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Simon Chapman: It pays to have firm links 

Ethical problems arise when the research funding piper calls a tune that breaches transparency, independence and critical integrity, when knowledge generated is restricted to the sponsor or when the effort is a naked attempt to detract from ethically obnoxious conduct.

But what of engagement with corporations developing goods and services that sustain and enrich life, and which openly embrace university research ethics standards? Should the undeniable evidence of research corruption and the blunting of independence cruel the development and reputation of all responsible collaborative arrangements between industry and universities? Must willingness to take the corporate research dollar inevitably signify inherently compromised research standards? . .

I have taken the corporate dollar from two industries and in both cases have had to furiously fan the air from the waft of public criticism that assumes anything emanating from it must be dodgy.

Last year pharmaceutical company GlaxoSmithKline offered me and four colleagues $250,000 to fund research into ways of promoting smoking cessation. It wanted research to help it sell more nicotine replacement patches. We wanted to research ways that would help reduce the burden of illness caused by smoking. . .

Accepting the money has produced useful work that would not have been done otherwise. It has not turned us into obsequious lap-dogs gratefully slurping up their dollars. . .

The biggest losers in the corporatisation of research are those fields where commodities, patents or large workforces don't exist. Classics, philosophy, cultural studies, fine arts, social work and branches of medicine such as psychiatry and public health are unlikely to make money for sponsors and they will sink further into penury if affirmative public funding policies do not urgently recognise their importance.

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University supports home-grown talent 

Nottingham University is the latest establishment to offer support to students from less privileged backgrounds.

The university - recently criticised for taking up a sponsorship deal from British American Tobacco - is offering scholarships of £1,000 a year to undergraduates from the local area who are the first in their family to go to university. [This graph only]

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LEIGH: Clarke is not fit to lead the Tory party 

Back from Vietnam, Kenneth Clarke is expected to say whether he'll run for the Tory leadership. But it is difficult to understand why anyone in his party would vote for him. How will their fortunes improve if they are led by a moral defective with poor judgment?

For that is what Mr Clarke is. He was in Vietnam on behalf of British American Tobacco, who want to penetrate that third-world market and twist arms to be allowed to build a cigarette factory there. The former health secretary and chancellor gets, it seems, some £100,000 a year as BAT's deputy chairman. . .

BAT's disreputable behaviour was revealed in the Guardian last year following detective work by the Washington-based International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, who waded through 11,000 documents BAT was forced to hand over in their Guildford headquarters . . . And, Mr Clarke should be embarrassed to be reminded, some of the most incriminating files concern BAT's decade-long struggle to break open the market in the small, poor country of Vietnam from whence he has just returned. . .

And on his constituency turf of Nottingham, a deal with which his name has been linked has been brokered for the university to take a BAT donation of £3.8m. This has sent academics fleeing in droves from a "tainted" university.

Not only, therefore, is Clarke's morality inadequate. So is his political judgment. If Tories vote for him as their leader, they'll be gluttons for punishment.

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Research team moves from Nottingham university to the School of Pharmacy 

Professor David Thurston’s entire cancer research team is to leave Nottingham as a result of the university’s decision to accept money from a tobacco company to pay for business school developments.

Professor Thurston, a pharmacist who leads a 15-strong team developing new anti-tumour agents, announced his intention to leave the university some time ago, but the news that his team is leaving with him has been described as humiliating by Professor Malcolm Stevens, Nottingham’s head of cancer research, who is also a pharmacist. . .

The move has been welcomed by the School of Pharmacy’s head of medicinal chemistry, Professor Laurence Patterson. He says that Professor Thurston’s team will add critical mass to an already vibrant cancer research team, which has a product in phase I clinical trials.

The matter will not end there, so far as Nottingham university is concerned. Another, as yet unnamed principal researcher has already accepted a job at another university as a result of the BAT grant and his team is likely to go too.

