The nation's largest cigarettes maker has paid for scientific research at four Massachusetts universities since 2000, a practice that critics of the tobacco industry liken to the Mafia underwriting crime fighting.
'Taking money from the tobacco industry to conduct scientific research is like the DA taking money from the Mafia to conduct investigations of crime,' said Gregory Connolly, a Harvard School of Public Health professor and former director of the Massachusetts Tobacco Control Program.
Philip Morris USA, which makes Marlboro and other top-selling cigarettes lines, gave grants to scientists at Boston University, Harvard University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and the University of Massachusetts, company spokesman David M. Sylvia said Friday.
The research supported by the company touched on conditions such as heart disease and cancer that are linked to smoking. The grants given by the Philip Morris External Research Program were not used to develop new tobacco products or refine existing brands, but they may have helped the company rehabilitate its public image.
When accepting Philip Morris money, the researchers had to promise to disclose the source of their funding in scientific publications, Sylvia said, and the company, in turn, promised not to meddle in the research.
Still, industry foes said research paid for by tobacco companies is irredeemably compromised. "Taking money from the tobacco industry to conduct scientific research is like the DA taking money from the Mafia to conduct investigations of crime," said Gregory Connolly, a Harvard School of Public Health professor and former director of the Massachusetts Tobacco Control Program.
University scientists first came under withering attack for taking money from Big Tobacco in the 1990s, when their work was seen as buttressing industry claims that cigarettes were not harmful. The tenor of industry-funded research changed after the companies acknowledged in a landmark settlement in 1998 that their products were lethal.
"Their interest now is to try to convince the public that they are truly concerned companies and that they care enough to fund important research at reputable institutions," said Dr. Michael Siegel, a Boston University School of Public Health researcher who has extensively studied the tobacco industry. "And, they're using the good name of these institutions to try to bolster their own scientific and public credibility."
BU's acceptance of research grants from Philip Morris was first disclosed Thursday in The Daily Free Press, a student newspaper at the university. In a statement issued Friday evening, the provost of BU's medical campus, Dr. Karen Antman, said the school had received $3.99 million from Philip Morris during the past decade and devoted it to the study of tobacco-related diseases.
"We adhere to the highest ethical conduct in research and pursue funding from a variety of sources for unrestricted medical research," Antman said in the statement. "Our research is conducted and the results are assessed against the standard benchmarks that apply to any research."
Philip Morris would not disclose how much money in total it distributed through the External Research Program from 2000 through last year, when it was ended. Nor would the company specify the amounts given to Massachusetts
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