistics, in 1969 testified at congressional hearings that even if all smokers were to stop smoking tomorrow, “it really would not make any difference. They would still have the same death rate from lung cancer.” Leo Katz, a Michigan State statistician, at these same hearings testified there was not yet sufficient evidence to demonstrate “that smoking causes any disease”; Katz blasted the “contrived semantics” of the Surgeon General’s report and claimed to have detected an “almost unanimous criticism” by statisticians of its “extralogical argumentation.” Theodor D. Sterling, the Special Projects operative from Washington University, at this same venue characterized efforts to quantify harms caused by smoking as “meaningless” and “beset by errors”; multivariate data in his view could be “made to show almost anything” and had certainly not demonstrated any health harms from smoking. With garbage of this sort clogging public hearings, is it surprising that cigarette makers have been treated with kid gloves by lawmakers?43

Far more common, though, has been the provision of private technical expertise, kept quiet. A quick search of the archives reveals numerous academic statisticians serving as consultants to the industry: Alan S. Donnahoe from the University of Richmond, Joseph Fleiss from Columbia, Jean D. Gibbons from the University of Alabama, Richard Hickey from the Wharton School, John and Elisa Kapenga from Western Michigan State, Kenneth Mullen from the University of Guelph, J. E. R. Frijters from Wageningen University in the Netherlands, Daniel Barry from University College in Cork, Carl A. Silver from Drexel, J. B. Spalding from the University of North Texas, Edwin Wilson from Harvard, Arnold Zellner from the University of Chicago, Nathan Mantel from George Washington University, just to name a few.

Most work of this sort is technical and kept far from the prying eyes of the press, but some has been deployed to sensational effect. Darrell Huff, author of the wildly popular (and aptly named) How to Lie with Statistics, was paid to testify before Congress in the 1950s and then again in the 1960s, with the assigned task of ridiculing any notion of a cigarette-disease link. On March 22, 1965, Huff testified at hearings on cigarette labeling and advertising, accusing the recent Surgeon General’s report of myriad failures and “fallacies.” Huff peppered his attack with amusing asides and anecdotes, lampooning spurious correlations like that between the size of Dutch families and the number of storks nesting on the rooftops—which proves not that storks bring babies but rather that people with large families tend to have large houses (which therefore attract more storks). Huff also pointed to the selection bias in the high rate of breast cancer among Chinese men compared to Chinese women—explainable by the reluctance of females to report their maladies. Senator Neuberger moderated the hearings and was flabbergasted by Huff’s remarks: “Do you honestly think there is as casual a relationship between statistics linking smoking with disease as there is about storks and Chinese and so on?”44 Neuberger probably had no idea how carefully lawyered Huff’s words were, or how much he was being paid for his debunkery. That same year Huff was also paid to produce an industry-friendly bulletin outlining his views on tobacco and health, with the industry’s powerful Ad Hoc Committee reserving rights to allow or disallow publication.45 And he was later paid to expand his views into a book-length treatment of the topic. Huff in 1968 was paid $10,000 plus expenses to work on his manuscript, and a contract was secured with Macmillan, though the book seems never to have appeared. Huff was a very good catch for the industry, given that his How to Lie . . . was—and remains—the most popular book on statistics ever written.46

Law firms representing the industry have also had professional statisticians on staff—as have the Tobacco Institute and the various manufacturers. Geoffrey Todd for many years was Imperial Tobacco’s top statistician, and in 1968 the firm had “six graduate statisticians” working on mouse experiments and agricultural projects at the company’s Bristol laboratories. Philip Morris has had numerous statisticians on staff: John E. Tindall rose to the rank of senior scientist, for example, by helping the company crunch numbers on smokers’ perceptions of nicotine deliveries, advertising’s impact on sales, “mucociliary studies on cats,” and “chronic smoking in cynamolgus monkeys.” Academic statisticians are sometimes invited to the companies as visitors: Philip Morris in 1988 paid John and Elisa Kapenga to come to Richmond as “visiting scientists”; and Reynolds had earlier hired H. Alan Lasater from the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, to help with its secret Project Cal (the low-smoke Premier cigarette). Statisticians provide training for tobacco staff: in 1995, for example, Philip Morris hired Daniel Ennis of Richmond’s Institute for Perception to present a series of “Statistics Courses” (co-taught with Kenneth Mullen); Abbott Associates has also been used for this purpose. Tobacco law firms have sometimes even supported graduate students. In 1979, for example, Bernard G. Greenberg of the University of North Carolina (UNC) contacted Marvin Kastenbaum to see if the Tobacco Institute would be willing to support Joseph M. Janis, a student working on a project stemming from Greenberg’s litigation work for the industry. The project was handed over for approval to the CTR’s lawyers—which is how Janis’s Ph.D. dissertation (questioning the lung cancer-tobacco link) became a CTR Special Project. Janis by 1981 had received more than $25,000 from the industry for his dissertation, which was used in legal strategizing by the industry to combat “the primary issue” (cancer causation). As dean of UNC’s School of Public Health, Greenberg also helped secure a job for his tobacco-friendly protégé at that university.47

Organizational charts in the archives show that Reynolds in the 1980s had at least seven statisticians working in its brands R&D department, with at least five additional statisticians in its technical services department and another six or seven in marketing and marketing research. Brown & Williamson had a comparable crew, as did most European manufacturers. Reemtsma had a team of statisticians under Rolf Kröger, and Germany’s powerful Verband der Cigarettenindustrie worked with a number of statisticians, including Wolf-Dieter Heller of Karlsruhe University, who in 1984 let BAT consultants ghostwrite a paper for him attacking Trichopoulos’s work on secondhand smoke. Britain’s Tobacco Research Council had a statistical subcommittee handling such matters for British tobacco makers; and Peter N. Lee from Britain’s Tobacco Advisory Council headed a similar body: the Tobacco Statisticians’ Working Group, set up in 1982. No major tobacco manufacturer can operate without statisticians.48

Statisticians have serviced the industry in other ways. In 1981, for example, a team of statisticians led by Nathan Mantel of George Washington University was hired to criticize Takeshi Hirayama’s paper showing a lung cancer risk in Japanese women exposed to secondhand smoke. The team—which included Alvan R. Feinstein of Yale and Chris P. Tsokos from the University of South Florida—found a “mathematical error” in Hirayama’s work, which the Tobacco Institute publicized with an extraordinary media blitz. Hundreds of newspapers throughout the country carried the story, with very few recognizing that cigarette makers had paid for the poke. (The tobacco press described Mantel et al. as “three independent statisticians,” when the reality was that all three had taken money from the tobacco industry—and Feinstein was a Special Projects operative.) The Tobacco Institute managed to dominate media coverage of this story: in a six-week period in the summer of 1981 Mantel’s “error” report was covered in 469 U.S. newspapers with nearly 57 million “potential impressions.”49 During which time the industry’s own scholars—notably Fritz Adlkofer from the German Verband der Cigarettenindustrie—were admitting, albeit quietly, that Hirayama was “correct” and Mantel et al. “wrong.”50

Several other statisticians received CTR Special Projects monies; those we know about include Ingram Olkin at Stanford, Theodor Sterling from Washington University, George Saiger at Columbia, Jacob Yerushalmy from UC Berkeley, and Roberto Bacchi from Hebrew University in Jerusalem. Edwin Wilson, a Harvard statistician, was an early member of the Scientific Advisory Board of the TIRC, and many statisticians received TIRC/CTR or CIAR grants.