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• University torn apart by £3.8m tobacco deal 

An English university is facing accusations that it has sold its good reputation for £3.8m from a tobacco company in a dispute that has divided its academic community.

The deal between Nottingham University and British American Tobacco has been described as "a terrible humiliation" for the university and prompted predictions of a mass exodus of staff because of its "ethically wrong" decision.

One senior university figure, the East Midlands MEP Mel Read, who resigned last week, is the latest in a long line of academics, lecturers and advisers to have severed their links with the university in protest at BAT's donation to set up Britain's first international centre for business ethics. . .

The deal has caused anger on the university's 330-acre parkland campus where, with 10 applications for every student place and an excellent research record, people usually try to get in, rather than get out. . .

Outrage at the decision is widespread, says Sandi Golbey, of the Association of University Teachers. In an AUT survey of more than 200 University of Nottingham lecturers, more than 80 per cent, agreed the donation had brought the university into disrepute. Ms Golbey said: "It is literally unbelievable that they have taken this money. BAT have a lot to gain by association with a university of the calibre of Nottingham. People will think that they can't be all bad if Nottingham will take their money."

The Student Union has called for university rules to be changed to ban future donations from tobacco companies. . .

The vice-chancellor, Sir Colin Campbell, has fully backed the project. The university insists it has done nothing wrong and believes the long-term benefits of establishing the International Centre for Corporate Social Responsibility will outweigh any short-term negative publicity.

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BAT is a legitimate company; the Treasury takes its money in tax and spends it on things like the NHS. Why is it wrong to take money from it and plough it into higher education?
Professor Ian Gow, head of the business school where the BAT's "International Centre for Corporate Social Responsibility" will be based. The Nottingham saga continues in, Cassidy, S., <I>University torn apart by £3.8m tobacco deal</I>

• MEP boycotts 'tobacco cash' university 

A member of the European Parliament has resigned as a special lecturer at a university which has accepted funding from a tobacco company. . .

Now the East Midlands Euro MP, Mel Read, has decided to resign as a special lecturer at the university's adult education centre and as a member of the University Court - a formal body made up of local dignitaries.

When news of the deal broke, Ms Read - herself a graduate of Nottingham University - wrote to the vice chancellor, Sir Colin Campbell, to her express her concerns.

The reply was, she said, "rather anodyne" and merely suggested another university would have taken the cash if Nottingham had not.

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• University cancer team quits over tobacco aid 

SIXTEEN medical staff have resigned from Nottingham University in protest at the acceptance of a multimillion-pound grant from a tobacco company.

Malcolm Stevens, the university’s head of cancer research, described the departures as humiliating. He said yesterday that the resignation of David Thurston and his team of 15 researchers would make Nottingham a “minor player” in the cancer field.

He said that the university’s decision to accept a £3.8 million grant from British American Tobacco was misguided and that it had been made without consultation with academic staff. “We have always aspired at Nottingham to be a major international player in cancer research,” he said. “But as a result of the university’s decision I think we will now be a very minor player. It is a disastrous humiliation.”

Nottingham’s decision to accept the BAT money to set up Britain’s first international centre for corporate social responsibility has already been widely condemned by academics and students at the university. . .

Sources at the university said yesterday that unease about the BAT grant was growing even among other clinicians. A letter calling for BAT’s money to be given back is being circulated among its paediatrics experts.

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We have always aspired at Nottingham to be a major international player in cancer research. But as a result of the university’s decision I think we will now be a very minor player. It is a disastrous humiliation.
Malcolm Stevens, Nottingham university’s head of cancer research, on the resignation of David Thurston and his team of 15 researchers over the BAT "Centre for Corporate Social Responsibility." WRIGHT, O.<I>University cancer team quits over tobacco aid</I>

I don’t think there’s any evidence of a general exodus of people.
Unidentified Nottingham University spokesman, after yet another departure over the BAT "Centre for Corporate Social Responsibility," this time by an entire team. WRIGHT, O.<I>University cancer team quits over tobacco aid</I>

CRACE: Free and fair 

There's been plenty of hand-wringing and heart-bleeding, but up till now precious little action. So Richard Smith's recent resignation from his post as professor of medical journalism at Nottingham University in protest at the institution's links with British American Tobacco came as a rare and welcome example of someone putting his money where his mouth was - and taking a principled stand on the ethics of academic responsibility.

