Previous articleNext article FreeSpecial Section: Second LookFrom Maverick to Mole: John C. Burnham, Tobacco ConsultantNicolas Rasmussen and Robert N. ProctorNicolas RasmussenUniversity of New South Wales Search for more articles by this author and Robert N. ProctorStanford University Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreTobacco is no problem of the past. Cigarettes still kill 480,000 Americans annually and over seven million worldwide. Cigarettes kill half of all smokers. As a historian, John Burnham helped the tobacco industry weather storms in the 1980s and 1990s—and in ways that affected historical scholarship.1In the 1980s American tobacco firms faced a new wave of lawsuits from dying smokers who had begun smoking in the 1940s and 1950s. Manufacturers should have warned consumers that their products were carcinogenic, many plaintiffs argued, because sufficient evidence implicated cigarettes when they started smoking. These cases depended on a historical question: When did science prove that smoking causes cancer? Industry defendants claimed that “nobody had proof” before the 1964 Surgeon General’s report (at the earliest)—that is, expert medical opinion remained unsettled. Burnham was engaged as an expert witness by lawyers defending cigarette manufacturers and prepared for two 1986 cases.2 He was never called to the stand, but legal records show how he planned to testify. In one case, he was slated to rebut the testimony of Jeffrey Harris, a scientist who had written an expert report arguing that by the 1940s there was enough evidence to implicate smoking and that cigarette makers “should have been warning customers” even if definitive proof was not yet available. Burnham planned to critique Harris’s analysis as “ahistorical” and to defend the Tobacco Industry Research Committee (TIRC)—established in late 1953 to investigate evidence linking cigarettes and cancer—as “both timely and appropriate and … a respectable/commendable scientific effort.”3Burnham had created his own dubious evidence base for this claim, as we will see. From recent historiography we know that the research funded by the TIRC, while conducted by reputable scientists and published in good peer-reviewed journals, was managed by cigarette industry lawyers and public relations firms, with the explicit goal of showing corporate concern while countering any evidence linking smoking directly to disease. The TIRC mainly funded basic research into cancer mechanisms rather than real-world causes, and when causes were explored these were invariably alternative causes that placed no blame on cigarettes. Viruses were a big focus of TIRC research, as were topics like basic biochemistry and genetics. Distraction research, decoy research, delay research.4 Given his industry connections, Burnham might have accessed primary sources from the TIRC showing just this. For example, he might have seen documents in which TIRC Scientific Advisory Board director Clarence Cook Little described, in 1954, the research committee’s goal as providing “a foundation of research sufficiently strong to arrest continuing or future attacks” on the industry. He might have noticed a 1957 letter in which Ed Darr, President of Reynolds, writing to Paul Hahn, President of American Tobacco, characterized the TIRC as “a successful defensive operation.” Or he might have found the top scientist at Philip Morris admitting privately in 1970: “Let’s face it. We are interested in evidence which we believe denies the allegation that cigaret smoking causes disease.”5Burnham was also employed to defend tobacco outside the courtroom, influencing the scholarly literature so as to support the industry’s interpretation of the past. From 1987 to 1993 he worked as a consultant to Philip Morris, one of four directors of that firm’s secret Project Cosmic to enlist the aid of the social and behavioral sciences. Burnham’s role was to help create a “network of scientists and historians from all over the world” to study smoking and write articles casting the cigarette industry in a favorable light.6 Among the historians he recruited were David Harley of Oxford and David Musto of Yale, who were together allocated over $300,000 for historical work and both of whom subsequently published scholarly papers on tobacco and related drug history without acknowledging industry support. Burnham also conducted a historical project funded by Cosmic, on the transition from chewing tobacco to cigarettes, which seems to have remained unpublished (except perhaps as part of his 1993 Bad Habits).7 During this same period Burnham also published a historical piece that likewise failed to acknowledge the