The Tobacco Institute itself for many years had a “Department of Statistics,” a position one might compare to the Department of Geology at the Institute for Creation Research. Professional statisticians seem not to have regarded department head Marvin A. Kastenbaum as tainted or beyond the pale; indeed in 1975 the Stanford-trained statistician was invited to deliver an after-dinner speech at the annual meeting of the American Statistical Association, the nation’s premier professional body, which Kastenbaum entertained with lawyered stories about how foolish it was to blame cigarettes for any kind of disease. He also mocked the “priesthood” of public health scientists trying to grapple with an “alleged” increase in lung cancer rates. Kastenbaum compared worrying about lung cancer to worrying about toxoplasmosis from exposure to cats and pulmonary fibrosis from exposure to parakeets. His speech is a swamp of technical trickery and nitpickery—but it was also clearly a coup for the Tobacco Institute, securing as it did the embrace of the country’s most distinguished assembly of professional statisticians.51 It is disturbing enough to have statisticians shilling for the industry but perhaps just as disturbing that he was invited to deliver such a speech in the first place. In 1955 perhaps, but in 1975?

Statisticians have also assisted the companies with their legal defense in court. Here are some of those who have taken this bait, along with some of the cases for which they have testified:

Edwin Luther Bradley Jr., University of Alabama: Broin v. Philip Morris (1997); Acton v. Reynolds (1999); Butler v. Philip Morris (1999); Seaborn v. Reynolds (2000); Anderson & Anderson v. Lorillard and Philip Morris (2000); Tompkin v. American (2001); USA v. Philip Morris (2005)

Richard C. Clelland, University of Pennsylvania: Cipollone v. Liggett (1987)

Eugene P. Ericksen, Temple University: Reed v. Philip Morris (1997); Richardson v. Philip Morris (1997); Brown v. American (2000)

Jairas D. Flora, Midwest Research Institute: Sulcer v. Reynolds (2009); Walden v. Reynolds (2009)

Bernard G. Greenberg, University of North Carolina: Green v. American (1964)

R. Garrison Harvey, Wecker Associates: West Virginia Laborers v. Philip Morris (1999); multiple Engle progeny cases

Maxwell W. Layard, University of California: AFCO v. TIA (1990)

Leo Katz, Michigan State University: Thayer v. Liggett (1969)

Lynn R. LaMotte, Louisiana State University: Texas v. American (1997); Oklahoma v. Reynolds (1998)

Paul Levy, University of Illinois at Chicago: Dunn and Wiley v. RJR Nabisco (1998)

Brian P. McCall, University of Minnesota: Minnesota v. Philip Morris (1998)

James T. McClave, Infotech: Florida v. American (1997); Washington v. American (1998); Boeken v. Philip Morris (2001); St. Louis v. American (2009); Soffer v. Reynolds (1998)

Daniel L. McGee, Florida State University: Piendle v. Reynolds (2010)

Kenneth Duncan MacRae, University of Surrey: Marsee v. U.S. Tobacco (1986); U.S. Tobacco v. Ireland (1990); Aho v. Suomen Tupakka Oy (1991, 1999)

M. Laurentius Marais, Wecker Associates: Henley v. Philip Morris (1998); Bullock v. Philip Morris (2002)

Ronald G. Marks, University of Florida: Broin v. Philip Morris (1997); Mehlman v. Philip Morris (2001)

Nancy Mathiowetz, University of Maryland: Oklahoma v. Reynolds (1998); Blue Cross of New Jersey (2001); Bullock v. Philip Morris (2002)

Irwin Miller, Wesleyan University: Thayer v. Liggett (1969); Cipollone v. Liggett (1987)

Jacqueline Oler, Drexel University: Burton v. Reynolds (1996)

Donald B. Rubin, Harvard University: Texas v. American (1997); Florida v. American (1997); Mississippi Tobacco Litigation (1997); Ironworkers v. Philip Morris (1998); Minnesota v. Philip Morris (1998); Washington v. American (1998); Northwest Laborers v. Philip Morris (1998, 1999); USA v. Philip Morris (2003, 2005)

Herbert Solomon, Stanford University: designated in Haines v. Liggett (1992); consulting for Cipollone (1987)

Brice M. Stone, Metrica: Mississippi Tobacco Litigation (1997); Florida v. American (1997)

Larry Tonn, Tonn & Associates: Texas v. American (1997); Oklahoma v. Reynolds (1998)

Richard Tweedie, Bond University: AFCO v. TIA (1990)

William E. Wecker, Wecker Associates: Broin v. Philip Morris (1997); Florida v. American (1997); Mississippi Tobacco Litigation (1997); Texas v. American (1997); Washington v. American (1998); Engle v. Reynolds (1998); Blankenship v. Philip Morris (2000); Whiteley v. Raybestos-Manhattan (1999, 2000); Blue Cross (2000); Scott v. American (2000); Minnesota v. Philip Morris (1998); Lucier v. Philip Morris (2003); Falise v. American; and USA v. Philip Morris (2005)

Finis R. Welch, Texas A&M: Texas v. American (1997)

Janet T. Wittes, Statistics Collaborative, Inc.: USA v. Philip Morris (2005)

George H. Worm, Clemson University: Texas v. American (1997)

Arnold Zellner, University of Chicago: Mississippi Tobacco Litigation (1997)

Statisticians serving in this capacity have typically been asked to challenge the methods used to estimate health harms, medical costs, or some other pillar in the injured party’s argument. William E. Wecker, for example, who runs a consulting firm in Novato, California, has testified in more than a dozen such trials, arguing in each case that something other than tobacco might be to blame for a person’s death or malady. Wecker has made a career of exculpatory testimony even outside the tobacco realm, arguing that metallic lead is less stupefying than people think and that manufacturing defects are unfairly blamed for auto accidents. Wecker has taken money from both Big Lead and Detroit (GM) via the law firm Kirkland and Ellis, which represents both industries. Plaintiffs’ attorneys in tobacco litigation have drawn attention to these parallels, with the common thread being this shifting of blame onto “other factors”—or something about the victim’s constitution or behavior.52 Wecker has been joined in this effort by at least two other statisticians from his firm: Laurentius Marais and R. Garrison Harvey have testified in more than a dozen trials for Big Tobacco. Harvey in the first decade of the new millennium pulled in more than $2,750,000 for his tobacco work, constituting about 22 percent of the Wecker firm’s entire business.53

Donald B. Rubin, the John L. Loeb Professor of Statistics at Harvard, has been one of the most successful witnesses for the cartel—and one of the most highly paid. In 1997 he was charging $1,000 per hour for consulting and $1,250 for testimony, which he later raised to $1,250 for consulting and $1,600 for testimony. Between 1997 and 2002 Rubin claims to have earned $1.5 million to $2 million working for the industry, and in USA v. Philip Morris alone he billed another “several hundred” hours. Rubin typically testifies that the models used by plaintiffs to calculate the health costs of smoking or industry misconduct are inappropriate or contain “fatal mistakes” that, once exposed, give defense attorneys some grounds for tossing the baby out with the bathwater. He has also testified that the industry’s long history of lying makes no difference in how many cigarettes are consumed. Rubin, interestingly, is one of only a handful of scholars working for the defense to have publicly defended such work, which he says is simply “defending the importance of honest and competent statistics, that is all.”54 Rubin has also testified, though, that he has only a “layman’s” understanding of causality when it comes to smoking. That is typical, this expression of expert ignorance, in effect: “I only know what I was asked to know, nothing more.”

