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• Frederick Seitz, Physicist Who Led Skeptics of Global Warming, Dies at 96  

Frederick Seitz, a renowned physicist who led both the National Academy of Sciences and Rockefeller University and became a prominent skeptic on the issue of global warming, died Sunday in Manhattan. He was 96 and lived in Key West, Fla. . . .

From 1978 to 1988, Dr. Seitz was a member of the medical research committee of the R. J. Reynolds Tobacco Company. His work for the company was the subject of a 2006 article in Vanity Fair magazine that criticized what it called an "overlap" between scientists who deny climate change and "tobacco executives who denied the dangers of smoking."

The article, by Mark Hertsgaard, said that Dr. Seitz had helped R. J. Reynolds "give away $45 million to fund medical research in the 1970s and 1980s," studies that "avoided the central health issue" of smoking and "served the tobacco industry's purposes."

Dr. Seitz called the charges "ridiculous, completely wrong." In an article for the technology journal TCSDaily, he wrote, "The money was all spent on basic science, medical science," citing in particular research on mad cow disease and tuberculosis and for the work of the Nobel Prize winner Stanley B. Prusiner, the discoverer of prion, an agent that causes brain and neural infections.

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