industry’s support.8 This work, discussed below, is not listed as sponsored in Project Cosmic documents; the timing would suggest that it immediately predated that particular consulting relationship.How then has our scholarly literature been affected? David Harley’s Cosmic-era piece in the Bulletin of the History of Medicine discusses the “beginnings of the tobacco controversy” in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England, linking the moral opprobrium that arose around smoking with Puritan political maneuvering and relating it to contemporary discourse about witchcraft and possession. This leaves the impression that our present “tobacco controversy” may have comparably suspect roots. David Musto’s feature in Scientific American had similar relativizing implications, albeit for a broader audience. Recapitulating major themes in his 1987 book, The American Disease: Origins of Narcotic Control (revised from the 1973 edition), Musto stresses that tolerance and intolerance toward drugs has followed a cyclical pattern in the United States and declares the 1990s a new “period of drug intolerance” driven by a mania for “self-improvement”—recalling the moralistic xenophobia that spawned the Harrison Act (1914) and the classic era of narcotic control. Musto does not mention tobacco but implies that the dangers of “habit forming” drugs in general are exaggerated.9 Harley and Musto both depict past expert opinion as following popular prejudices, effectively relativizing and devaluing the medical consensus against cigarettes prevailing since the 1950s.In 1987, shortly after being hired by the industry lawyers, Burnham published an article in Science, Technology, and Human Values backing up his planned testimony that the TIRC was a “respectable/commendable scientific effort.” Here Burnham and his coauthors (both graduate students in his department) argue that research funded by trade associations in the mid-twentieth century comported well with contemporary scientific standards. Specifically, on the basis of a study of six American trade associations, they show that after an early phase when direct commissioning of research was typical, associations began during the 1940s to adopt panels of eminent, supposedly independent scientists to review and distribute grants—not long after flagship scientific institutions like the National Research Council. Trade associations adopted peer review for multiple reasons: members were assured that research would aid the whole industry rather than particular firms, for example, and patronage of respected academic research had prestige value. Also, peer review drew in, “as participants in policy, not as supplicants for largesse, the best investigative minds available,” charming the enlisted experts into realizing industry ambitions.10 Following the supposedly enlightened example of the pharmaceutical industry in the 1930s and 1940s, trade associations typically gave grants to academic scientists in such a way as to “preserve the educational and research character of the university” and attached no “conditions to the gifts other than that the funds support the unit or person designated.” Burnham et alia conclude that peer review made trade association science “independent and therefore authoritative—in a way that industrial research could never be.”11 Burnham makes no mention of tobacco industry research, except in passing in a footnote, but obviously the same argument would apply to the TIRC.Burnham’s article is based almost entirely on secondary sources and trade association documents promoting industry self-image (such as annual reports). And not all the secondary literature drawn on actually supports his generalizations—for example, on the key point that pharmaceutical firms typically funded independent research, without which the article offers no evidence at all that industry-supported biomedical research (whether from firms or associations) was genuinely independent.12 Current primary source–based scholarship on the TIRC and other midcentury industrial funders of life science conflicts with Burnham’s Arcadian fantasy.13 To be sure, one must be cautious in imposing present-day ethical standards on the past, but Burnham and his coauthors produce an opposite distortion, making the past an exotic land foreign to the concept of conflict of interest. Work on the pharmaceutical industry, Burnham’s Exhibit A, shows that drug firm support for medical investigators never completely lost the well-earned disrepute that marked it circa 1900, even if by the 1930s these funding relationships had become less outrageous ethically than they had been a generation earlier.14 But they did