Date:
Friday, January 19, 2007.
12:00 PM.<BR/>
Location: Encina Hall, 2nd floor, Room E-207, 616 Serra St., Stanford University<BR/><BR/>
<p>There are presently about 6 trillion cigarettes smoked every year. With 6 billion people on earth, this means a global consumption rate of about 1000 per person per year, man, woman and child. Cigarettes are about 3.5 inches long, which means that 350 million miles are smoked per annum--enough to make a continuous chain stretching from the earth to the sun and back--with enough left over for a couple of side trips to Mars. Or to circle the globe 15,000 times. More than 60 million kg of soot, tar, ash, nicotine, phenols, benzpyrene, hydrogen cyanide, formaldehyde and radioactive polonium-210 are inhaled by smokers every year, with well-known consequences: 5 million people die every year from smoking, a number expected to grow to 10 million/year over the next few decades. Tobacco killed an estimated 100 million in the twentieth century, a number that could rise to a billion in the present century--more than one percent of all who have lived since the evolution of Homo sapiens. How did we come into such a world, which London's Royal College of Physicians has characterized as the "present holocaust"? The modern cigarette must be seen as the outcome of mass marketing and mass deception, combined with creative feats of pharmacologic engineering. No small object has been more carefully designed. The tobacco industry has also fought research with research, with one goal being the construction of both popular and expert ignorance (agnotology). Litigation against the industry has become one way to curb tobacco use in the U.S, but thousands of scholars have also defended the industry in court (as expert witnesses), raising</p>
<p>novel issues of moral and social responsibility. Historians have also worked extensively for the industry, earning millions of dollars. The talk will compare the historiography of plaintiffs v. industry defendants in court, as part of a larger epidemiology of expertise, looking also at changing rhetorics of gigantism, archival eavescasting, and some of the intricacies of decoy, distraction and filibuster research. </p>
<p> Robert N. Proctor is Professor of the History of Science at Stanford University and the author of several books, including "Racial Hygiene: Medicine Under the Nazis", "Value-Free Science?", "Cancer Wars", and "The Nazi War on Cancer", several of which have been translated into various languages. His research coalesces around the history of scientific and medical controversy; he has also written on cancer and environmental policy, human origins, molecular coproscopy, racial hygiene, gemstone aesthetics, expert witnessing, the phonesthemics of science rhetoric, the morphology of phylogeny, and the "social production of ignorance" (agnotology). He has held positions as Senior Scholar in Residence at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C. (1994) and as Visiting Fellow at the Max-Planck-Institute for the History of Science in Berlin (1999-2000); he is also a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He is now working on a project on human origins (esp. changing interpretations of the oldest tools), a book called "Darwin in the History of Life", a book on figured stones ("Agate Eyes"), an edited volume on Agnotology, and a book on how, when and why tobacco hazards came to be recognized (and denied). He was the first historian to testify as an expert witness against the tobacco industry, and continues to testify as a witness in cases where "who knew what when" is in question.</p>
<p> Comment: Matthew Kohrman.</p>
<p> This talk is part of Stanford's Seminar on Science, Technology, and Society.</p><BR/>
Friday, January 19, 2007.
12:00 PM.<BR/>
Location: Encina Hall, 2nd floor, Room E-207, 616 Serra St., Stanford University<BR/><BR/>
<p>There are presently about 6 trillion cigarettes smoked every year. With 6 billion people on earth, this means a global consumption rate of about 1000 per person per year, man, woman and child. Cigarettes are about 3.5 inches long, which means that 350 million miles are smoked per annum--enough to make a continuous chain stretching from the earth to the sun and back--with enough left over for a couple of side trips to Mars. Or to circle the globe 15,000 times. More than 60 million kg of soot, tar, ash, nicotine, phenols, benzpyrene, hydrogen cyanide, formaldehyde and radioactive polonium-210 are inhaled by smokers every year, with well-known consequences: 5 million people die every year from smoking, a number expected to grow to 10 million/year over the next few decades. Tobacco killed an estimated 100 million in the twentieth century, a number that could rise to a billion in the present century--more than one percent of all who have lived since the evolution of Homo sapiens. How did we come into such a world, which London's Royal College of Physicians has characterized as the "present holocaust"? The modern cigarette must be seen as the outcome of mass marketing and mass deception, combined with creative feats of pharmacologic engineering. No small object has been more carefully designed. The tobacco industry has also fought research with research, with one goal being the construction of both popular and expert ignorance (agnotology). Litigation against the industry has become one way to curb tobacco use in the U.S, but thousands of scholars have also defended the industry in court (as expert witnesses), raising</p>
<p>novel issues of moral and social responsibility. Historians have also worked extensively for the industry, earning millions of dollars. The talk will compare the historiography of plaintiffs v. industry defendants in court, as part of a larger epidemiology of expertise, looking also at changing rhetorics of gigantism, archival eavescasting, and some of the intricacies of decoy, distraction and filibuster research. </p>
<p> Robert N. Proctor is Professor of the History of Science at Stanford University and the author of several books, including "Racial Hygiene: Medicine Under the Nazis", "Value-Free Science?", "Cancer Wars", and "The Nazi War on Cancer", several of which have been translated into various languages. His research coalesces around the history of scientific and medical controversy; he has also written on cancer and environmental policy, human origins, molecular coproscopy, racial hygiene, gemstone aesthetics, expert witnessing, the phonesthemics of science rhetoric, the morphology of phylogeny, and the "social production of ignorance" (agnotology). He has held positions as Senior Scholar in Residence at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C. (1994) and as Visiting Fellow at the Max-Planck-Institute for the History of Science in Berlin (1999-2000); he is also a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He is now working on a project on human origins (esp. changing interpretations of the oldest tools), a book called "Darwin in the History of Life", a book on figured stones ("Agate Eyes"), an edited volume on Agnotology, and a book on how, when and why tobacco hazards came to be recognized (and denied). He was the first historian to testify as an expert witness against the tobacco industry, and continues to testify as a witness in cases where "who knew what when" is in question.</p>
<p> Comment: Matthew Kohrman.</p>
<p> This talk is part of Stanford's Seminar on Science, Technology, and Society.</p><BR/>