Except there was no money involved, as Smith's post was both part-time and unpaid. Which perhaps made his decision to leave a trifle easier; it has one wondering how many other academics would have loved to follow suit but, with families and mortgages to support, were left to choke on BAT's filtered largesse.

Big business and universities are a done deal. Scarcely a week goes by without some university announcing the creation of a new sponsored chair

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BARLOW: BODY AND MIND: When the devil invites you to dine 

All of which is not to pretend that the way the new Nottingham University International Centre for Corporate Social Responsibility has been funded isn't disturbing. Or that the editor of the British Medical Journal, who resigned a professorship in medical journalism at the university over this very issue, was not right to do so.

After the chilling cash-for-letters scandal of the 1980s, in which tobacco companies paid established scientists to write letters to medical journals playing down the dangers of passive smoking, medical journalists tend to be acutely sensitive about the ways in which corporate money can be used to manipulate public debate.

But, even as one remembers this, it's salutary to note that the out-of-control university-industrial complex remains for most university scientists a sideshow: and, for the rest of us one therefore presumes, more of a psychological condition for the earnestly minded, than a grave, ubiquitous reality.

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Row over Nottingham tobacco cash deepens 

The decision by Nottingham University to accept a £3.8m ($5.3m) donation from British American Tobacco (BAT) has led directly to the loss of cancer research funding and prestigious research staff from the university.

The money, which is to be used to fund an international centre for corporate responsibility, has sparked a furore among antismoking campaigners and cancer researchers. . .

The Cancer Research Campaign has decided that £1.5m—which was to be raised through an appeal to help build new research facilities in Nottingham—will now be donated to Newcastle University instead. The decision follows a poll of the campaign's regional supporters in which over 90% said that, in the light of BAT's donation, they no longer felt comfortable raising funds for Nottingham.

The university has also lost a team of cancer researchers led by Professor David Thurston, who has resigned from his post as professor of experimental cancer chemotherapy and director of the Gene Targeted Drug Design Research Group. Professor Thurston has relocated his whole team to the London School of Pharmacy. It is understood that Nottingham's decision to accept the funding was a factor in his departure. . .

Students at the university have also protested at the decision to accept BAT's money.

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Outrageous Fortune 

Some people feel that corporate sponsorship of scientific research amounts to the purchase of it. Editors of scientific journals reckon that vigilance is the answer

NEVER look a gift horse in the mouth, goes the adage, and the University of Nottingham, in England, certainly did not. . .

To Nottingham’s critics, allowing a firm from one of the world’s least socially responsible industries to sponsor a centre for the study of corporate responsibility smacks of the ludicrous. But such curiosities are not new. Alfred Nobel made his fortune from dynamite, yet the Nobel Peace prize is a coveted tribute. . .

Phil Campbell, the editor of Nature, says that within a few months the journal will create a policy on the disclosure of financial interests. . .

These editors are quick to point out that such requests, and the disclosures they elicit, are not a watertight way of ensuring the integrity of science. A scientist who is determined to conceal a conflict of interest will have little trouble doing so. But there is a natural check on such trickery—if an observant reader points out the ruse, the journal will publish a correction.

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SMITH: A tainted university 

Can you think of a more inappropriate use of tobacco profits than funding a centre for corporate responsibility? Surely this is David Lodge going too far in a satire on modern universities? It's absurd that a university run by academics, not surrealists, should take this money from an industry that has killed 100m people and behaved more unethically than any other.

