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Tobacco Science Wars [Item not online] 

THE debate over cigarettes and public health broke new ground with the release last year of two reports on the danger tobacco use poses for nonsmokers. The National Academy of Sciences (NAS) and the US, Surgeon General found that exposure to other peoples' cigarette smoke may have lethal consequences. The tobacco industry has reacted strongly, attacking not only this information, but the scientists behind it.

In a recent interview, two outspoken scientists, James Repace of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and Stanton A, Glantz of the University of California at San Francisco, accused the tobacco industry of grossly misusing scientific data. . . .

The Tobacco Institute, the industry's arm in Washington, claims it is "anti-smoking activists" who are guilty of abusing the scientific process. The Institute made such charges in a 53-page booklet in December 1986 ("Tobacco Smoke and the Nonsmoker: Scientific Integrity At the Crossroads"). It says, among other things, that anti-smoking advocates forced a scientific workshop at Georgetown University to be cancelled last year because it wa sponsored by industry.

Repace responded in an interview with Science by laying out his own version of the propaganda war. As he began he was hit unexpectedly with what he calls "the most powerful threat that can be made against a government employee." On 12 March, Representative Don Sundquist (R-TN) sent a letter to the head of EPA. Lee Thomas, denouncing Repace for personal misconduct. . . .

He was shaken by the letter, however, because it has triggered a full-scale ethics inquiry. He says, "I now face a protracted investigation. Even if I am fully exonerated, it will give my supervisors extra work. They may ask, 'Do we really want someone who causes this kind of trouble?'" The information on fees in Sundquist's letter, according to Repace, is highly detailed, the kind a detective might dig up. "I wonder where he got it."

According to McNamara, "We asked around town who this guy was, and obviously we asked the tobacco industry. They provided us with this information, which we sent to the administrator" of EPA.

Repace says this is the latest of many examples of industry meddling in the scientific debate. . . .

There have been several skirmishes over the propriety of such conferences in recent years. The bitterest broke out last summer at Georgetown University. Sorell Schwartz, a Georgetown pharmacologist and tobacco industry consultant, put together a group of experts for the industry called the "Indoor Air Pollution Advisors' Group" in the spring of 1985. Its members, all academics, have been flown around the country by the tobacco industry to speak about the weakness of the data on environmental tobacco smoke, . . .

Through inadvertence, Schwartz says, he failed to have an assistant notify speakers that the conference was sponsored in part by cigarette companies. For other technical reasons, he also failed to print this information in the program.

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