What is remarkable about such testimony is how closely it follows the industry’s legal line. Indeed nothing makes a tobacco industry witness more uncomfortable than being asked whether smoking causes disease. There are many examples, but consider this testimony of Lynn R. LaMotte, professor of statistics at Louisiana State University, testifying under oath in 1997 for the defense in Texas v. American Tobacco:

Q: Do you have—well, first of all, do you have an opinion as to whether or not cigarettes cause disease?

A: I—I have an impression. I don’t—I wouldn’t want to call it an opinion, but I have, you know, a general uninformed impression. If I want to call it all opinion, I need some—I need some basis in fact for it, but I have a general impression that—what was the first question?

Q: Let me rephrase it. Dr. LaMotte—

A: Yes.

Q: —do cigarettes cause disease?

A: Okay. So the question is, do I have an opinion as to the truth of that statement; is that correct?

Q: However you want to answer it.

A: I have a general, casual, uninformed lay impression that I think is probably a fairly general impression, that smoking cigarettes may lead to some sort of health deficit.

Q: Well, let me ask you the question in a simple question. And you can say yes, no, or, I really don’t know. Do cigarettes cause disease?

A: I’m trying to answer that. I have the—I have an uninformed impression, not anything that I have looked into actively, that—that smoking cigarettes may lead to some kinds of diseases.

Q: Do you have any evidence to the contrary? You seem—the reason I’m asking you is you seem to be waffling—and I don’t mean to be critical, but you seem to be trying to dance around the issue of whether cigarettes cause disease. And I’m just trying to find out if that’s true or false, in your mind. That’s all I’m asking about is [what’s] in your mind.

A: Let me explain the source of my discomfort. I’m here as an expert on statistics and it appears that you’re asking my personal opinion, which I’ll be glad to give you, but—

Q: Okay. Please.

A: I want to be sure that it’s recognized that that’s not even an opinion. It’s simply a general impression, totally uninformed, without any sort of active effort by me to verify whether there’s any truth to it or not. I have a general impression that smoking in some degree is associated with certain diseases. That’s—you know, I have that general impression. It’s not informed, not expert. I haven’t actively tried to solve—to verify whether it’s true.

Q: Third time I’m going to ask you the same again. Do cigarettes cause disease?

A: It is my general uninformed impression, without any sort of active effort to determine any scientific way—I don’t have any knowledge as to any specific knowledge of what I regard as hard evidence either way, but it’s my general impression that smoking cigarettes, stated fairly loosely, may lead to some diseases.

. . . . .

Q: So if I gave you a true or false test—you’re a professor. You’ve taken lots of tests and given lots of tests, right? So if I gave you a true or false test and asked you to answer it true or false or I don’t know—I’ll give you three answers. And the question is, in your view, Dr. LaMotte, do cigarettes cause disease which results in increased health care costs to treat those diseases?

A: I would have to answer I don’t know.55

Plaintiffs’ lawyers confronted by the industry’s “common knowledge” defense should take notice of such opinions and have them read before any jury trying to figure out whether we can expect young smokers to have understood what was in store for them, forty or fifty years down the road, if they continued smoking. If the industry’s own experts don’t even know that cigarettes cause disease in 1997, why would we imagine ordinary teenagers just starting to smoke to be so much better informed? Why should we expect them to know so much more than a professor, offered by the manufacturer decades later to testify as an expert witness? Of course knowledge may not be the real issue here: Gabriel DiMarco, vice president for research at R. J. Reynolds, once grumbled to senior lawyers at his company that “our medical/scientific witnesses will say whatever we want them to say.”56

SHOWERED WITH HONORS

I don’t know which is more disturbing: the harnessing of statisticians by the industry or the willingness of so many scholars to service the industry in this manner. Are statements such as those quoted above consistent with professional ethics? Are statisticians as a group proud of such collaborations? And if not, why have we seen so few scholarly critiques or exposés of such services? Do they even know it is going on? Where is the collective conscience of the profession? Or should we rather regard such activities as private matters, nobody’s business, properly governed only by personal conscience? The American Statistical Association’s website does list “Ethical Guidelines” adopted in 1999, one article of which asks statisticians to “provide only such expert testimony as you would be willing to have peer reviewed.” But what is the force of such an admonition? Has there ever been any attempt to sanction a colleague for violating such a provision, or to subject such testimony to peer review? And what if a discipline is so thoroughly suffused with tobacco money that one cannot be sure one’s peers are not on the take? Could this mean that “peer review” becomes compromised? Something close to this, as we shall see, is the present plight of professional historians, the most benighted of all disciplines in this respect.

Of course we can and should raise such questions for every academic discipline—and not just for tobacco work. The tobacco case is particularly egregious, however, given how many different disciplines have been ensnared. A 1999 list of Philip Morris witnesses for the industry includes experts on addiction (e.g., George Seiden), advertising (Timothy P. Meyer), biomedical ethics (Kevin Wildes), cardiology (Malcolm P. Taylor), communications and polling (Dexter Neadle), computer science (Stephen Murrell), diagnostic radiology (David Rosenbach), epidemiology (Robert Verhalen), fire causation (Donald F. Pisculli), hypertension (Suzanne Oparil), insurance underwriting (Jay C. Ripps), law and legal ethics (Martin H. Redish), lobbying (Karl Rove), marketing (Richard J. Semenik), maternal smoking (Jack McCubbin), oncology (Joseph F. Laucius), otolaryngology (John S. Knight), pathology (Emanuel Rubin), pediatrics (Percy Luecke), product integrity (Richard P. Solana), pharmacology (Peter Putnam Rowell), propaganda and persuasion (Thomas M. Steinfatt), psychology (Cecil R. Reynolds), pulmonology (Stephen E. Jacobs), sociology (Rachel Volberg), and toxicology and risk analysis (Andrew Sivak). The individuals named here are sampled from one single document, but some fields have had dozens of servicing experts.57

One thing that has made such collaboration possible—and easy to conceal—is that when scholars work for the industry, either as consultants or as witnesses, this is rarely divulged to their colleagues. Services of this sort may be nominally public—recorded on some transcript stored in a courthouse—but little publicized. “Public in a copy of one” is how one might think about it. So a cardiologist may be working for the industry while colleagues know nothing about this. A historian may be president of a professional association, with few of its members aware of his or her legal work. This makes it possible for scholars to collaborate with the industry with little or no consequences for their reputations—because colleagues will rarely even be aware that activities of this sort are going on. Which is why we need to shine light on this process: scholars should be held accountable for their public and political engagements, and I would endorse a policy requiring all scholars to disclose all consulting arrangements on university-sponsored websites. And if scholars are not proud of what they are doing or worry about being “outed,” then perhaps they should not be doing it in the first place.

