Tobacco Foe Under Attack
UCSF scientist says the battle has gotten personal

Joan Ryan, Chronicle Staff Writer

Stanton Glantz is a scientist out of central casting.
Unruly gray hair, glasses, neglected teeth, shortsleeve
shirt with the requisite frayed collar and pen in the
front pocket. He owns a 1969 Dodge Dart convertible but
rides a 10speed bike to the 11th floor office he has
occupied at the University of California at San
Francisco for 20 years. It's a cramped bandbox of a
place whose one luxury is an old electric tea kettle on
the floor.

At lunch, the medical professor slurps the last drops of
iced tea, eats even the parsley and orangewedge
garnishes on his plate, then chews bits of the wrapper
from his straw, committing himself 100 percent to the
meal. It's a defining trait, this complete passion for
whatever he undertakes, one that helps explain why
America's tobacco lords hate and fear this rumpled
scholar.

Glantz's studies about the dangers of cigarette smoke
and his zeal for sharing his findings in the media
have cost the tobacco industry billions of dollars in
lost revenue. For two decades, cigarette companies have
retaliated with terse rebuttals and occasional subpoenas
to his research as it appeared in medical journals.

But in the past five months, the stakes have gone up. As
the tobacco companies strike a contrite pose in
negotiating a multibilliondollar federal settlement for
damages caused by cigarettes, they have declared allout
war on Glantz.

``Philip Morris is running a jihad against me,'' Glantz
said.

This spring, a Web page went up devoted, in part, to
discrediting him and his work. A state organization
Californians for Scientific Integrity was formed in
May to sue the university, contending that Glantz
fraudulently used taxpayer money to fund studies they
say supported his own political agenda. Tobacco industry
lawyers have been securing restraining or ders,
requesting subpoenas, taking depositions and filing
suits alleging misdeeds dating back 15 years. The
tobacco companies want to copy every sheet of paper in
Glantz's office and every disk on his computer. Last
month, they got a temporary restraining order preventing
Glantz from tossing away even his junk mail. (It was
lifted after a couple of weeks.)

HISTORY OF STIRRING THINGS UP

He never minded the nasty remarks the tobacco people
made about him. In fact, he thrived on battling them.
Glantz has always loved standing in the center of the
storm. In graduate school, for example, he and several
other students published a paper in Science magazine
revealing the Stanford science community's ties to the
military, sending the administration and the dean of
engineering ballistic. He is so argumentative and
arrogant in his views sometimes that he infuriates even
his allies.

"What drives you crazy is he's almost always right,"
said Robin Hobart, codirector of Americans for
NonSmokers' Rights.

THIS TIME IT'S PERSONAL

But this storm is different. This one, he says, has
become personal, so much so that Glantz recently took
out an extra insurance policy on his home in case the
tobacco companies sue him for libel and win.

"The goal is to make it expensive professionally and
emotionally to work on tobacco issues," Glantz said.
"They want to convince me not to do this anymore. And
to convince the university to tell me, `Look, this is
costing us too much in legal fees, blah, blah, blah.'
I'm fortunate that the university is supporting me the
way they are.''

`OVERESTIMATING HIS EFFECT'

Walker Merryman of the Tobacco Institute, the trade
association for the industry, is a longtime critic of
Glantz but says no one is out to get the professor. He
says Glantz is overestimating his effect.

"I don't see anything he's done that you can consider
an accomplishment as far as smoking goes," he said.
"He's simply very good at attracting attention to his
views. Over the years, he has claimed to be an expert in
every scientific field from economics to physiology. He
calls himself `doctor' as if he's a medical doctor when
he's really a mechanical engineer. He enjoys the image
of a sort of eccentric professorial type, his hair in
disarray, wearing a cardigan sweater. I don't think
that's by accident. I think that's part of the act."

Although Glantz is not a medical doctor, he is a full
medical professor at the university. He has a doctorate
in applied mechanical engineering, having completed his
dissertation on how the heart muscle works.

SEMINAL ROLE IN MOVEMENT

Glantz's supporters laugh at the comments. ``His role is
seminal in the movement,'' said Hobart of the
nonsmokers' group. ``It would be hard to picture where
the clean air movement would be without Stan Glantz's
research.''

