Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Merchants of Doubt, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Science, Trust, and Public Policy
Capitalism and the Environment
Media Bias
Certainty, Doubt, and the Scientific Method
Summary
Analysis
In May 1979, just after his retirement, distinguished atomic scientist Frederick Seitz met with a group of R.J. Reynolds tobacco executives to learn about their new biomedical research program. The companies would be funding dozens of labs to study degenerative diseases like cancer and diabetes. The executives asked Seitz to help them choose which researchers to fund. Seitz hired two advisors: James A. Shannon, a prominent physician and former director of the National Institutes of Health, and Maclyn McCarty, a distinguished bacteriologist who helped discover the function of DNA. Seitz, Shannon, and McCarty decided to fund promising but underappreciated young scientists, like the lung researcher Martin J. Cline and the protein researcher Stanley B. Prusiner.
Oreskes and Conway begin with Fred Seitz’s work for the tobacco industry because this is where he first perfected the doubt-mongering techniques that he later brought to other fields. However, he didn’t invent these techniques: instead, he learned them from the industry’s existing anti-science marketing strategy. In fact, his research campaign exemplifies how destructive corporations use science to fight science: they create an air of scientific legitimacy around their bogus claims by paying highly-respected researchers to join their side.
Themes
Seitz’s program funded legitimate, groundbreaking research. But its true purpose was to defend the tobacco industry by challenging the scientific consensus about tobacco’s health effects, linking degenerative disease to other causes to distract the public, and funding scientists who could later testify in court on behalf of tobacco companies. This strategy was already tried-and-true: even though scientists proved the link between cigarettes and cancer in the 1950s, for more than two decades afterward, every single lawsuit against tobacco companies failed thanks to scientists’ testimony.
Tobacco companies couldn’t directly refute the conclusive evidence that cigarettes cause cancer. Instead, they distracted from it by presenting alternate explanations for the health problems they caused, as well as by paying scientists to make unscientific claims on their behalf. The corporations consistently evaded responsibility because scientific proof doesn’t necessarily translate cleanly into legal evidence. They depend on two different kinds of causality. Research can establish that smoking causes cancer in the population as a whole, but not that any individual gets cancer specifically because of their smoking.
Themes
In 1953, the American press began reporting on urgent new research showing that cigarette tar gave mice fatal cancer. (In fact, this line of research wasn’t new—the Nazis proved that cigarettes caused cancer in the 1930s.) Executives from several major tobacco companies met with a major public relations firm and agreed on a strategy: they would publicly deny the new scientific findings, spread positive messages about cigarettes, and fund their own research. They founded the Tobacco Industry Research Committee, which declared that the evidence linking cigarettes to cancer wasn’t yet conclusive. They also met with the nation’s top publishing executives to explain their “research program” and request more “balanced” coverage of the issue.
Oreskes and Conway turn to the very beginning of the tobacco controversy in order to understand the origins of the doubt-mongering strategy that corporations still use today. This strategy is public relations disguised as science: its purpose is not to discover new facts or advance the state of scientific knowledge, but rather to defend deadly (but highly profitable) products against the truth. In other words, they were fighting to preserve their business model: killing people by selling them poison. Tobacco executives specifically used their wealth, power, and connections to manipulate the media: they insisted that “balance” required giving their lies the same level of consideration as proven scientific facts. Needless to say, throughout the book, Oreskes and Conway will show how Fred Seitz, Fred Singer, and their associates recycled this same playbook for decades.
Themes
Researchers had definitively proven the link between cigarettes and cancer—and the tobacco executives knew it. But the Committee confused the media by flooding it with information and funding research into questions that were still unanswered (like why not all smokers get cancer). To lead the Committee, industry leaders chose Dr. Clarence Cook Little, a respected geneticist who believed that “genetic weakness” caused cancer. They promoted the work of Wilhelm C. Hueper, a prominent researcher at the National Cancer Institute, who often testified in court to help plaintiffs prove that the toxic building material asbestos (and not cigarettes) caused their cancer.
The Tobacco Industry Research Committee started by pursuing two key priorities: recruiting contrarian scientists and overwhelming the public with so much information that it would struggle to distinguish the truth from lies. Researchers like Little and Hueper couldn’t legitimately claim that cigarettes were safe, but they could convincingly blame cancer on other factors. Together, these tactics made the tobacco corporations’ misinformation appear just as legitimate as scientists’ actual peer-reviewed consensus.
Themes
Get the entire Merchants of Doubt LitChart as a printable PDF.
The Committee also sent out thousands of pamphlets full of loaded questions about cancer. For instance, the pamphlets asked why, if cigarettes caused lung cancer, different cities could have similar smoking rates but vastly different lung cancer rates. Of course, scientists already knew the answer (which is that many factors besides smoking cause lung cancer). But most journalists, politicians, and doctors didn’t. Thus, the pamphlets made settled science look like a lively, ongoing controversy. Moreover, the federal Fairness Doctrine required journalists to take balanced approaches to controversial issues, and when it came to cigarettes and cancer, they decided to “giv[e] equal weight to both sides, rather than giving accurate weight to both sides.”
The Committee’s loaded questions appeared to raise doubts about the link between cigarettes and cancer, but only because they seriously mischaracterized the existing research and distorted basic logical principles. The claim that cigarettes are safe because they don’t give every smoker cancer is illogical: common sense dictates that something can be harmful without harming everyone who comes into contact with it. So is the claim that, if cigarettes cause cancer, then different cities can’t have the same smoking rate but different lung cancer rates. No scientist seriously thought that cigarettes were the only cause of lung cancer. Ultimately, Oreskes and Conway argue that the media wrongly applied a political concept of “balance” (covering two legitimate, competing sides) to science (in which scientific consensus is legitimate, and baseless claims that go contrary to it are not).