Yet Nottingham University has done just that. So I have resigned from my unpaid and part-time post as professor of medical journalism in the university. . .

An excellent study for the centre to undertake would be into the corporate responsibility of BAT. The study would reveal, I suggest, corporate irresponsibility on a Mephistophelean scale.

But will the centre undertake such a study? I'll be surprised - but impressed - if it does. It would be so unEnglish and so impolite. How could Sir Colin dine with his new friends (who include Kenneth Clarke) after such a study had been published? Despite all the rhetoric about academic freedom, BAT has bought off a potential critic. . .

Worse than denying the evidence, the tobacco companies systematically and often covertly tried to undermine the science that was causing its problems. Academics around the world have been bought and given the resources to create confusion. Usually the links of these academics were not apparent. The industry infiltrated universities, medical journals, newspapers and even the World Health Organisation.

In the 1980s the industry created the Health Promotion Research Fund, chaired by a professor of medicine. . .

Nottingham University is being used and besmirched.

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Editor resigns after Internet poll 

The donation aroused controversy, however, because of the proven harmful medical effects of smoking, with many arguing that the money was "tainted."

"Clearly this is not a 'clean' source of funding for the university," said BMJ-reader Dr. Mary Black, who voted for Smith to resign.

Britain's Cancer Research Campaign (CRC) applauded Smith's decision.

"Accepting tainted tobacco cash has backfired on the university," said the CRC's director-general Professor Gordon McVie. "They are facing a huge exodus of good staff and sponsorship."

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Resigning matter / The British Medical Journal's editor resigns from a professorship after balloting readers over a tobacco company donation 

Philip Dalling, head of public affairs at Nottingham University, says that while the university respects Smith's point of view, it has no intention of returning the money.

"The University accepted the donation from BAT in December," he says. "BAT is a legal company wishing to support an important area of research. We believe that it is genuine support. There are no strings attached."

Dalling points out that the university acted within guidelines issued by the Cancer Research Campaign (CRC) and the UK's Committee of Vice-Chancellors and Principals (CVCP) which advise British universities on when and how it is acceptable to take money from the tobacco industry. "We followed that protocol to the letter," Dalling says.

But Jean King, Director of Education for the CRC, disagrees. "What they've done is turn around the fact that it doesn't contravene the letter of it to sound as if we're supporting them," she says. "It is totally against the spirit of the guidelines."

The CRC-CVCP protocol advises that funding that is "capable of showing the tobacco industry in a favourable light" should be rejected. Nottingham University point out that the research centre will not carry BAT's name, but King counters that the news of the donation was issued in a press release.

"The initial intention was to gain favourable publicity," she says. "[Tobacco companies] are trying to reinvent themselves as socially responsible when clearly they aren't."

BAT declined to comment on their motivation. "It is a matter for Nottingham University," says a spokeswoman. . .

Richard Nicholson, editor of the Bulletin of Medical Ethics, says he would find such grants acceptable if the money was put to good purpose and the donor had no say in how the money was used. . .

He says one way the University could convince observers that it will not be influenced by tobacco industry interests would be to make their first project an in-depth study of the social responsibility of the tobacco industry. But it remains to be seen whether the new centre will be willing to tackle such issues.

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SMITH: University should not take tobacco millions 

Nottingham University looks either grasping, naive, or foolish; all are bad for a university that wants to be a world leader in thinking and study.

The vice-chancellor seems to have convinced himself that taking the money is acceptable because the industry is legal and because Universities UK (the committee of vice-chancellors and principals) and the Cancer Research Campaign say it’s all right (a curious position for an organisation that is supposedly doing all it can to reduce deaths from cancer).

But many other people and organisations - particularly those concerned about health - will think it entirely wrong to take the money.

It’s thus the medical school that will suffer, while it’s the business school that gets the money. The medical school has in a remarkably short time achieved a high reputation among British medical schools. The university now puts that at risk.

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