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Cigarette company paid for lung-cancer study - On Deadline  

A prominent scientist accepted money from the tobacco industry through a hastily created non-profit group that helped finance research that suggested CT scans could boost the long-term survival rates of lung cancer patients, The New York Times reports.

"Small print at the end of the study, published in The New England Journal of Medicine, noted that it had been financed in part by a little-known charity called the Foundation for Lung Cancer: Early Detection, Prevention & Treatment," the paper says. "A review of tax records by The New York Times shows that the foundation was underwritten almost entirely by $3.6 million in grants from the parent company of the Liggett Group, maker of Liggett Select, Eve, Grand Prix, Quest and Pyramid cigarette brands."

Dr. Claudia Henschke, a cancer researcher at Weill Cornell Medical College, was the beneficiary of this company's largess. She and her collaborator, Dr. David Yankelevitz, deny that they tried to hide the source of their funding.

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