The reality has been that, far from being censured or shamed, scholars working for the tobacco juggernaut are very often showered with honors and awards. In an earlier chapter I reviewed the honors won by the cardiologist Suzanne Oparil, but collaborators in many other fields have been similarly fêted. Bernard G. Greenberg, the Special Projects operative and first statistician ever to testify for the industry in court,58 in 1981 won the O. Max Gardner Award, given annually by the Board of Governors of the University of North Carolina to a faculty member who has made “the greatest contribution to the welfare of the human race.” Kenneth Ludmerer was named a Master of the American College of Physicians in 2005, after testifying in more than a dozen trials for the industry. Ludmerer also won the Nicholas E. Davies Memorial Scholar Award for “outstanding contributions to humanism in medicine” and in 2001 won the first Dean Tosteson award, with the Harvard pulmonologist Stephen Weinberger as head of the prize committee. Should lung doctors be giving prizes to scholars who earn hundreds of thousands of dollars defending Big Tobacco?

Other collaborators have had prizes, professorships, or even buildings named for them. The Morris Fishbein Professorship at the University of Chicago honors a long-standing friend of tobacco, as does the Clarence Cook Little Hall at the University of Maine. The John C. Burnham Early Career Award given out by the Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences honors a former Philip Morris Project Cosmic director (see chapter 24), and Burnham himself in 2009 won the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Society for the History of Psychology—part of the American Psychological Association. The Arnold Zellner Doctoral Prize, awarded to students at the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business, honors a man who testified for the industry in court as an expert witness. Many other prizes have been awarded in the name of scholars who have worked for Big Tobacco—or sometimes even influential tobacco lawyers. The H. Thomas Austern Memorial Writing Competitions—open to students of law throughout the United States—honor a man who became wealthy helping Big Tobacco defend its legal interests. The prize committee’s website (organized by the Food and Drug Law Institute) describes Austern as having practiced “food and drug law for over fifty years at the firm of Covington and Burling” but leaves off any mention of the fact that Austern was also a major architect of tobacco’s legal strategy. Winners of such handsomely endowed prizes might be surprised to learn where the money came from.

ROCKEFELLER’S SEITZ AND LEDERBERG

When it comes to sponsored research, part of the problem has been that university administrators often don’t seem to know much about how the industry operates and what it means to collaborate with such entities. I’ve mentioned the growing number of institutions refusing such ties, but the more common pattern has been to welcome tobacco’s easy money. The archives are full of letters from administrators bowing down before these mighty dispensers of cigarette largesse. In March of 1980, for example, Rockefeller University’s executive vice president wrote to Ernest Pebbles, chief counsel of Brown & Williamson, expressing his gratitude for the company’s recent gift:

Dear Ernie:

Please forgive my delay in writing formally to thank you again for arranging with Mr. Shinn [from Shook, Hardy and Bacon] to visit the campus with Jack Roemer [Reynolds’s general counsel] on January 3, joining us for lunch and visits both to our Hospital and to Dr. [Norton D.] Zinder’s laboratory. Dr. [Joshua] Lederberg sincerely regretted that he was not able to return from the West Coast prior to your visit then, and so he was delighted that he could meet you on February 6.

I hope that during these recent meetings we have conveyed an overall perspective on the missions that the University—earlier the Rockefeller Institute—continues to fulfill in the development of biomedical research in the U.S. . . . In any case, now that B&W is a major partner in our work—and many thanks again for so quickly arranging the generous grant of $90,000—we look forward to frequent exchanges on many subjects of mutual interest. . . . We look forward to welcoming you back to the campus often.59

Rockefeller President (and Nobel laureate) Joshua Lederberg was equally thrilled to have Big Tobacco on campus, writing to Reynolds’s CEO (“Dear Paul”) to express how “tremendously grateful” he was for the company’s “extraordinary generosity.” Six years later Lederberg wrote to the top lawyer for Brown & Williamson, maker of Viceroy and Kool cigarettes: “I know you will share our pride in the caliber of scientific endeavor made possible by your partnership with us in the expansion of knowledge for human benefit. . . . Your company’s support has been a source of much encouragement to us all.” Lederberg listed some of the uses to which this money was being put, including the study of illness from parasitic infection (in global terms “the leading health problem”); purchase of a nuclear magnetic resonance spectrometer; and expansion of a dermatology center exploring “carcinogenic damage that may result from the toxic effects of atmospheric oxygen and from exposure to chemicals, drugs, and ultraviolet irradiation.” Cigarettes of course go unmentioned, and the tobacco men must have been pleased to see this friendly neglect.60

Of course one could argue that Rockefeller was just taking the industry’s money in order to advance the cause of basic science. And what harm could there be in that? (A senior Stanford medical colleague of mine likes to say that the only problem with “tainted” money is that there “ ‘taint enough of it.”) Collaborations of this sort, though, allow tobacco manufacturers to advertise themselves as responsible corporate citizens, promoters of science and the noble goals of medical research. Such was the case in 1975, when the makers of Camel cigarettes established the R. J. Reynolds Industries Postdoctoral Fellowship at Rockefeller, endowed with a gift to the university of $300,000. That same year an additional $2.5 million was promised to establish a five-year R. J. Reynolds Fund for the Biomedical Sciences and Clinical Research on campus, characterized by the company as “an effort to achieve progress in understanding the basic causes of the principal diseases afflicting mankind.” As explained in company documents, however, the goal was also “to furnish tangible evidence of the Company’s commitment to good citizenship on a major national scale in a field of great potential benefit to mankind.”61

Rockefeller’s enthusiasm for such arrangements becomes clearer, once we understand the personal devotion of Lederberg’s predecessor to the tobacco cause. Frederick Seitz, president of Rockefeller from 1968 to 1978, was a powerful figure in American science, serving as both president of the National Academy of Sciences (1962–69) and a member of President Richard Nixon’s Science Advisory Board (which must have helped him win the National Medal of Science—for his work in solid-state physics). Seitz was also, though, an enthusiastic advocate for R. J. Reynolds and its denialist cause—and later a vociferous denier of global warming.62 The man had zero medical credentials, but that didn’t prevent him from being hired (in 1979) to head Reynolds’s new Medical Research Committee (MRC), the chief conduit through which the Camel makers dispensed funds for external medical research. Seitz was joined on this committee by Alvan Feinstein, the well-heeled CTR Special Projects operative at Yale, and Leon Golberg, a corporate confederate from the Chemical Industry Institute of Toxicology in North Carolina.

