TOBACCO ON TRIAL IN CALIFORNIA
During a meeting last month to discuss banning University of
California researchers from taking support from tobacco
companies, several members of the university's Board of Regents
argued that such a ban would violate academic freedom and that
it was unnecessary because the university already has a faculty
code of conduct to guard against the sort of corporate
manipulation of science that proponents of the tobacco ban
fear.
Jefferson Coombs, the alumni regent, said that passing the ban
"would establish a dangerous precedent that threatens academic
freedom," and would "convey a signal that we do not trust the
judgment of our world-class academics, faculty and
administrators at the University of California. There's a reason
why these codes of conduct are in place."
Regent Sherry Lansing raised similar concerns, stating that
because of the university system's existing code of conduct,
which each campus carries out in its own way, "I believe that
[professors] are able to do research without being corrupted."
Regent Judith Hopkinson voiced agreement with Lansing's views.
But critics cite two pieces of evidence that they say belie
assertions that the faculty code of conduct has guarded the
university from the influence of the tobacco companies' agenda.
Last August, in a ruling that ended a multi-year federal
racketeering and fraud lawsuit against nine tobacco companies,
Judge Gladys Kessler criticized the companies for manipulating
science to fit claims that tobacco is harmless.
In her final opinion, which ran over 1,700 pages, Kessler wrote
that tobacco companies and law firms "identified 'friendly'
scientific witnesses, subsidized them with grants from the
Center for Tobacco Research and the Center for Indoor Air
Research, paid them enormous fees, and often hid the
relationship between those witnesses and the industry." She
specifically cited four projects managed by the tobacco
companies to alter research questions on the health effects of
second-hand smoke.
One researcher she singled out is James Enstrom, a cancer
researcher at the University of California at Los Angeles, whose
work was financed by the tobacco industry for a study he
published in the British Medical Journal.
