Starting in the late 19th century, the industry transformed itself to become a model of modern industrial organization and consumer marketing. The tobacco industry already had a long history of innovative advertising, marketing, and public relations that had centered on making smoking universal. The industry could not denigrate the scientific enterprise and still maintain its public credibility, so crucial to its success. After all, in the immediate postwar years-the dawn of the nuclear age-science was in high esteem. These findings appeared in major, peer-reviewed medical journals as well as throughout the general media.Īs a result, the tobacco industry would launch a new strategy, largely unprecedented in the history of US industry and business: it would work to erode, confuse, and condemn the very science that now threatened to destroy its prized, highly popular, and exclusive product. Although health concerns about smoking had been raised for decades, by the early 1950s there was a powerful expansion and consolidation of scientific methods and findings that demonstrated that smoking caused lung disease as well as other serious respiratory and cardiac diseases, leading to death.
Smoking had been categorically linked to the dramatic rise of lung cancer. 2īy late 1953, the tobacco industry faced a crisis of cataclysmic proportions. 1 Before that time, there had been a widespread perception, both within science and among the public, that scientific endeavors constituted a set of activities that were in large measure insulated from “interests.” Institutions have struggled over recent decades to discern new policies and approaches to mitigate the increasingly powerful influence of industries as they affect scientific investigation and the public good. In this sense, the tobacco industry invented the modern problem of conflicts of interest at midcentury. But the steps the industry took as it fashioned a new relationship with the scientific enterprise have become a powerful and influential model for the exertion of commercial interests within science and medicine since that time.Īs a result, industrial influence on scientific research and outcome has been a powerful legacy of the tobacco story. This, of course, is not to argue that the approach and strategy undertaken by big tobacco are necessarily typical of conventional industry–science relationships. ANY SYSTEMATIC INVESTIGATION of the modern relationship of medicine and science to industry must consider what has become the epiphenomenal case of the tobacco industry as it confronted new medical knowledge about the risk of cigarette smoking in the mid-20th century.
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