Vanity Scare

http://www.tcsdaily.com/article.aspx?id=041406F

The headline was certainly eye-grabbing. "Scientist Who Spearheaded Attacks on Global Warming Also Directed $45M Tobacco Industry Effort to Hide Health Impacts of Smoking." 

So read an email to reporters and journalists from an environmental group trumpeting a report in the May issue of Vanity Fair by the writer Mark Hertsgaard. What made the accusation even juicier is that the scientist is Frederick Seitz, the former president of the prestigious National Academy of Sciences and the former President of Rockefeller University, the highly regarded New York-based research institute. Seitz is emeritus professor at Rockefeller and still lives in a Rockefeller University apartment. He is 94 years old. 

The article in Vanity Fair is part of a so-called "Green issue" that includes a call to arms from Al Gore and friendly profiles on climate change alarmists such as NASA's Jim Hansen, Ed Begley Jr., Bette Midler, Ed Norton and many others. Since global warming is a "threat graver than terrorism," the magazine tells readers on its cover, it's cool to want to fight global warming. "Green is the new black," Vanity Fair tells us.

In keeping with that spirit, the magazine is trying to blacken permanently the reputation of Seitz, one of America's highly regarded scientists, for not toeing the fashionable line on global warming.

To find out if the startling claim was true -- that Seitz "directed a 45M tobacco industry effort to hide health impacts of smoking" -- I called him at his apartment in Manhattan. Unless there is more to the story, the accusation appears to be a willful distortion, if not an outright lie.

"That's ridiculous, completely wrong," Seitz told me. "The money was all spent on basic science, medical science," he said.

According to Seitz, the CEO of RJ Reynolds -- the tobacco company -- was on the board of Rockefeller University while Seitz was a full-time employee there. "He was not a scientist," Seitz said of the executive, but he believed in supporting the University's dedication to basic research -- in a little over a century, Rockefeller University  HYPERLINK "http://www.rockefeller.edu/awards/nobel/laureates.php" has had 23 Nobel Prize winners affiliated with it, in fields of medicine and chemistry. RJ Reynolds allocated $5 million a year to Seitz to direct basic research. 

To figure out how to distribute the money, Seitz says he assembled some top folks in different fields of scientific research -- such as  HYPERLINK "http://history.nih.gov/exhibits/bowman/BioShannon.htm" James Shannon, the director of the National Institutes of Health for 13 years, and  HYPERLINK "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maclyn_McCarty" Maclyn McCarty, the legendary geneticist -- to help direct the funds. 

What kind of research did they support? Seitz mentioned the work of  HYPERLINK "http://nobelprize.org/medicine/laureates/1997/prusiner-autobio.html" Stanley Prusiner, who won the Nobel prize for his research into prions (Prusiner even thanks Seitz and RJ Reynolds in his Nobel Prize acceptance speech which you can read  HYPERLINK "http://nobelprize.org/medicine/laureates/1997/prusiner-autobio.html" here: (http://nobelprize.org/medicine/laureates/1997/prusiner-autobio.html). 

When I asked Seitz if he ever spent money to try to debunk a link between smoking and ill-health, he said no. When I asked him if he himself had ever denied a link between smoking and cancer, Seitz (who, remember, is almost 100 years old) again said no and told me "my father was a 19^th century man, and even he told me from when I was young that there was a connection between smoking and cancer" and that "we often talked about the hazards of smoking." In other words, Seitz was aware of the ill-effects of smoking for a very long time, and has never tried to deny that.

And it sounds like Vanity Fair isn't the only media arm that is trying to go after Seitz. Seitz told me a public television crew had come by to interview him and one of the crew members said to him "you use dirty money." When I asked Seitz what he thought of that, he said "no money is dirty; it's what you use it for" that matters. And for Seitz, he was directing funds to breakthrough research on mad cow disease, tuberculosis and other diseases. 

The writer of the attack on Seitz, Mark Hertsgaard, has been writing alarmist articles about climate change for some time now, so it's not altogether surprising he would attack someone whose views he does not share -- although the brazenness of the distortions in his accusations is extraordinary, even by alarmist standards. 

What's strange is that the NASA scientist Jim Hansen -- most famous of late for claiming he has been muzzled by the Bush administration for raising his concerns about climate change -- would participate in the attack on Seitz. Hansen participated in a press conference this week with Hertsgaard and activists from a green group during which they announced the startling "revelation" about Seitz. When a noted government scientist participates in the sort of character assassination attempted on Dr. Seitz, something is truly rotten in the state of American science.

The truth is that Americans are a lot smarter than Vanity Fair thinks they are. For a decade now, the alarmists have been jumping up and down and saying, "Look at me! The Earth is burning up!" Research has continued into climate change, but precipitous steps at mitigation have wisely been avoided, and increasing attention is being paid to technology and adaptation measures. The alarmists are unhappy. The tactic of personal intimidation has been a popular, though ineffective weapon in their arsenal. Now, they are trying to make global warming fashionable by employing personal smear tactics in what is supposed to be the most fashionable of American magazines. How gauche.

Nick Schulz is Editor of TCS Daily