Robert Proctor: "The tobacco industry has financed with hundreds of millions of dollars at least 25 Nobel prizes"

His story could very well become a movie. In the seventies, when Robert Proctor (Texas, 1954) was investigating why we get cancer—at a time when there was an intense debate about the role played by tobacco, pesticides, and other pollutants—he delved into the secret archives of the big tobacco companies and discovered a chilling fact: for decades, they had manipulated science to sow doubt about the deadly effects of their products.

Proctor, a professor at Stanford University (USA), was the first historian to testify against the tobacco industry and helped convict major tobacco companies, such as Philip Morris, manufacturer of Marlboro, in numerous lawsuits in the United States. He coined the termagnotology, which defines the deliberate manufacturing of ignorance. Furthermore, he has also investigated the strategies of companies in the fossil fuel, chemical, and food sectors to generate disinformation, whether by discrediting scientific evidence or delaying measures that threaten their interests. Proctor has participated this week in a seminar organized by the Milà i Fontanals Institution for Research in Humanities of the CSIC, in Barcelona.

He states that the tobacco industry has massively funded scientific research.

— I have documented that the tobacco industry has funded at least 25 Nobel laureates with hundreds of millions of dollars. Stanley Prusiner, awarded in 1997 for the discovery of prions, which cause, among others, mad cow disease, received funding from R. J. Reynolds, manufacturer of Camel cigarettes, for example.

What did the industry get out of it?

— Investing in research on virology and genetics allowed them to argue that cancer was not caused by cigarettes, but by viruses, by genes. For decades, they managed to shift research priorities and also attention from environmental causes toward internal factors: infections, genetics, and personal decisions. The strategies they have followed consist of individualizing the disease and making the role of tobacco companies invisible, because for this industry it is much more convenient to talk about mutations and their effects than about the decisions made in boardrooms, which is where it is actually decided to manufacture dangerous cigarettes, with very serious effects. And that is what most people do not understand: these large corporations deceive and divert attention, often by funding scientific research and personalizing responsibility. "If you get sick, it is your fault, because of your genes".

Do you see parallels with the sugar industry?

— The relationship between tobacco and sugar is fascinating and complex. At the end of the 19th century, a revolution of packaged pleasures had taken place: industrial products made with sugar had appeared, from chocolate bars to soft drinks, ice creams, and with all this, the first obesity epidemic. And cigarette manufacturers responded by announcing that smoking helped you lose weight. The advertising was aimed at women saying: "Reach for a Lucky instead of a sweet".

And what happened?

— That sugar and tobacco formed an alliance. Even today, the unions representing tobacco workers in the United States are called confectionery and tobacco workers' unions, and, in fact, cigarettes are sold alongside candies or sweets. Sugar is one of the main reasons why cigarettes cause cancer.

How?

— The modern cigarette contains 25% of its weight in sugar. Before its appearance, there were practically no cases of lung cancer. In fact, I have demonstrated with my research that the incidence of the disease increased steadily and very rapidly following the invention of this sugared cigarette. Before, people did not inhale the smoke and left it in their cheeks, because it was too harsh, too alkaline. Nicotine was absorbed through the cheeks and reached the blood. The incorporation of sugar into cigarettes made tobacco smoke inhalable for the first time in history.

Why do scientists accept that these industries fund their research?

— The statistician R. A. Fisher, to whom we owe the foundations of modern statistical science, was paid by the tobacco industry and argued that cancer caused an itch in the lungs that drove the sick to smoke to soothe it. This “lung itch hypothesis” appears more than 400 times in the secret archives of the tobacco industry. Honestly, I believe that not all scientists know the truth. Some surely prioritized the freedom that the funding gave them to conduct research; others accepted money to be able to continue investigating, because, in the end, large corporations funded what interested the scientists, whether it was prions, genetics, or the possible effects of tobacco on stress.

Nixon declared war on cancer in 1971, with the push of a law to investigate the causes of the disease in depth. However, tobacco was not the focus of this program.

— The tobacco industry had managed to turn the scientific evidence that cigarettes cause cancer into a mere political opinion. Part of its success—like that of the oil and sugar industries—consists of shifting the responsibility for the product. It is their strategy: instead of denying everything, it distracts and disorients; it averts the gaze from the truth. The most important and diabolical machinery of these great conspiracies—and we are talking about judicially accredited conspiracies, not conspiracy theories—consists of modifying the very architecture of scientific practice on a large scale.

