Favored Scientists Got Cigarette Firm Funding : Research: Supposedly independent council steered grants to studies that might aid industry, documents show.

Cigarette company lawyers for years ran a “special projects” division within the putatively independent Council for Tobacco Research, steering grants to favored scientists whose research might be used to defend the industry from legal attack, internal documents show.

Documents from the files of Brown & Williamson Tobacco Co. show that top lawyers from the major cigarette firms during the 1970s and ‘80s made “special project” grants to scores of scientists and research organizations, bypassing a scientific advisory board of outside experts.

“The industry research effort has included special projects designed to find scientists and medical doctors who might serve as industry witnesses in lawsuits or in a legislative forum,” said B&W; general counsel Ernest Pepples in a 1978 memo to then-company Chairman Joseph E. Eden.

Tobacco industry officials long have asserted the council’s independence from business and legal concerns, saying its grants are based on scientific merit alone. The claim has been central to the defense of smoker-death cases, in which industry lawyers have cited lavish support for the council as proof of an honest quest for knowledge about the effects of tobacco products.

Neither Pepples nor officials of the Council for Tobacco Research, based in New York, could be reached for comment. However, Tom Fitzgerald, a spokesman for Brown & Williamson, said: “We believe the Council for Tobacco Research operates with integrity and funds meritorious research by independent scientists who are then encouraged to publish it.”

Council materials are among reams of B&W; documents recently provided to congressional tobacco foes Reps. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) and Henry A. Waxman (D-Los Angeles), and to several news organizations, including The Times. B&W--the; No. 3 U.S. cigarette firm, which markets Barclay, Kool and other brands--says the documents were stolen by a former paralegal for a law firm that represents the company.

The council will be the focus of a hearing today before Waxman’s House subcommittee on health and environment.

Originally called the Tobacco Industry Research Council, the CTR was the industry’s response to early studies linking smoking and lung cancer--a linkage so unspeakable for tobacco executives that B&W;’s parent, British-American Tobacco, for a time used the code word “ZEPHYR” to describe the disease.

The council was launched in 1954 with ads in 448 U.S. newspapers. Under the heading, “A Frank Statement to Cigarette Smokers,” the tobacco firms proclaimed: “We accept an interest in people’s health as a basic responsibility, paramount to every other consideration in our business.”

According to the announcement, the research council would get at the truth of the health allegations by investigating “all phases of tobacco use and health.” An advisory panel of experts “disinterested in the cigarette industry” would screen research proposals for scientific merit. In the years since, the body has provided more than $223 million in research grants, according to the council’s 1993 annual report.

The new disclosures are not the first to raise questions about the council. Tobacco foes in the past have denounced it as a public relations ploy meant to promote the fiction of a continuing debate on the health effects of smoking.

In a candid 1974 memo introduced in a trial over the death several years ago of a New Jersey smoker, the research director of Lorillard Inc. acknowledged: “Historically, the joint industry-funded smoking and health research programs have been selected . . . for various purposes, such as public relations, political relations, position for litigation etc.”

But the newly leaked papers provide the most detailed information yet on the council’s role in industry legal strategy.

The documents include dozens of letters from attorneys with two big industry law firms--Shook, Hardy & Bacon in Kansas City, Mo.; and Jacob, Medinger & Finnegan in New York--seeking approval of CTR “special project” grants for various researchers. The letters were sent to Pepples and top lawyers for the other big cigarette firms.

At least some of the “special project” grants went to researchers studying alternative explanations for high rates of heart disease and lung cancer among smokers.

Lawyers for Shook, Hardy, and Jacob, Medinger declined to discuss details of the special project grants, although Shook, Hardy attorney Gary Long said the research was not secret and grantees were allowed to publish their findings.

The documents show that at least one researcher rejected for regular funding from the council turned to the lawyers instead.

According to the papers, after Louisiana State University researcher Dr. Henry Rothschild was turned down in 1981, industry lawyers granted CTR special project funding for his research on genetic and environmental factors in lung cancer.

Rothschild later testified for the industry before Congress, according to the documents, which include a 1978 journal article, co-authored by Rothschild, that criticized as dubious such advice from doctors as “the complete elimination of cigarettes.”

“I don’t think there were any restrictions placed on what we found,” Rothschild said in a telephone interview Wednesday when asked about his special project funding. “There was no quid pro quo.”

A perennial recipient of special project funds was Carl C. Seltzer, formerly of the Harvard University School of Public Health. The documents include four newspaper clippings and four television news transcripts chronicling a trip to Australia in May, 1979, in which Seltzer’s view that smoking does not cause heart disease was widely quoted.

“Reports from colleagues in Australia and New Zealand indicate that Dr. Seltzer’s visit ‘was a great success,’ ” said a Shook, Hardy lawyer in a letter to Pepples.

“The CTR supported all kinds of research,” including research “contrary to the interests of the tobacco companies,” Seltzer, now semi-retired, said in a telephone interview Wednesday. “I think that’s a very important thing.”

Other documents include a position paper by foes of California’s Proposition 10, a smoking control initiative defeated by voters in November, 1980. The paper, issued by a group called Californians Against Regulatory Excess, quoted several recipients of special project funds as debunking the problems of secondhand smoke--but did not disclose their industry ties.

The documents also reflect the council’s legal significance to the industry as it braced for a surge in claims that tobacco caused smokers’ deaths.

In 1978 memos to top B&W; executives, Pepples explained how CTR solved a huge legal quandary involving the industry’s need to both fund research and be able to dismiss adverse findings.

The CTR “avoids the research dilemma presented to a responsible manufacturer of cigarettes, which on the one hand needs to know the state of the art and on the other hand cannot afford the risk of having in-house work turn sour,” Pepples wrote on Sept. 29, 1978.

“The point here,” he wrote, “is the value of having CTR doing work in a non-directed and independent fashion as contrasted with work either in-house or under B&W; contract which, if it goes wrong, can become the smoking pistol in a lawsuit.”

On at least one occasion, however, Pepples voiced alarm that the council had funded sensitive “red light” projects without the companies’ knowledge. These were biological tests related to cancer causation, including an effort to produce tumors in mice by injecting them with condensate from tobacco smoke.

“I confess that I was somewhat jarred by the revelation to me about tests on mice through the CTR,” Pepples said in a March 10, 1977, memo to another B&W; executive.

“Jack Roemer (a top R.J. Reynolds lawyer) also finds that incongruous. He has checked with Ed Jacob (of the Jacob, Medinger law firm). . . . Ed was unaware of the fact of tests on mice,” Pepples wrote.

“Pursuing the thought just a bit further, these tests are so-called red light tests,” Pepples wrote. “No matter what our explanation happened to be, the fact of the red light in our own hands would be a serious burden to the tobacco industry if it came out in legislative hearings or in litigation.”

Tobacco foes said the disclosures debunk industry claims about the council.

“It’s an amazing situation, because to have a group of lawyers basically selecting scientific research . . . completely goes against the normal process by which scientific investigations are conducted,” said Stanton Glantz, a University of California at San Francisco medical professor and longtime industry critic. The documents, he said, “really reveal that the CTR as it was presented to the public was just a sham.”