Blowing Smoke

Where ‘mercenary scientists’ once helped to cast doubt on the dangers of smoking, researchers now lead efforts to assess the effects of e-cigarettes

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The link between cigarette smoking and cancer seems obvious now, but it took decades of research and advocacy to change attitudes and minds.

While researchers helped lead the way, many also played a part in supporting the tobacco industry, which funded research at major institutes and laboratories across the nation.

Sarah Milov, an assistant professor of history at the University of Virginia and author of “The Cigarette: A Political History,” set for release in October by Harvard University Press, describes them as “mercenary scientists,” whose work was done for the tobacco paycheck. Some of the research tobacco companies would underwrite wasn’t directly linked to the business, but helped shift attention away from it, such as projects investigating genetic links to cancer, or other causes unrelated to smoking, Milov says.

“They would write the checks even if recipients weren’t trying to shill for big tobacco,” she says. “It’s an ingenious strategy to say the science is unsettled.”

Some of the leading apologists for the industry were based in Richmond, at the old Medical College of Virginia, according to Robert Proctor, author of “Golden Holocaust: Origins of the Cigarette Catastrophe and the Case for Abolition” (2011, University of California Press). Proctor is a professor of the history of science at Stanford University.

Some of the leading apologists for the industry were based in Richmond.

MCV’s successor, the Virginia Commonwealth University School of Medicine, is now a leader in research used to regulate tobacco through its Center for the Study of Tobacco Products. Thomas Eissenberg, a co-principal investigator, notes that the medical school now has a policy against conducting industry-funded research, and that he’s seen no impact on the center’s work.

“We had this unfortunate past,” he says, adding that he’s felt no pressure from tobacco interests.

But those past roots ran deep, as you’d expect in the capital of a state “wholly built on smoke,” as England’s King Charles I complained during the Colonial era.

MEN OF MEDICINE — AND TOBACCO

The key to understanding MCV’s tobacco connection is found in a trove of tobacco industry documents available through the University of California-San Francisco and cited by Proctor. There, you’ll find an American Tobacco Co. memo on the importance of biological research from 1941, stating that work done by the company and by MCV under an American Tobacco grant “provide evidence that the alleged serious effects of smoking on health are being greatly exaggerated.”

American Tobacco was a lucrative benefactor. It was a leading producer of tobacco products with extensive roots in Richmond that had formed in 1890 from a merger of companies including Allen & Ginter, the Richmond-based tobacco manufacturer founded in the 1870s by John Allen and Lewis Ginter. The American Tobacco Co. South Richmond Complex Historic District is off U.S. Route 1.

The memo expresses American Tobacco’s appreciation for “the completeness with which the staff of the Medical College has been ‘sold American,’ ” referring to the catchphrase in a long-running advertising campaign for Lucky Strike, America’s best-selling cigarette brand in the mid-20th century. “This encourages the belief that if our activities were better known, more medical men could be brought into the fold.”

“It was shocking how thoroughly [MCV] was captured,” Proctor says in a telephone interview.

In “Golden Holocaust,” Proctor contends that tobacco, for a time, shaped research priorities at MCV, and he notes that there was a “virtually seamless” exchange of personnel between the college and American Tobacco. Some faculty members also worked the company’s labs, and American Tobacco funded certain research positions at the medical school.

One critical collaborator was Harvey B. Haag, who led the school’s Department of Physiology and Pharmacology from 1936 through 1955, and was medical school dean from 1947-50. He had worked with American Tobacco in 1935 to “secure evidence” that America’s top cigarette brand at the time, Lucky Strike, was less irritating to the throat and lungs than other brands, according to Proctor, and had headed the medical division of American Tobacco’s new laboratory in 1939.

Haag’s successor as pharmacology chair, Paul S. Larson, served from 1955-72, and is noted for the international attention that he brought to the school for his nicotine pharmacology and toxicology research, according to the VCU Department of Pharmacology and Toxicology website. Asked to find a successor to lead American Tobacco’s lab, Haag suggested Larson as  someone with ability and a “broad-minded attitude” toward the industry.

Proctor describes Haag and Larson as faithful collaborators who testified for the industry before various regulatory groups, produced reviews of medical literature and attended conferences, keeping tobacco interests in the know regarding cancer research.

MCV scientists also helped compile a bibliography of research on smoking and health titled “Tobacco: Experimental and Clinical Studies.” It became known as “The Green Monster,” and was a resource for tobacco-industry lawyers to draw upon to call into question any medical studies cited in court that sought to link tobacco use with cancer.

A change in leadership at the medical school, which merged with Richmond Professional Institute to become VCU in 1968, reflected a shift in its relationship with the tobacco industry.

Jesse Steinfeld, who had served as surgeon general during Richard Nixon’s administration’s first term, was tapped as medical school dean in 1976. As surgeon general, he had decried cigarette use, and warned of the hazards of smoking by women and the dangers of secondhand smoke, according to his 2014 obituary in the New York Times.

His daughter, Mary Beth Steinfeld, a 1981 MCV graduate and a professor of pediatrics at the school of medicine at the University of California-Davis, says that he was concerned about assuming duties at MCV “in the heart of tobacco country,” but that he was told by board members that the school wanted to show its independence and commitment to academic freedom, according to a VCU Health news release at the time of his death. Mary Beth Steinfeld says her father, who was dean until leaving in 1983 for a similar post with the Medical College of Georgia, had no conflicts with local tobacco concerns during his tenure in Richmond.

RESEARCH AND REGULATORS

Today, tobacco research continues at VCU, but now it’s more about providing data to regulators. That’s the work of the Center for the Study of Tobacco Products, which last year was the recipient of a five-year, $19.8 million federal grant to study e-cigarettes. The study will provide data to the FDA for its use in the regulation of tobacco products and will seek to measure toxicity, user behavior and abuse liability.

The center was the first to evaluate e-cigarettes in 2010 and received $18 million in federal grants in 2013 to develop methods to evaluate the products. The VCU center, led by Eissenberg and Alison Breland, the co-principal investigators, works in conjunction with researchers at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, the University of Southern California, the University of Arkansas and the American University of Beirut in Lebanon.

As tobacco companies push e-cigarettes as a growing business investment, one concern is the products’ appeal to youth, Breland says. “More and more research is showing that young people who start with e-cigarettes then transition to combustible cigarettes.”

At the center, students learn about MCV’s previous efforts on behalf of the tobacco industry, using Proctor’s book as a resource, Breland says. The center has also brought to campus speakers including the University of California’s Phillip Gardiner, who last year discussed how menthol cigarettes are an assault on African-American health.

The work they are performing at the center is on the cutting edge, and it has purpose, Breland and Eissenberg say.

“The feeling is that the work we are producing will lead to something,” Eissenberg says, “that [it] will be part of regulations that help people.”