not offer genuine independence to grantees; nor, for that very reason, were they unproblematic.To summarize, drug firms did often supply drugs to researchers pursuing projects of their own design, but not grants. Grant recipients were typically commissioned to conduct a study, designed in advance by the firm, meeting immediate commercial needs such as testing a new drug. These grantees, even if eminent, were subject to micromanagement by the firm during the study and presented manuscripts for review and editing prior to journal submission. When results reflected unfavorably on a product, they usually remained unpublished. More rarely, with select eminent researchers, firms established long-lasting consultancies and partnerships, with unrestricted grants and formal independence, but they enlisted these friendly experts in furthering lines of research beneficial to both parties and in developing exclusive intellectual property for the funder. Here, too, unfavorable results would often remain unpublished. When published, the results of all three types of study bore acknowledgments only that “materials” had been supplied by the drug firm—and this was by mutual preference.15 Drug firms must have felt that research perceived as independent would have a greater impact on the medical profession (as Burnham said). Authors must have felt that acknowledging a grant detracted from their status or that of their publication. One Smith, Kline executive referred in 1939 to maintaining an image of independence as “playing the game” as preferred by grantees. But as one scholarly commentator observed in 1955, seasoned investigators understood that a small footnote acknowledging a “gift of materials often means an unstated grant for research expenses” and took that into account when evaluating a paper’s findings.16 So industry funding was epistemologically suspect as well as detrimental to reputation—not normal and unproblematic by the ethics of the day.So much for pharmaceuticals as the paradigm for “respectable/commendable scientific effort” sponsored by industry. And what can be Burnham’s Exhibit B—perhaps the Sugar Research Foundation, featured in his 1987 piece as the most advanced trade association research organization? Robert Hockett, former head of the Sugar Research Foundation, became executive director of the TIRC on the strength of a job application promising to rescue the reputation of cigarettes by shaping the medical research literature, just as he’d rescued sugar from its biomedical critics.17Historians’ work for the cigarette industry received media attention in the early 2000s, and Burnham was one of the few to respond publicly. In a 2004 letter in Lancet, he disputed that historians working as expert witnesses or consultants should disclose that fact when submitting journal articles for publication, partly because the norm requiring disclosure was only “relatively recent.”18 In fact, the American Historical Association had specified since 1987 that historians “should acknowledge the receipt of any financial support … related to their research”; this norm was (newly) codified when Burnham published his piece on trade association science.19 Burnham further argued that working for legal counsel differs from working for a corporate client, a stock defense that failed to take account of his work directly for Philip Morris. Perhaps he felt it more important to support other historians willing to testify for tobacco clients than to try to defend his own work masterminding Project Cosmic. Perhaps he felt secure that he never was a stooge for Philip Morris but, rather, a “willing partner” pursuing a mutually interesting truth—following in the footsteps of those other “best minds” who had shared this same conceit since the 1930s. His implicit stance—that sound method yields facts, no matter who selects the topic and pays for the work—is hard to understand without supposing Burnham a true believer in the rationalism of his scientist-heroes in How Superstition Won. Otherwise, how could he abide his own service to the epitome of the ad-mongering vice industries that play villain in Bad Habits?There is irony in the fact that Burnham, champion of science over superstition, would end up working for those a judge called “the kings of concealment and disinformation,” using historical scholarship as an instrument to deceive.20 If ours is an age of ignorance’s triumph over intelligence, or deception’s over honesty, then that is partly because so many scholars have been willing to collaborate with Big Tobacco and other engines of deception, helping to build the template for the industrial-strength science denial we now suffer.AcknowledgmentsThis