Themes
Next, the Tobacco Industry Research Committee started funding researchers, medical students, and national medical associations. It got so close to the medical establishment that in 1962, the U.S. Surgeon General even gave it veto power over appointments for the Advisory Committee on Smoking and Health. Yet, after examining the scientific evidence, the panel unanimously concluded that tobacco smoking is the primary cause of lung cancer. (In fact, tobacco industry scientists had already reached the same conclusion years before.) In 1964, when the surgeon general revealed these findings at a press conference, he shocked the nation.
The tobacco industry’s primary goal was to prevent political leaders from building policy around the emerging research on cigarettes. Therefore, securing power in official public health committees was one of its foremost priorities. It succeeded, but it couldn’t stop officials from implementing effective policies. This is because, in the 1960s, public health committees were still bound by basic scientific principles—like valuing truth and evidence. Oreskes and Conway will later show that this is no longer the case today, thanks largely to the merchants of doubt.
Themes
In response to the growing controversy, rather than admitting the dangers of cigarettes, the Tobacco Industry Research Committee simply rebranded itself as the “Council for Tobacco Research” and started funding even more research. The more the evidence mounted, the harder the Council fought it. The U.S. government banned tobacco advertising and mandated warning labels on cigarette packaging, and smoking rates started to fall drastically. But tobacco companies were still extremely profitable—and very concerned about fighting off lawsuits. In fact, from 1954 to 1979, the industry won 125 lawsuits and lost zero. Its secret was to keep hiring renowned scientists and keep selling doubt.
The Committee’s tactics show that the tobacco industry wasn’t trying to legitimately challenge research about cigarettes on scientific grounds, but rather fighting to undermine it at any cost. Fortunately, the government chose to base its policy on the scientific evidence—as it should—and not on the industry’s distortions. However, the legal system didn’t yet catch up, because the standard of evidence necessary to regulate dangerous products is very different from the standard of evidence needed to win a legal case against the people who produce them. To regulate cigarettes, the government merely needed to show that they cause significant harm to the public in general, but to win a specific legal case, a plaintiff would have to show that cigarette companies specifically harmed particular individuals.
Themes
This is how the tobacco industry ended up hiring Frederick Seitz. His career helps explain why he agreed to join. After playing a major role in the Manhattan Project to build the atomic bomb and publishing leading textbooks in the 1940s, Seitz became president of the National Academy of Sciences, then Rockefeller University—which he left in 1979 to work for the R.J. Reynolds tobacco company, one of the university’s most generous donors. By this point, Seitz had fallen out with most of his colleagues over his support for the Vietnam War and nuclear proliferation. He also hated communism and viewed private industry as a better source of scientific funding than government grants. Ironically, he viewed the public’s animosity toward tobacco companies as part of a dangerous anti-science trend in American life. Finally, he believed that genetic defects cause disease, not the environment.
Fred Seitz began working at the intersection of science and policy very early in his career. This experience gave him the credibility and connections that enabled him to effectively defend the tobacco industry later on. In fact, World War II efforts like the Manhattan Project, and the similar programs that followed during the Cold War, ensured that the most conservative and pro-war physicists became the most prominent in public life. Seitz’s political leanings led him to turn against most of his scientific colleagues well before he began outright denying the validity of their research. In other words, his work for the tobacco industry was politically motivated: he saw it as part of a push for private industry to overtake the government as the primary patron of American science. He didn’t seem to care which companies were doing the funding, or what their underlying motives were.
Themes
After joining R.J. Reynolds, Frederick Seitz started giving out millions of dollars in research funding. But before each grant, he consulted with lawyers to ensure that the research would create useful “friendly witnesses” for tobacco industry lawsuits, like Martin J. Cline. As late as 1997, Cline testified at a trial that it’s impossible to link any individual’s smoking habit to their lung cancer—and admitted that he received $3 million in “gift[s]” from the tobacco industry. Because of friendly scientists like Cline, the tobacco industry avoided legal liability for decades.
Cline’s testimony shows that Seitz’s program succeeded: by supporting important research by legitimate scientists, it gave an air of credibility to completely illegitimate lies about cigarettes. The bottom line was money: tobacco companies paid respected scientists astronomical sums of money to lie in court. Even if the vast majority of scientists would refuse this kind of unethical conduct, the companies only needed a select few to embrace it in order to achieve their goals.
Themes
In 2006, courts finally recognized the tobacco industry’s research strategy as “part of a criminal conspiracy to commit fraud.” Industry scientists like Cline didn’t deserve a fair hearing in the media or court, Oreskes and Conway argue, because they didn’t make truly scientific claims. They never collected evidence, reached any conclusions, or went through peer review. They simply spread doubt. But it worked for more than 50 years. Since not all smokers die of smoking, the tobacco industry insisted that smoking doesn’t truly cause disease with certainty. And since scientists are always uncertain about something—like whatever research question they are investigating—the industry wrongly insisted that scientists aren’t sure about anything. Frederick Seitz kept using these same strategies for decades, starting with the George C. Marshall Institute.
The tobacco industry long fought off lawsuits related to its products because courts require a kind of certainty that even science often fails to provide—researchers had no way to link smoking to individual cases of cancer. However, lawsuits about the industry’s public relations practices succeeded because courts could prove with certainty that tobacco companies deliberately misled the public about their products. Still, the merchants of doubt largely succeeded: even though they didn’t altogether prevent the government from regulating tobacco products or holding tobacco companies accountable, they delayed both by decades. This meant decades of extra profit for tobacco companies—and decades of serious health consequences for the people who used their products. Ultimately, Oreskes and Conway have begun with the story of the tobacco industry in order to show how the “merchants of doubt” at the center of their book learned to replicate its strategies in other industries, even today.
Themes