Seitz’s job as head of the MRC was basically to help decide how to turn a sliver of Reynolds’s profits into “basic research in the field of degenerative diseases.” None of this work implicated tobacco in any kind of illness.63 Kenneth Moser at San Diego was exploring a causal role for fungi in lung disease; Joseph Post at NYU was studying hormone therapies for breast cancer; and Hidesaburo Hanafusa at Rockefeller was probing “certain virus-induced cancers in fowl.” Seitz knew that “only a few human cancers seem to be linked to virus infections,” but he also informed his paymaster that research along these lines had produced a “detailed working model of a cancer-causing system at the molecular level.” Seitz reviewed other work funded by Reynolds: on cellular membranes and stem cells at Colorado’s School of Medicine, on chromosomal markers for genetic diseases at Rockefeller, on viral diseases at the Wistar Institute, and similar work at Duke, the University of Utah, the Eleanor Roosevelt Institute for Cancer Research in Denver, and so forth. All perfectly respectable science, and perfectly irrelevant (or worse) to the problem of tobacco and disease. Seitz characterized Reynolds-funded work at the Southwest Research Institute (San Antonio) on pedigreed baboons as showing “high promise of adding to our store of information regarding the relative influence of diet and genetics on the development of arteriosclerosis,” deflecting attention from tobacco. Seitz sometimes recommended support for projects already funded by federal agencies: a Columbia University effort to establish blood biomarkers “to single out individuals who are at special risk for contracting emphysema,” for example, Seitz urged as exceptionally fund-worthy. Seitz himself profited handsomely in this capacity: Vanity Fair in 2006 reported his having earned about $585,000 from Reynolds for his work as a company adviser.64

Joshua Lederberg continued this friendly relationship with Tobacco in 1978, when Seitz retired as Rockefeller’s president. The archives preserve a record of President Lederberg telling Brown & Williamson about his desire to see research into “the effect of depriving people of cigarette privileges when they are under stress.” Brown & Williamson by this time was providing hundreds of thousands of dollars to Rockefeller, and Lederberg himself was quietly servicing the company as a paid consultant—while serving as Rockefeller’s president. We don’t know much about what he was doing; it apparently had something to do with the FTC’s ongoing investigation of the Barclay filter. We do know that the very existence of this consulting arrangement was to be held in “absolute confidentiality.” Rockefeller academics would continue chumming around with tobacco executives for quite some time: on April 1, 1988, for example, Reynolds flew half a dozen of its corporate higher-ups (by private jet) to Manhattan to explain to Lederberg, Seitz, and others at the university the virtues of the company’s new “smokeless” Premier cigarette.65

NAÏVETÉ AND GREED

I’ve cited ingratiating letters from Lederberg and Seitz to cigarette makers, but hundreds of such letters from university administrators are preserved in the tobacco archives. Collaborations of this sort were made possible by a confluence of political naïveté and greed. These were surely not ignorant men, but perhaps we should not overestimate their understanding of the sociology of knowledge and the potential for bias. An overly narrow conception of the nature of science could well have led some of these scholars to fail to see their role as pawns in larger schemes of knowledge management. Or maybe it’s better just to talk about naïveté and greed. University administrators may well have failed to see any harm in taking such money, imagining perhaps that in moving from cigarette profits to research funds, the lucre of the Camel men was cleansed of its questionable origins. No one was ever forced to take such money, after all, and recipients were nominally free to do with it as they wished. This is a very narrow view of how science works, however. Research relationships build up, there are incentives to please, PR comes into play, and there is a subject matter skew to what gets funded, altering the balance of research priorities on campus. Scholars taking such funds may be free to research whatever they want, but the companies make sure that money only goes to topics (and scholars) judged harmless or even helpful to the cigarette cause. And handshakes of course make good photo ops, and the industry garners laurels.

The industry sponsors academic research because it polishes its reputation, providing it with a semblance of authority and legitimacy. In a nutshell: How can we be so bad if Stanford and Harvard and UCLA are helping us? The names of such institutions are used for public relations purposes. In 1988, for example, the Tobacco Institute published a brochure titled In the Public Interest: Three Decades of Initiatives by a Responsible Cigarette Industry, citing sponsorship of University of California scholars as evidence of its corporate responsibility. In a section titled “Scientific Research” we learn that UCLA’s School of Medicine had been given a $2.75 million grant to investigate “lung defense mechanisms including early detection and treatment of cancer.” The Council for Tobacco Research issued a press release celebrating this same grant, citing it as evidence of the industry’s honest and sincere “efforts over the past two decades to resolve questions about smoking and health.” E. A. Horrigan, RJR’s chairman of the board, had made similar arguments in a 1984 publication titled An Open Debate. In a section of this glossy brochure labeled “No Scientific Proof,” Horrigan claimed that evidence of a smoking–disease link had been based only “on statistical studies, not on scientifically established proof of cause.” The brochure also claimed that the industry was trying to find answers by financing “independent research at such institutions as Harvard University, the University of California at Los Angeles, Washington University and other top centers of scientific research.”66

Of course it is not just the name of the university that is coveted; there is also the desire to win friends and stockpile useful facts and solve certain legal or PR problems or otherwise strengthen the ability to sell cigarettes. Why did Reynolds in the mid-1970s give the University of Washington in Seattle $2.8 million for a five-year project on cardiovascular disease? The industry’s archives reveal a desire to exercise “influence on the scientists and doctors there,” and specifically to use such contacts to spread the word that “tobacco people are not ogres.” Why did Philip Morris give the psychiatrist Redford Williams at Duke $4.75 million? They liked his idea of heart attacks being more common among “angry” people—because “hostiles” secrete more of certain hormones that can also cause heart attacks.67 The industry has long had this goal of funding not just skeptics or sycophants, or persons skilled in scientific sleight of hand, but also scholars who have some way of making nicotine look good.

Similar goals were in play when Philip Morris sponsored John P. Cooke’s work at Stanford. Cooke, a distinguished cardiologist, was an early recipient of money from the company’s External Research Program, an organization set up in 2000 to continue the work of the Council for Tobacco Research and Center for Indoor Air Research (in violation of the 1998 Master Settlement Agreement—so ruled the court in USA v. Philip Morris). Cooke had been doing experimental work showing that nicotine promoted angiogenesis—growth of new blood vessels—which for a time looked like it might have commercial prospects in the form of nicotine-coated stents. The theory was that nicotine would help promote the growth of new blood vessels, speeding the recovery of people who had undergone heart surgery. Philip Morris liked this idea of a therapeutic use for nicotine and authorized a multimillion-dollar grant to support Cooke’s research. The work was clearly of public relations value, which is why the Tobacco Reporter published an article extolling the Stanford professor’s work on what it called the “Healing Weed”:

The news has been conveniently ignored by tobacco’s adversaries, but recent studies indicate that, aside from its well-known risks, the golden leaf may have some health benefits. More and more research is showing that certain tobacco compounds offer protection against medical disorders, such as brain diseases like Parkinson’s disease and Tourette’s syndrome.

Much like the rainforests have been a plentiful source of compounds for developing new pharmaceuticals, tobacco fields could be the next gold mine for the pharmaceutical industry.

