Cornell’s ties to Big Tobacco amount to a crisis of credibility for the University. Early last month, The Sun reported that nearly $1 million of funding in the plant breeding and genetics department came from Philip Morris USA, one of the world’s largest tobacco corporations. Cornell’s image is additionally under fire at the hands of recent revelations that a Weill Cornell lung cancer study received funding from Big Tobacco via an entity — ironically dubbed “The Lung Cancer Foundation” — that effectively acted as a shell company to obscure the dubious identities of the study’s benefactors.
The Cornell press shop’s contention that Big Tobacco’s funding of plant biology and lung cancer research is OK doesn’t hold. The University’s line is that the research remains above-board: the donations were disclosed and disseminated, and the donors didn’t have any meaningful control over the study.
Whether or not this is true is, in the instance of tobacco, beside the point. Liggett and Philip Morris (and, incidentally, Lorillard — the former corporate home of Trustee Andrew H. Tisch ’71) are tobacco companies. The rules that protect Cornell’s other corporate donors don’t apply.
We live in an age when tobacco companies’ P.R. machines race to proclaim anti-smoking messages like “there is no safe cigarette” and “smoking causes lung cancer.” Yet these same companies remain active. Smoking remains the leading preventable cause of death in the United States. And Big Tobacco, despite its Janus-faced spin doctoring in the West, is at this very moment rapidly expanding into the developing world. More than two-thirds of Chinese men smoke, and a recent British study suggests smoking could eventually kill one-third of young male Chinese.
The fact remains that gifts from Big Tobacco are essentially blood money. Any gift from a tobacco company is money that was made on the lives, addictions and subsequent deaths of millions of people worldwide. It is money made by companies that — since at least mid-century — have, despite their pleas to the contrary, been fully cognizant of the addictiveness and deadliness of their product.
It is also money made by preying upon those who can least afford the costs of ill health. Nicotine addiction disproportionately effects the working class and, more pronouncedly, those living below the poverty line.
The Skorton Administration’s professed insistence on leaving politics out of science is admirable, but this isn’t about politics — it’s about life and death. Research can satisfy the strictest standard of transparency, but the fact remains that Big Tobacco is no ordinary corporate partner.
President Skorton is a physician. He knows smoking kills. Most likely, he has seen the ill effects of tobacco himself. Declining funding from Big Tobacco is, like divesting from Darfur, a moral issue. In either case, Cornell ought not to lend legitimacy to an entity complicit in unnecessary, premature deaths.
Worldwide, the most rapidly-rising causes of premature death are HIV and tobacco. We hope that if AIDS were produced by a major corporate lobby, Cornell would disassociate itself. We hold Big Tobacco in the same category.