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Speaker: Robert Proctor, Professor of the History of Science, Stanford University
Professor Proctor's lecture can be viewed online.
Robert Proctor is a professor of history of science at Stanford University, the first historian to testify against the tobacco industry, and author of Cancer Wars: How Politics Shapes What We Know and Don't Know About Cancer, among other books. In his lecture at the Center for Ethics, Proctor discussed the history of the tobacco industry and, in particular, its enlistment of academics and experts in a sustained campaign of spreading ignorance and doubt about the effects of tobacco use.
Proctor began with some facts that helped to make vivid the scale of tobacco consumption and tobacco-related deaths. Six trillion cigarettes are smoked every year. Strung together end to end, that would be enough to form a chain stretching to the sun and back, with some left over. Proctor also gave estimates of the total amount of cigarette-related chemicals inhaled each year. For example, an estimated 60 million kg of tar are inhaled each year through cigarette smoke, enough to fill about 6,000 railroad cars to the brim.
In the twentieth century, an estimated 100 million deaths are attributable to cigarette consumption. But, in terms of the total expected deaths from tobacco products, the worse is yet to come. An estimated 10 million people will die each year from tobacco use over the next decade. Over the next century, total deaths are estimated at anywhere between several hundred million and a billion, depending on how efforts to reduce cigarette use fare.
Two ways in which the harmful effects of cigarettes could be mitigated would be to reduce the amount of nicotine in cigarettes or to prohibit the process of "flue-curing." Flue-curing, invented in the 19th century, is a curing process that brings down the PH level of cigarette smoke, making it inhalable. At the end of his lecture, Professor Proctor also advocated the ban of cigarettes.
For every million cigarettes smoked, one person dies. Since the tobacco industry makes about a penny in profit per cigarette, it makes a profit of about $10,000 for every one million cigarettes sold. In a sense, then, we can conclude, Proctor suggested, that the tobacco industry values an individual life at $10,000 or less.
After presenting these facts and giving examples of the creative ways in which tobacco has been marketed, Proctor began his discussion of the corruption of academics and experts who have aided the tobacco industry in various ways, principally by providing expert testimony in litigation and producing research.
The main way in which the tobacco industry has made use of academics is by providing financial support for research that the industry deems favorable or that, even if not positively supportive of the industry's interests, can be held up as an example of the industry's contributions to basic science. Much of the research that the tobacco industry has supported has aimed to increase the plausibility of alternative accounts of the causation of lung cancer. But the academic work supported by tobacco money has not been confined to medical research. Some of it has addressed moral and political questions about government coercion and paternalism, some of it has sought to question the usefulness of the concept of addiction, and so on. Some of the research does not even directly function as industry propaganda, but its sponsorship is useful to the industry as a means of maintaining good public relations, because it serves as evidence of the industry's commitment to science. A third way in which the industry's connections with academics have benefited its agenda is through the creation of a "stable of experts" that tobacco companies can trot out as expert witnesses in litigation. Proctor gave numerous examples of each of these connections between industry and academia and was able to cite tobacco company documents as evidence for his claims, documents that have been made available in a publicly accessible archive.
It would be a mistake, Proctor claims, to describe the research that the industry has funded as "pseudo-science." It is typically not of a low quality, but rather simply off-topic or irrelevant to the question of whether tobacco products are harmful. Its corrupting influence is also not to be located at the individual level. Proctor's charge is not that industry funding causes researchers to falsify their results or use faulty data. For the most part, industry does not attempt to interfere with the publication of results it deems unfavorable (although there have been such incidents). It is instead the aggregate effects of industry funding that show its corrupting influence. By subsidizing points of view and research that the industry considers favorable, it skews the aggregate pattern and subject matter of research. In its distinctions between micro-level and macro-level bias and description of the mechanisms by which industry funding exerts this bias, Proctor's account bore important similarities to later speakers' accounts of institutional corruption.
Sean Ingham, Graduate Fellow in Ethics 2009-10