The article goes on to describe how Cooke et al.’s research proves that “certain tobacco compounds have therapeutic qualities,” allowing us to conclude that Nicotiana is “not merely the ‘evil weed’ that some public health activists make it out to be.”68 Cooke would later defend the right of faculty to collaborate with the industry as a basic academic freedom but only after he himself decided to turn down future funding from the tobacco maker, to avoid all appearances of impropriety.

BERGER’S ENTANGLEMENT

The TI, CTR, CIAR, and PMERP were well-oiled vehicles for the industry’s doubt-mongering in the United States, but other kinds of academic front groups have been established in other parts of the world. In 1988, for example, when nicotine addiction was coming under attack as comparable to heroin and cocaine addiction, Philip Morris responded by setting up an organization called ARISE—for Associates for Research into the Science of Enjoyment—composed principally of European scholars dedicated to defending smoking. Self-advertised as “apolitical,” the true purpose of the group was to challenge efforts to regulate tobacco use, and to do so using “third parties” to hide the industry’s involvement. ARISE began by hosting a series widely advertised workshops: on “Addiction Controversies” in Florence in 1988, on “Pleasure: The Politics and the Reality” in Venice in 1991, on “Pleasure and Quality of Life” in Brussels in 1993, and on “Living Is More than Surviving” in Amsterdam in 1995. Conferees’ papers and opinions were splashed about the press and published to further spread the message, albeit with no acknowledgment of the role played by the tobacco industry as the primary instigator and sponsor.69

The whole point of ARISE was to reclaim smoking as a vital and even healthful part of human life. David M. Warburton, a psychopharmacologist at the University of Reading and “worldwide co-ordinator” of the group, warned about health educators becoming “the new high priests of pleasure control with epidemiologists as their oracles.” Warburton insisted that “moderate” consumption of coffee, alcohol, and cigarettes could actually lengthen life: “There is clear scientific evidence that a cup of coffee, a glass of wine, a cigarette and a few pieces of chocolate make people calmer, more relaxed and generally happier. Medical evidence shows that happier people live longer, so moderate indulgence can only be beneficial.”70 Other ARISE associates made similar claims. Petra Netter, a psychologist from the University of Giessen, claimed that “Pleasurable experiences resulting from the use of food, wine, coffee, smoking, tea, cola drinks and chocolate are beneficial when used in moderation.”71

The more common ARISE bluff, though—and this is a frequent industry refrain in the 1980s and 1990s—was that the steps being taken to protect against exposure to secondhand smoke constitute an intolerable infringement of basic human liberties. Timothy Evans, a political sociologist from London’s Adam Smith Institute, railed against “the proliferation of campaigns designed to restrict personal freedom and individual choice,” especially those targeting the “alleged dangers associated with alcohol, tobacco, caffeine and an increasing range of foods.” Frank van Dun, a legal philosopher at Maastricht University, held that the use of “political means for the prevention of disease requires totalitarian control over the lives of people.” John Luik of the Niagara Institute in Canada took a similar stance, denouncing “neopuritans and the health paternalists” for meddling in our lives; he also denied the reality of addiction, characterizing it as “an ideology.” (Luik later went to work for Forces International, a smokers’ rights citadel whose website still lists him as a “researcher.”) Luik still today says it is wrong to think of tobacco use as causing people to have “no control”; people can and do quit, which he takes as proof that smoking cannot be addictive. Luik is a skilled conjurer, but he also attacks a straw man. No one says an addiction is impossible to overcome: people can have a disease, after all, and still be cured—which doesn’t mean they were never sick. Even the most highly addicted smoker can quit if sufficiently draconian measures are imposed—but that doesn’t mean that addiction is just “an ideology.” Luik insists that defending smokers’ rights doesn’t necessarily make one a tool of Big Tobacco, but the example he himself sets is hardly convincing, given his long and cozy history with the industry.72

Project ARISE included twenty scholarly “Associates” from university faculties all over northern Europe and America. The point was to amplify the voices of academics willing to celebrate the joys and benefits of smoking, spreading the good news that smoking was really not so different from enjoying an occasional cup of coffee or piece of chocolate. And Associates were well paid for their services. Philip Morris from 1991 to 1993 paid David Warburton $250,000 for his work on “smoking psychology,” part of the company’s larger Project Cosmic (see below.)73

These were not uninfluential figures. Indeed, the industry has often been able to capture trend-setting savants to get across its message. One remarkable case is the employment of Peter L. Berger, a Rutgers University sociologist, to fight for the tobacco cause. Berger had become something of a trendy maverick in 1966, when he and Thomas Luckmann published The Social Construction of Reality, arguing that facts are very much social constructs and that how we see the world depends on the groups to which we belong and how we are socialized. Berger seems to have come to the attention of tobacco manufacturers in 1977, when he published an article lamenting the success of “antismoking forces” in pushing through laws restricting smoking in public places. Philip Morris et al. liked his denigration of the clean-air movement as “potentially totalitarian,” especially his characterization of smoke-free legislation as “another step in a long-term campaign of stigmatizing and even criminalizing smoking.” He admitted to having “no competence with regard to the medical questions at issue,” but he did claim to know something about the broader social and cultural context, including the “aggressiveness” of anti-tobacco campaigns. Berger was clearly personally annoyed (as an avid cigar and pipe smoker), but he also lamented the “demeaning” segregation of smokers. In 1982 he testified before a U.S. Senate committee investigating whether to strengthen warnings on cigarettes and attacked such proposals as dangerously paternalistic, carrying “the disturbing implication that the American public actually consists of child-like individuals.” Five years later he participated in an industry-financed conference organized to undermine the science demonstrating a cancer hazard from secondhand smoke. Berger here complained that faith in the Surgeon General had led people to swallow a load of anti-tobacco claptrap; he also cautioned that anti-smokers had come to have vested interests: they were no longer “a little band of lonely zealots” but rather part of a well-organized “international antismoking conglomerate.” The anti-smoking movement was also “elitist,” pursuing a “quasi-religious quest for immortality . . . for the fountain of youth.” Smoking restrictions he compared to the “prohibition of certain types of cuisine (say, Italian restaurants)” and other “totalitarian encroachments.” Berger even played the Nazi card, declaring “Anti-smoking” to be “the new anti-Semitism.”74

The industry of course loved his conception of ideologies being on both sides of a purported smoking “debate,” parsed as freedom versus tyranny. Berger was also useful in that his industry-friendly articles—his quasi-autobiographical “Furtive Smokers” published as the cover story in Commentary in June of 1994, for example—didn’t reveal his having taken tobacco money.75 The industry has always liked to exercise its influence through carefully cloaked “third parties,” and Berger was apparently willing to play and profit from this game. His trendy constructivism also fit nicely with the industry’s denialist agenda: if all facts are constructs and truth is really just a contest of authorities, why should we believe the Surgeon General over the Tobacco Institute?

Berger remains one of the world’s most-cited sociologists; his Social Construction of Reality alone has more than twenty thousand citations in Google Scholar, though I doubt very much that those who so honor him know about his entanglement with Big Tobacco.