Why do we continue smoking, despite the evidence that smoking is dangerous?

— The industry says that everyone already knows that smoking is dangerous. But, does everyone really know that cigarettes contain radioactive polonium? That one of the ingredients in tobacco is castoreum, a secretion from the anal gland of the Siberian beaver? That 6 billion are smoked every year, at a rate of 15 kilometers per second? That they are consumed faster than the speed at which satellites orbit the Earth? That smoking is the leading cause of preventable death in Spain? That every year 50,000 Spaniards die because of tobacco and that some 5,000 more deaths are caused by breathing other people's smoke? A moment ago I was on a terrace at a café, here in Barcelona, and we were completely saturated with smoke. It would not have been at all disproportionate for me to have approached the smokers and urinated on their table. Why would that be offensive? It would be much less dangerous than the fact that they were throwing the 6,000 toxic substances contained in tobacco smoke at us: cyanide, ammonia, nicotine, formaldehyde, arsenic, lead, and heavy metals like cadmium.

Everyone knows someone who has reached ninety years of age while smoking.

— They are anecdotes, stories from survivors. On average, each cigarette takes ten minutes off your life: it is not just a risk, it is harm. Smoking is the leading preventable cause of death. And this is despite the fact that we could have gotten rid of cigarettes in 1953, when there was already epidemiological evidence, animal experiments, clinical pathology data, and chemical tests proving that they caused mass deaths.

You have scrutinized the tobacco industry archives. What is the most important document or piece of evidence you have found there?

— One of the most important documents is the Roper proposal, from 1972, in which the Tobacco Institute analyzes why its strategy has been successful in litigation, legislation, and public opinion. To begin with, it convinced the courts that the link between cigarettes and cancer was only a hypothesis and managed to block its regulation. In the United States, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) did not begin to regulate tobacco products until 2010. The industry played at creating confusion: if milk cartons, wax, or pollution were harmful, who could say with certainty that cigarettes caused harm? It instrumentalized complexity to sow doubt and keep alive the hope that nothing would happen to oneself. It also denied addiction by arguing that, if one wanted to, one could quit smoking.

The data indicate that many start smoking at 12, 13, or 14 years old.

— It is a pediatric epidemic. When you ask young people if they will continue smoking in five years, many claim they will not, but the majority will continue to do so. Studies indicate that 90% of smokers wish they had never started. Tobacco is a product that kills approximately half of its consumers. An internal document from Imperial Tobacco in Canada, from the eighties, asserted that smoking is more similar to being an alcoholic than to drinking. Cigarettes are not a recreational drug: they are consumed out of necessity. It is necessary to understand the magnitude of the addiction.

Do you see parallels with ultra-processed foods?

— In the eighties and nineties, Philip Morris was the world's leading food producer. It applied techniques learned from tobacco—regarding dopamine, addiction, colors, advertising, and marketing—to sell products that activate the brain's reward circuits and make us crave calculated combinations of sugar, fat, and salt.

And what about climate change and the fossil fuel industry?

— They use the same techniques: denial, distraction, delay, and deception. In Merchants of Doubt, Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway explain that some tobacco deniers have also denied the effects of climate change. Probably, the greatest consequence of the tobacco industry has been to create the instruments of deception and the manufacturing of ignorance that now allow for the continued production and burning of carbon.

Trump is a great defender of the fossil fuel industry.

— The oil, coal, and tobacco industries played an important role in Trump's rise. R. J. Reynolds and the oil industry contributed money to his campaign. Evangelical Christianity was also decisive, which functions as a system of production of beliefs and ignorance. Oil companies no longer deny global warming as much, partly because Trump does the job in favor of their interests so well that they no longer need to do so.

It has promoted Indra, a tool that uses artificial intelligence and offers access to thousands of documents from declassified secret archives of the tobacco, chemical, pharmaceutical, arms, food, and fossil fuel industries. How does it work?

— Indra, like the Hindu god of lightning and waters, wants to reduce the asymmetry in access to information. We want to combat the power asymmetry that these large corporations have regarding the control of evidence and information. This new tool allows anyone who wishes to search through the more than 150 million pages of documents that we have and that were previously secret, originating from the tobacco industry and large carbon companies, such as ExxonMobil, Shell, and TotalEnergies, among others.