Hobart and others say the reasons for the attacks are
clear. ``He's costing them money,'' she said.

Three years ago, Glantz did a study that showed
restaurants did not suffer economically when forced to
ban smoking in their dining rooms. That study is at the
heart of the current attack. Public officials around the
country have used the study to support passage of
cleanair initiatives in their cities. The cigarette
companies say Glantz ``cooked'' the results. This
spring, they came out with a critique of Glantz's work,
saying he used fallacious data. Glantz, they say, is
guilty not only of scientific misconduct but of misuse
of government funds.

``It's a completely bogus study,'' said Gary Auxier of
the National Smokers Alliance, which is spearheading the
legal maneuverings against Glantz. ``We might be looking
at the tip of the iceberg here. No matter how you feel
about smoking, you have to ask, `Are there limits to
what a university professor can do with taxpayer money?'
If he's been using it to go after his own political
agenda, then something should be done about it.''

`HIS RESEARCH IS IMPECCABLE'

Such talk outrages Drummond Rennie, West Coast editor of
the Journal of the American Medical Association and a
medical professor at the university.

``For them the masters of hiding data and misleading
the public

to attack the scientific integrity of Stan Glantz is
so outrageous, so upsidedown, so hall of mirrors, it's
difficult to know what to say,'' he said. ``If you want
to kill a scientist, you bring allegations of
misconduct. Look, I've critiqued Stan Glantz's work very
closely. I've had reviewers pick his data apart. His
research is impeccable. There is not a more honest and
open scientist than Stan Glantz.

``What's happening is nauseating. They want to finish
this guy off. And with the money they have to throw
around, they may very well succeed. They're attacking
this very honest, ingenious scientist because he's
right, not because he's wrong. When you're right, you're
a threat.''

NATIONWIDE ATTENTION

Glantz had also angered the tobacco industry when he and
four colleagues published ``The Cigarette Papers,'' a
1995 book that included leaked files from Brown &
Williamson, the nation's thirdlargest cigarette
manufacturer. The files contained the first hard
evidence that the tobacco industry knew 30 years ago
that nicotine was addictive and caused cancer. The book
landed Glantz appearances on ``60 Minutes,''
``Nightline,'' ``Phil Donahue,'' ``Frontline'' and the
ABC News.

Now Glantz is making waves again by opposing the
settlement that cigarette manufacturers are trying to
hammer out in Washington a settlement supported by
the American Cancer Society and many other antismoking
organizations. The settlement would release the tobacco
industry from legal liability for the death and disease
their products have caused in exchange for a huge fine
and, among other concessions, more severe limits in
advertising, particularly to children.

Glantz says the American Cancer Society and others ``are
being sold a bill of goods.'' He'd like the courts, not
the government, to punish the cigarette manufacturers.
Successful civil suits against them either from
individuals or from entire states suing for recovery of
Medicaid costs would prove to be so outrageously
expensive for the companies that eventually the legal
liability of selling cigarettes would outweigh the
profit. The companies would go out of business.

``If the settlement goes through, it will stop all the
suits,'' Glantz said. ``And in a short time it will
become evident that the people got screwed.''

LOVING THE CONTROVERSY

As much as he resents what the tobacco companies are
doing to him, he loves it, too. For one, the controversy
revives his 3yearold restaurant study, exposing it to
public officials who might not have known about it. And
it gives him a fresh forum to spread the word about
smoking. The legal wranglings are taking time away from
his other research he's been studying the mechanics
of the left ventricle for more than 20 years in the
hopes of better understanding heart disease but he
has no regrets.

``It's worth doing because it makes a difference,'' he
said. ``It makes life a lot better for a lot of people.
I was a Boy Scout, an Eagle Scout. I believe in the idea
of service. It's part of the ethos at UC, which is why I
like working there.

``I know the tobacco industry tries to paint me as a
fanatic. But I think I'm just sensible. If you know
someone is putting poison chemicals in the air, you have
an ethical obligation to tell people. That's what I'm
doing.''
© The Chronicle Publishing Company