research was supported by large grants to Nicolaus Rasmussen from the Australian Research Council and small grants from Harvard University and the Boston Medical Library, the Faculty of Arts at the University of New South Wales, and the Stanford Center for Advanced Studies in Behavioral Sciences, where he was privileged to enjoy a residential fellowship in 2015. Robert Proctor has served as an expert witness for plaintiffs in cigarette litigation. This work was supported by the State of California’s Tobacco-Related Disease Research Program (TRDRP) high impact pilot grant to him, award number 25IP-0017.NotesNicolas Rasmussen specializes in the history of experimental life sciences and medicine, particularly the role of instruments, institutions, and industrial sponsorship in shaping knowledge. He is the author of Picture Control: The Electron Microscope and the Transformation of Biology in America, 1940–1960 (Stanford, 1997), On Speed: The Many Lives of Amphetamine (New York, 2008), Gene Jockeys: Life Science and the Rise of Biotech Enterprise (Johns Hopkins, 2014), and Fat in the Fifties: America’s First Obesity Crisis (Johns Hopkins, 2019). School of Humanities and Languages, University of New South Wales, Sydney, NSW 2052 Australia; [email protected].Robert Proctor specializes in twentieth-century science, technology, and medicine, especially the history of controversy in those fields; his projects have considered scientific rhetoric, the cultural production of ignorance (agnotology), and the history of expert witnessing. He is now working on a book titled “Darwin in the History of Life.” Department of History, Building 200, Stanford University, Stanford, California 94305-2024, USA; [email protected].1 For the statistics see https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/tobacco (accessed 30 Apr. 2019); and https://www.cdc.gov/tobacco/data_statistics/fact_sheets/fast_facts/index.htm (accessed 30 Apr. 2019). With regard to the title: in May 1997, reporting to his legal handlers at Purvis and Johnson, Burnham described himself, in his role as recruiter of historians defending the cigarette industry in court, as “your devoted mole”: Ramses Delafontaine, “History and Historians in American Civil Courts: The Rise and Fall of the Awareness Historians in U.S. Cigarette Litigation, 1985–2017” (Ph.D. diss., Univ. Ghent, 2018), Sect. 5.2.2 Robert N. Proctor, “‘Everyone Knew but No One Had Proof’: Tobacco Industry Use of Medical History Expertise in U.S. Courts, 1990–2002,” Tobacco Control, 2006, 15(suppl. 4):iv117–iv125. See also Louis M. Kyriakoudes, “Historians’ Testimony on ‘Common Knowledge’ of the Risks of Tobacco Use: A Review and Analysis of Experts Testifying on Behalf of Cigarette Manufacturers in Civil Litigation,” ibid., pp. iv107–iv116.3 Jeffrey E. Harris, “Expert’s Report on the State of the Art” (for Cipollone vs. Liggett Group, etc.), 1 Aug. 1985, https://www.industrydocuments.ucsf.edu/docs/#id=klxc0023, pp. 39–40 (accessed 30 Apr. 2019); and Disclosure, Cipollone vs. Liggett Group, Inc., et al., 1986, https://www.industrydocuments.ucsf.edu/docs/#id=spvg0128, pp. 1, 3 (accessed 30 Apr. 2019).4 Allan M. Brandt, The Cigarette Century: The Rise, Fall, and Deadly Persistence of the Product That Defined America (New York: Basic, 2007), Ch. 6; Brandt, “Inventing Conflicts of Interest: A History of Tobacco Industry Tactics,” American Journal of Public Health, 2012, 102:63–71; and Robert N. Proctor, Golden Holocaust: Origins of the Cigarette Catastrophe and the Case for Abolition (Berkeley: Univ. California Press, 2011), Chs. 16 and 17.5 Hill and Knowlton, “Confidential Report: Tobacco Industry Research Committee Meeting,” 19 Oct. 1954, https://industrydocuments.library.ucsf.edu/tobacco/docs/#id=jlfy0042, http://legacy.library.ucsf.edu/tid/prr62b00 (accessed 1 May 2019); Ed Darr to Paul M. Hahn, 30 July 1957, https://www.industrydocuments.ucsf.edu/tobacco/docs/#id=hqvf0136 (accessed 1 May 2019); and Helmut Wakeham (Philip Morris) to Joseph F. Cullman III, “‘Best’ Program for C.T.R.,” 8 Dec. 1970, https://www.industrydocumentslibrary.ucsf.edu/tobacco/docs/#id=nxmk0119, http://legacy.library.ucsf.edu/tid/prr62b00 (accessed 1 May 2019).6 Proctor, “‘Everyone Knew but No One Had Proof’” (cit. n. 2); and “Chronology and Development of Project Cosmic,” 1988, https://www.industrydocuments.ucsf.edu/docs/jfpl0128 (accessed 21 Sept. 2019) (quotation).7 David Musto, “Opium, Cocaine, and Marijuana in American History,” Scientific American, July 1991, pp. 40–47; David Harley, “The Beginnings of the Tobacco Controversy,” Bulletin of the History of Medicine, 1993, 67:28–50; “Project Cosmic: Budget / Spending