Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming

After Seitz retired from his illustrious scientific career, he was hired by the tobacco company RJ Reynolds to run its program funding “biomedical research at major universities, hospitals, and research institutes across the country” (10). This project, with funding over $45 million to be spent over the next six years (1979-85), would support research “in the areas of chronic degenerative disease, basic immunology, and the effect of ‘lifestyle modes’ on disease” (11).He was joined by James A. Shannon and Maclyn McCarty; the tobacco industry needed witnesses in the torrent of lawsuits, people who could say that cigarettes did not cause the diseases these companies were being sued for:

Every project Reynolds funded could potentially produce such a witness who could testify to causes of illness other than smoking….[m]any of the studies explored other causes of the disease—stress, genetic inheritance, and the like—an entirely legitimate topic, but one that could also help distract attention from the industry’s central problem: the overwhelming evidence that tobacco killed people (14).

In 1953, researchers had demonstrated that cigarette tar caused cancer, much to everyone’s surprise(except Nazi scientists, who had known for a long time but whose knowledge was suppressed after the war). The media had taken this story and run with it.