Industry-funded science long obscured the smoking-cancer link despite strong early evidence

Evidence

No less compelling, in the annals of science-and-society, is the example of the half century of research on tobacco and human health. Despite there being plenty of anecdotal evidence that smoking was bad for human beings (people already called cigarettes “coffin nails” way back in 1900!), it proved amazingly difficult to marshal scientific proofs sufficiently indisputable as to force regulation (and drive successful tort litigation). In this case, historians have done a TON of research to uncover all the ways that interested parties—mainly the tobacco companies themselves!—funded a vast network of scientific researchers who generated huge quantities of actual science (peer-reviewed papers in scientific journals, etc.), all of which obscured the links between cigarette smoking and morbidity. — The Friends of Attention, Attensity!, 150

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Postwar vaccine-driven disease declines turned public fear toward pollution-linked cancers. — Richard J. Lazarus, The Making of Environmental Law, 255; Tobacco companies suppressed cancer evidence for decades before paying a $200 billion settlement. — Lee McIntyre, Post-Truth, 66