INTIMATE RELATIONS

U.S. tobacco manufacturers from 1954 through 1998 funneled much of their sponsored research through the Council for Tobacco Research, and from 1988 to 1998 through the Center for Indoor Air Research, the comparable body designed to distract from secondhand smoke hazards. Both were ordered disbanded by the Master Settlement Agreement, but Philip Morris resurrected the CIAR in 2000 as the Philip Morris External Research Program, which operated into 2008. The companies still fund academic research, though it is important to realize how different this is from the work of legitimate research foundations. A grant from Reynolds or Philip Morris is not like a grant from, say, the Ford Foundation. An application submitted to the Ford Foundation is not run by the legal department of the Ford Motor Company—which is more like what happens in the tobacco context. Tobacco grants are approved by damage-control experts at the companies, which means that tobacco money is more like development research—or a kind of advertising. So when Stanford takes money from Philip Morris, this is really not so different from putting up a giant Marlboro billboard on campus. The industry supports research to help it sell more cigarettes, or to boost itself in the eyes of cultural and political elites. And scholars who take this money are facilitating these efforts.76

Of course there are other ways the companies exercise influence in academe. Professorships have been established: Northern Illinois University in DeKalb has a Philip Morris Professor of Sales, and the University of Kentucky has a Philip Morris Professor of Plant and Soil Sciences and a Philip Morris Professor of Management Information Systems. VCU has a Philip Morris Endowed Chair in International Business, and Yale has a Philip Morris Chair in Marketing. The University of Kentucky hosts the Philip Morris Agricultural Leadership Development Program (to develop “leadership skills of young, active, burley tobacco farmers”) and administers the company’s Outstanding Young Farmer Awards.

North Carolina State in Raleigh has long had intimate tobacco relations—which is hardly surprising given the crop’s importance to the state. The university has always helped farmers with planting problems and by the 1950s was serving tobacco scientists through its Tobacco Literature Service run out of the D. H. Hill Library. Since 1978 the university has had at least fourteen Philip Morris Professors. A quick check of the university’s website reveals a Philip Morris Professor of Agricultural and Resource Economics, an R. J. Reynolds Professor of Mechanical Engineering, a Philip Morris Professor of Plant Pathology, a Philip Morris Professor of Crop Science, a Philip Morris Professor of Economics, and a Philip Morris Endowment for Extension. The Philip Morris Endowment stipulates that the tobacco giant “recognizes the important role of North Carolina in the production of an adequate supply of high quality flue-cured tobacco”; Marlboro munificence also “assists the University to retain highly trained and competent tobacco specialists in key roles to work with county extension staffs to assure continued successful tobacco production in the state.”77 North Carolina State also has a number of professorships funded through a gift of ten thousand shares of R. J. Reynolds stock in 1950. The William Neal Reynolds Professorship, named for the brother of the original RJR, remains the highest honor bestowed by the university. Brown & Williamson has also supported the university’s pesticide laboratory.

Prizes and fellowships are another avenue of influence. Florida, Georgia, and North and South Carolina in the 1980s were targeted by Philip Morris with its Young Farmer Awards, leadership seminars, and extension specialist trips, with a monetary value exceeding $400,000. Philip Morris–funded activities included “three endowed extension professorships at NCSU, undergraduate scholarships, graduate fellowships, a young farmer short course, and support for the Multiple Cropping/ Irrigation Park” in Georgia. Apart from research, Philip Morris also supports reunion seminars, trips to tobacco-growing regions in Brazil, Philip Morris fellowships, and a Philip Morris prize.78 The University of Georgia has received similar funding, and Clemson in South Carolina has received money from Philip Morris to support seminars on agricultural technology, training in computer technology, and tuition and graduate fellowships for tobacco country extension agents.

Not all such benevolence goes to the tobacco-growing South. Philip Morris in the 1970s offered fellowships at places like Columbia University, where Stanley Schachter used the industry’s money to support graduate students working on smoking psychology.79 And in 1985 Philip Morris approved a payment of $275,000 to the City University of New York’s Baruch College to sponsor “the Philip Morris Incorporated Distinguished Visiting Professor in Business and Society” and “the Philip Morris Incorporated Lectures on Business and Society” in honor of George Weissman, the company’s former president.80 Similar support has been extended to universities abroad. More than a hundred researchers in Austria, Germany, and Switzerland have received the Philip Morris Prize since it was established in 1983—basically the Nobel Prize of the tobacco world—with winners taking home about $100,000. (The prize is awarded in all fields of science except for medicine, interestingly.) Nyenrode University in the Netherlands has had a Philip Morris Professor of Strategic Entrepreneurship, and there are now several Philip Morris Professorships at the Czech Republic’s famous Charles University in Prague.

Philip Morris has often given code names to European collaborations. Project Claude Bernard was the name given to the industry’s support of Jean Pol Tassin’s neuropharmacology at the College de France; Project Galileo supported John Gorrod’s work on nicotine metabolism at King’s College in London; and Project Paracelsus supported Berthold Schneider’s biometrics at the University of Hanover. Projects Broca and Descartes supported Robert Molimard’s Laboratory of Experimental Medicine at the University of Paris. There are dozens of projects of this sort, with code names including Bacon, Concarneau, Fermi, Franklin, Gauss, Harvey, Kepler, Leibniz, Lavoisier, Newton, Pascal, Rous, and Versin. All were part of Philip Morris’s plan to identify and support “potential witnesses or scientists able to help in finding witnesses.” Scholars were also chosen for their ability to help present smoking or nicotine in a favorable light, as when Jean-Marie Warter, Gabriel Micheletti, and Béatrice Lannes at the University of Strasbourg were funded to document the beneficial effects of smoking for people suffering from Alzheimer’s (Project Cajal).

(Alzheimer’s has been one of the few diseases shown—in rats—to respond positively to nicotine—Parkinson’s is another—and both of these get mentioned by tobacco lawyers in litigation, to make it sound as if smoking has benefits as well as risks. Neglected is the fact that even the industry’s own archives describe such studies as “small,” “poor,” and lacking in proper controls; ignored also is the fact that many Alzheimer’s patients end up quitting when their matches are taken away—to prevent them from accidentally starting a fire.81 Janine Cataldo at UCSF recently surveyed forty-three published articles on the smoking-Alzheimer’s link and after controlling for tobacco industry affiliation found that smoking actually increases one’s risk of contracting the disease. Cataldo’s study is significant from a methodological point of view, in that an effort is made to distinguish tobacco-tainted from tobacco-free research.82 This is a growing trend in tobacco-free scholarship, recognition that publications on tobacco health hazards cannot be relied on without controlling for the possibility of an industry-friendly skew.)

