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Confronted by compelling peer-reviewed scientific evidence of the harms of smoking, the tobacco industry, beginning in the 1950s, used sophisticated public relations approachestoundermineand distort the emerging science.
The industry campaign worked to create a scientific controversy through a program that depended on the creationofindustry-academic conflicts of interest. This strategy of producing scientific uncertainty undercut public health efforts and regulatory interventions designed to reduce the harmsof smoking.
A number of industries have subsequently followed this approach to disrupting normativescience.Claimsof scientific uncertainty and lack of proof also lead to the assertion of individual responsibilityforindustrially produced health risks. (Am J Public Health. 2012:63-71. doi:10.2105/AJPH.2011. 300292)
ANY SYSTEMATIC INVESTIGAtion of the modern relationship of medicine and science to industry must consider what has become the epiphenomenal case of the tobacco industry as it confronted new medical knowledge about the risk of cigarette smoking in the mid- 20th century. This, of course, is not to argue that the approach and strategy undertaken by big tobacco are necessarily typical of conventional industry-science relationships. But the steps the industry took as it fashioned a new relationship with the scientific enterprise have become a powerful and influential model for the exertion of commercial interests within science and medicine since that time.
As a result, industrial influence on scientific research and outcome has been a powerful legacy of the tobacco story. In this sense, the tobacco industry invented the modern problem of conflicts of interest at midcentury.1 Before that time, there had been a widespread perception, both within science and among the public, that scientific endeavors constituted a set of activities that were in large measure insulated from ''interests.'' Institutions have struggled over recent decades to discern new policies and approaches to mitigate the increasingly powerful influence of industries as they affect scientific investigation and the public good.2
THE TOBACCO INDUSTRY IN CRISIS MODE
By late 1953, the tobacco industry faced a crisis of cataclysmic proportions. Smoking had been categorically linked to the dramatic rise of lung cancer. Although health concerns about smoking had been raised for decades, by the early 1950s there was a powerful expansion and consolidation of scientific methods and findings that demonstrated that smoking caused lung disease as well as other serious respiratory and cardiac diseases, leading to death....