<nettime> Swedish scientist "agent" for the tobacco industry

[Karl-Erik Tallmo <tallmo@nisus.se>]

Hello all,

I have just finished translating an article about a Swedish professor 
accused of having secretely worked for the tobacco industry at an 
international level during 30 years - so I thought I might share this 
story with the list.

The professor in question is not just any of the tobacco industry's 
secret "consultants"; he has been in a key position, for instance 
supervising the Philip Morris owned research institute INBIFO in 
Cologne, while at the same time being employed at environmental 
medicine institutions in Geneva and Gothenburg.

Karl-Erik Tallmo



---------------------------------------------

PHILIP MORRIS ASSIGNED SECRET GRANTS TO SWEDISH PROFESSOR

(from Swedish journal "Dagens Forskning" no. 12, 2002)


A respected Swedish scientist has been under quite heavy fire the 
last year - in Switzerland. Ragnar Rylander, professor of 
environmental medicine in Gothenburg, is also engaged at the 
university of Geneva, where he has been doing research on the 
connections between environmental tobacco smoke and lung disease, 
research that has been secretely funded by the tobacco company Philip 
Morris. Professor Rylander has been accused of manipulating his 
studies to suit his covert financier, and of thus partaking in a 
"scientific fraud without precedent".

Almost nothing has been written about this case in the Swedish press, 
but in Switzerland this "l'affaire Rylander" has been a serial story 
during the last 14 months. The latest news is that Rylander's 
sharpest critics, two gentlemen from the anti-tobacco organizations 
CIPRET-Geneve and OxyGeneve, Jean-Charles Rielle and Pascal Diethelm 
respectively, were sued for defamation by professor Rylander. This 
was brought on because of what they say at their web site 
"Prevention" (http://www.prevention.ch/) about fraud and big money. 
Although they presented a lot of documentation, for instance 
correspondence between Dr Rylander and Philip Morris' main office in 
Richmond, Virginia, which confirmed much of their allegations, they 
were at the end of May found guilty of defamation, which came as a 
surprise to most observers.

According to a study from 2001 by Chung-Yol Lee and Stanton Glantz at 
the University of California, Ragnar Rylander has, however, been the 
key figure among the so-called consultants of the tobacco industry. A 
document from 1991 shows that the budget which was then allocated to 
him was 60,000 dollars a year as an unrestricted research grant and 
90,000 dollars a year consultancy. The same document also has this 
comment: "This is a commitment: he gets paid this amount regardless 
of what we ask him to do."


Read the whole article (with links to lots of tobacco industry documents) at

http://www.nisus.se/archive/020610e.html



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    KARL-ERIK TALLMO, Swedish writer, lecturer
   
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