Status,” Feb. 1991, https://www.industrydocuments.ucsf.edu/docs/xxxy0117 (accessed 30 Apr. 2019); and John C. Burnham, Bad Habits: Drinking, Smoking, Taking Drugs, Gambling, Sexual Misbehavior, and Swearing in American History (New York: New York Univ. Press, 1993).8 John C. Burnham, J. E. Sauer, and R. D. Gibbs, “Peer-Reviewed Grants in U.S. Trade Association Research,” Science, Technology, and Human Values, 1987, 12(2):42–51.9 Harley, “Beginnings of the Tobacco Controversy”; Musto, “Opium, Cocaine, and Marijuana in American History,” pp. 40, 47; and David Musto, The American Disease: Origins of Narcotic Control (1973; New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1987).10 Burnham et al., “Peer-Reviewed Grants in U.S. Trade Association Research” (cit. n. 8), p. 48. The words are those of NRC Growth Committee chair C. P. Rhoads, but Burnham argues that the same insight motivated industry associations.11 Ibid., pp. 43, 48.12 An important example is the generalization that drug firms typically gave unrestricted grants to academics; this rests on a secondary source giving an example of one special type of consulting relationship featuring formally unrestricted funding, but describing other funding relationships where funding was directed and funder control greater. John P. Swann, Academic Scientists and the Pharmaceutical Industry: Cooperative Research in Twentieth-Century America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1988).13 Robert N. Proctor, Cancer Wars: How Politics Shapes What We Know and Don’t Know about Cancer (New York: Basic, 1995); Nicolas Rasmussen, On Speed: The Many Lives of Amphetamine (New York: New York Univ. Press, 2008); and Jeremy A. Greene, Prescribing by Numbers: Drugs and the Definition of Disease (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 2008).14 For example, pharmacologists barred scientists working for drug firms from their professional association, a ban not withdrawn until 1941 (consulting was condoned in 1937). See Swann, Academic Scientists and the Pharmaceutical Industry (cit. n. 12), p. 54; and John Parascandola, The Development of American Pharmacology: John J. Abel and the Shaping of a Discipline (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1992), pp. 115–125. See also Harry Marks, The Progress of Experiment: Science and Therapeutic Reform in the U.S., 1900–1990 (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1997), Chs. 1 and 2.15 Nicolas Rasmussen, “The Moral Economy of the Drug Company–Medical Scientist Collaboration in Interwar America,” Social Studies of Science, 2004, 34:161–186; and Rasmussen, “The Commercial Drug Trial in Interwar America: Three Types of Clinician Collaborator,” Bull. Hist. Med., 2005, 75:50–80 (see pp. 76–77 regarding the acknowledgments).16 Rasmussen, “Moral Economy of the Drug Company–Medical Scientist Collaboration in Interwar America,” p. 176; Philip Boyer, Jr., to Soma Weiss, 22 Sept. 1939, Soma Weiss Papers, Harvard Medical School Countway Library, Boston, GA 92, Box 4, Folder “Smith, Kleine, [sic] and French (1928–43)”; and Esther Everett Cape, Medical Research: A Midcentury Survey, 2 vols. (New York: American Foundation, 1955), Vol. 1, p. 585.17 Robert C. Hockett to TIRC, 4 Jan. 1954, http://legacy.library.ucsf.edu/tid/prr62b00 (accessed 1 May 2019).18 John C. Burnham, “Medical Historians and the Tobacco Industry,” Lancet, Sept. 2004, 364:838, https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(04)16967-5/fulltext. Burnham’s letter is a response to Robert N. Proctor, “Should Medical Historians Be Working for the Tobacco Industry?” ibid., Apr. 2004, 363:1174–1175; see also Proctor’s reply, “Medical Historians and the Tobacco Industry,” in the same issue of Lancet as Burnham’s response: https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(04)16968-7/fulltext.19 “AHA Statement on Standards of Professional Conduct,” History Teacher, 1987, 21:105–109, on p. 105.20 H. Lee Sarokin, “Opinion,” in Haines vs. Liggett, 6 Feb. 1992, https://www.industrydocuments.ucsf.edu/tobacco/docs/#id=njyf0117 (accessed 1 May 2019). Previous articleNext article DetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Isis Volume 110, Number 4December 2019 Publication of the History of Science Society Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/706611 © 2019 by The History of Science Society. All rights reserved.PDF download Crossref reports the following articles citing this article:Ruth E Malone, Robert N Proctor Prohibition no, abolition yes! Rethinking how we talk about ending the cigarette epidemic, Tobacco Control 31, no.22 (Mar 2022): 376–381.https://doi.org/10.1136/tobaccocontrol-2021-056577