Academic collaborations have been established in other parts of the world. In Australia grants have been made available through the Smoking & Health Research Foundation, formerly known as the Australian Tobacco Research Foundation, an industry group. Fellowships have also been offered through the Rothmans Foundation, set up by the makers of Winfield cigarettes. Many Canadian universities accept research grants and donations from the industry, but tobacco industry officials sometimes even hold senior academic appointments, ranging from governor, president, and chancellor to positions in teaching hospitals and in university development. A 2002 study of this phenomenon found twenty-six instances of tobacco industry officers and directors holding university appointments in Canada between 1996 and 2001. Academic funding has also been pervasive in Britain—and scandalous—where scholars have actually been paid by the industry to research “corporate responsibility.”83 Scholars have been organized to dispute the hazards of secondhand smoke, through an elaborate network of “ETS Consultants” established by Philip Morris in 1987. Dozens of scholars from Europe and Asia were harnessed for this purpose, with the goal of going “beyond the establishment of a controversy concerning an alleged ETS health risk” and actually working (as one Philip Morris executive put it) “to disperse the suspicion of risk.”84

In Germany, relations between the tobacco industry and academia have been so close that it is hardly even fair to talk about “penetration” or “conflict of interest.” The Verband der Cigarettenindustrie for many years was the principal industry–academy go-between, attracting hundreds of academics to shill for the industry. In 2008, however, the head of Germany’s prestigious Institute for Heart Research in Berlin came under fire for accepting a large grant from the Philip Morris Foundation. The recipient claimed that the money was in no way influencing his research, overlooking the multipurpose nature of such grants. The point is only partly to secure industry-friendly results; it is also to gain prestige, establish allies, and create a stable of thankful experts willing to help in some time of need. The companies fund such research to help them survive in the political arena. Recognizing this broader purpose, Dean Martin Paul of Berlin’s famous Charité, the largest medical school in Europe, barred all academic contacts with the industry in the early years of the new millennium. Collaborations continue at many other European institutions, however, perpetuating the banality of smoking.85

The penetration is even deeper in Asia, where there is not a great deal of independent tobacco scholarship. Transnationals such as Philip Morris have provided scholarships to students in Singapore and in other Asian nations, and we can expect such ties to grow with globalization. In China, tobacco research is almost entirely in the hands of a governmental elite trying to get more people to smoke. The Zhengzhou Tobacco Research Institute in Henan is the largest such institute in the world, with a staff of 281, including seventeen professors. Scholars throughout the country aid and assist the monopoly with technical expertise, while farmers labor to produce the millions of tons of leaf and flavorings needed to supply a third of the world’s smokers. As of 2010 there are perhaps fifteen people making their living in China trying to curb tobacco use, while 15 million make a living doing everything they can to keep people smoking. Tobacco prevention is not yet taken seriously, though that could change very fast once China’s leaders realize how much damage is being done to national prosperity. Smoking may continue for another few decades in China, but it won’t be around forever.

ABUSE WITH A VELVET GLOVE

Scholars who worry about academic integrity often focus on theft of intellectual property or falsification of data or improper disclosure and the like. In the case of tobacco industry sponsorship, however, the bias is typically more complex and indirect. The industry does not ask researchers to falsify data or to come up with some preordained conclusion, and they don’t usually interfere with a scholar’s freedom to publish—indeed they want to see industry-friendly research in print. There are of course such abuses, but that is not how the industry ordinarily exercises its influence. The pattern has been to finance large numbers of scholars, with additional awards then going to those who come up with results the industry can live with. As if you were to sow a field with seeds and then to select and nurture only those flowers that grow in the colors you find pleasing. Scholars who pass such tests are then further cultivated and if all goes well will be invited to testify at hearings or in court as expert witnesses.

We saw in an earlier chapter how the industry supports academic research to create what they’ve called a “stable of experts” for use in litigation or some other public or PR capacity.86 Not everyone who works for the industry ends up defending it, but even a 5 or 10 percent harvest can still suffice. The tobacco archives contain hundreds of thousands of pages of transcripts of trial testimony and depositions of scholars working for the industry, and from all branches of academia. Many of these scholars are from leading research universities; almost all have either a medical degree or a nonmedical doctorate. Many were originally grantees of the CTR or the CIAR, which operated as hothouses for cigarette-friendly expertise. The archives contain long lists of potential experts, along with people whom the companies believe can direct them to others willing to serve.87 The industry trots out such experts in litigation or regulatory hearings, using them to produce a string of denials, qualifications, rationales, diversions, or whatever else might be needed to exculpate the industry’s conduct, past or present.

The bias created by tobacco-sponsored research is therefore different from what is commonly imagined. The industry creates bias in the aggregate pattern of research rather than (only) in any one scholar’s work. This is notorious in the case of secondhand smoke science, where the industry for many years was able to fund the work of skeptics, producing what amounts to “noise” in the smoke–disease signal. Deborah Barnes and Lisa Bero from the University of California studied this impact of sponsorship on hazard assessments for secondhand smoke and found that scholars taking the industry’s money were far more likely to find no evidence of a health threat.88 Brown & Williamson’s Director of Scientific Issues later twisted this same disproportion to dispute the reality of risk: “I do not believe that the evidence on secondhand smoke is very convincing. If you look, for example, at the studies on lung cancer, you find that the vast majority of those studies—around 80 percent or so—do not report a significant increase in risk, so from my perspective, I think we have to seriously question a lot of the claims that have been made on environmental tobacco smoke.”89 The industry’s modus operandi by this time was familiar: you basically fund lots of research to dispute a hazard, then cite this same research to say that lots of scholars dispute it.

Of course there are always dissenters and laggards in any scientific community, and not just quacks and charlatans but also respectable scholars who, for one reason or another, are not up to date on the relevant research. The industry gives trumpets, drums, and dollars to these laggards, to make it all seem like honest controversy. This is abuse with a velvet glove: as if the Catholic Church had not thrown Galileo in prison but rather had simply hired, fêted, and funded all manner of diehards and skeptics to march in step with those who held the earth to be the center of the universe.

Tobacco industry sponsorship has been corrosive of honest intellectual inquiry on a scale that is difficult to comprehend. Tobacco expertise for many years was dominated by the industry, as it still is in many parts of the world. Entire scientific societies have been formed to sabotage the science showing harms of one kind or another, and several scientific journals owe their existence to the industry’s need for “friendly research” (Tobacco Science but also more scholarly organs like Indoor Air). The industry is not just corrupting academia; they are also creating it. All businesses want to succeed, of course, and in this respect tobacco is no different. What is different is the extent to which Tobacco has been willing and able to obstruct popular and scientific knowledge, jamming the scientific airwaves with noise. We are talking about racketeers with academics as accomplices—and a breach of academic integrity more serious—and deadly—than anything since the horrors of the Nazi era. Cigarettes should be banned, if for no other reason than to end the corruption of science caused by the industry’s drive to continue its deadly trade.

To repeat: collaboration with the tobacco industry is one of the most deadly abuses of scholarly integrity in modern history. Abuses of the Nazis and Soviets are better known and more immediately murderous, but the mortal force of cigarettes is so vast, and so easily avoidable, that the comparison is not inappropriate. A hundred million people died from smoking in the twentieth century, and we are now on a pace to have many times that in the present century. Academics would have blood on their hands but for the fact that most tobacco deaths are bloodless and distant from the acts that first set mortality into motion. Comparisons could be made to prostitution, but that would insult a trade that does not kill half its clients. It also usually takes decades for smoking to kill, rendering the deaths seemingly faint and uncertain on the horizon. But the mortality is no less real and no less nefarious.