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WILLIAMS: VCU, Trani are a lot like school mascot  

VCU has accepted research money from Philip Morris, which has the right to review any proposed publication. It's not alone in taking tobacco money -- Philip Morris last year gave $25 million to the University of Virginia.

VCU, with its medical center and cancer-research facility, does not want to be "in bed" with a historically duplicitous industry that produces a public health hazard.

I don't pretend to be impartial. Before his death in 1992, my father spent time at Medical College of Virginia Hospitals as a lung-cancer patient, blocks away from what would become the Philip Morris research and technology center in the Virginia Biotechnology Research Park.

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