The editor of the respected British Medical Journal explains why he has resigned his chair at Nottingham
Jump to full article: The Guardian (uk), 2001-05-21
Author: Richard Smith / rsmith@bmjgroup.com
Intro: 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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