Everything for People Concerned About Smoking & Nonsmokers' Rights
FIRST on the Internet for Smoking News and Documents
Action on Smoking and Health
A National Legal-Action Antismoking Organization
Entirely Supported by Tax-Deductible Contributions
 
 
 Home  Search  About ASH  Why Join  Comment  Email page

Cancer Society Will End Grants to Researchers Supported by Big Tobacco [02/16-3]

Excerpts from: Taking Cash From Tobacco Will Cost Researchers American Cancer Society to cut off funds to scientists supported by the industry

By GOLDIE BLUMENSTYK Chronicle of Higher Education [02/20/04]

Scientists who receive financial support from the tobacco industry will soon be barred from receiving grants from the American Cancer Society, which awards about $125-million annually. For academic scientists, the society is one of the biggest sources of research money among nonprofit organizations.

The cancer society said the new policy, adopted this month, would help to ensure that its funds are used to reflect its commitment to reducing the use of tobacco.

Academics and others who follow issues of research and grant making said the decision of a major supporter of scientific research to adopt a litmus test in deciding who gets grants could have ramifications that extend far beyond the debate over the ethics of accepting research sponsorship from the tobacco industry.

But critics of the tobacco industry called the society's action an important moral statement. "It recognizes just how pernicious the tobacco industry has been as a force to distort the scientific process," said Stanton A. Glantz, a professor of medicine at the University of California at San Francisco.

Millions of documents released during litigation against the tobacco industry in the 1990s showed that the tobacco companies did indeed use their research budgets to sponsor studies that minimized the health dangers of cigarettes. In 1998, the tobacco industry signed a $246-billion settlement with 46 states and closed down industry-financed organizations that had sponsored many of the controversial studies.

Even before the society took its action, the question of whether to accept tobacco-industry money for research had been raging on many campuses, particularly in medical, nursing, and public-health schools.

The issue became particularly heated at Ohio State University last spring, when the institution decided it would accept a research grant of $590,000 from the Philip Morris External Research Program, even though doing so made the institution ineligible, under state policy, for a slightly smaller grant from an Ohio program. That state program is financed with proceeds from the 1998 settlement.

More recently, Ohio State announced it would accept $6-million from the Lorillard Tobacco Company to establish a research center on smoke-induced diseases. When it did so last December, the faculty member named to head the center, Jay Zweier, agreed to step down from his post at the university's Comprehensive Cancer Center because it has a policy barring tobacco-industry research sponsorship. (The schools of nursing and public health at Ohio State also bar tobacco sponsorship for research.)

Karen A. Holbrook, the president of Ohio State, said she respected the cancer society's decision to set its own guidelines in how it awards grants, and said she was grateful that the ban would not be as broad as Ohio's, or that of the American Legacy Foundation, which prohibits entire schools of universities from receiving its grants if researchers in those schools accept tobacco industry money.




footer
 Home Web Page  Search This Site  Learn About ASH  Why Join ASH  Comment on This  Email This Page

Raising Smoking in a Custody Dispute
Smoking in Condos and
Apartments 
File Complaints Against Smoking
Toxins in Tobacco Smoke
Dangers of Secondhand Smoke
Govt. Rpt. on Secondhand Smoke
Tobacco Class-Action Law Suits 
Sue-Big-Tobacco List of Lawyers
Tobacco Settlement, Multistate
ASH's New  International Site
Smoking Facts & Statistics
Children and Smoking


Presented as a public service by Action on Smoking and Health (ASH),
2013 H Street, N.W., Wash., DC 20006, USA, (202) 659-4310.
ASH is a 36-year-old national legal-action antismoking and nonsmokers' rights organization which is entirely supported by tax-deductible contributions.
  Please credit ASH, and include ASH's web address: http://ash.org