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Original Article	Our Response
U of A tobacco research comes under fire from within: $1.5-million grant taints school's reputation, health ethicist says Susan Ruttan The Edmonton Journal Wednesday, November 09, 2005	The dramatic headline might lead a reader to believe that there were arguments or recriminations inside the university. To our knowledge, there have not been any serious challenges to the decision to accept the funding. The only "fire from within" we have seen are quotes in this newspaper from a few university personnel (which we respond to the substance of in these pages, and which we note might not accurately reflect the opinions of those quoted); at the time this editorial was printed, this was limited to a single story by the same author. This seems to be a classic case of the press trying to concoct a story and then reporting.
EDMONTON - The University of Alberta is selling its reputation when it allows a faculty member to accept a tobacco company's grant, a health ethicist says.	We find it unlikely that Dr Leier actually said this. It certainly does not follow from anything he is quoted as saying here, or anything he wrote in his letter to the editor or said in a television interview. It seems likely that these conclusions are largely Ms. Ruttan's. Also, post-doctoral fellows are not normally referred to as faculty members.
"Tobacco companies have a lot of money," said Brendan Leier, a post-doctoral fellow in the university's John Dossetor Health Ethics Centre. "They can hire their own PhDs to work privately in labs." When companies instead choose to fund a university researcher, he said, it's because they know the public sees the university as a source of unbiased information and research. The U of A should have turned the grant down, said Leier.	Again, we suspect that Dr Leier was misrepresented here, so we are responding to what is written, without presuming that it represents his position. We will avoid taking offense at the thinly veiled insult of Dr. Phillips (that he would get funding not because of the quality of his work, but only because of the reputation of U of A), and simply observe that there is no basis given (in the entire editorial) for that "should".
Prof. Carl Phillips, a health policy expert from the University of Texas, joined the U of A faculty of medicine this summer. The university has approved a $1.5-million US grant from the U.S. Smokeless Tobacco Co., which Phillips will use for his research. Phillips' research compares the health risks of smokeless tobacco with those of smoking.	Yet again, Ms. Ruttan intentionally ignores the breadth of the research (which she is aware of) and the fact that the grant is completely unrestricted, so that it can be used to study this or any number of other topics.
U.S. Smokeless Tobacco Co., producer of brands such as Copenhagen and Skoal, has its own lab with company researchers. The company has been campaigning for years for recognition of its products as a safe alternative to smoking and for the right to advertise its products as safer than cigarettes.	We are not aware of USSTC ever trying to claim its products are "safe". We are fairly certain that this has never happened and never will.
The U of A says the grant to Phillips meets its criteria, because the money has been given with no strings attached. Leier said such a rule might be enough in an ideal world, but universities today are far from ideal. Researchers are desperate to get grants and universities are anxious to build relationships with the private sector.	We should clarify again that our funding was completely unrestricted. That is, the funder has no influence over our researcher projects, let alone our methods or the results. There is no preliminary or interim reporting; the funder only learns of our work when we release it to the public. Leier seems to be suggesting there is some "rule" about funding coming without strings; in fact the lack of strings in our funding is the exception, not the rule. (However, we assume that Dr Leier was misrepresented, since "such a rule" does not refer to any rule mentioned in the article or that exists at the university, and we would assume that a PhD ethicist would not make such an error.) The claim about ideal worlds and desperation sounds impressive until you think about it and realize that they completely lack substance (what exactly is not ideal? what would be ideal?) and really makes no sense (why would the desperation of researchers make the (never actually stated) rule not good enough?). Finally, the implication about desperation is misguided, and adds one more bit of personal offense at the expense of Dr. Phillips (and thus this paragraph is written as first person by CVP). I was not obliged to bring outside funding to the U of A; my salary is not supported by research grants and is totally unaffected by the USSTC funding. There was no desperation, though getting this funding was personally costly to me. I spent a great deal of my own time lining it up, and related administrative issues delayed when I was able to start at U of A. Indeed, my life would be much easier without this funding and the extra work involved in supervising other researchers. But I was dedicated to doing it for the same reason I am a professor in a public-spirited field: because with the grant I am able to leverage my efforts and do more good in the world. If I had an unrestricted grant from the government or health charity (though such things are extremely rare), or if I won the lottery, I would spend the money on doing the exact work that I am now doing. Perhaps one of these people who is so sure about my motives might have talked to me long enough to learn that before holding forth with opinions.
"As it stands right now, there are many, many conflicts of interest that go on inside universities and research," he said. Researchers may feel pressure, not necessarily directly, to produce results their funder likes.	Notice that the actual allegations are in the voice of the reporter, not Leier. In any case, such vague suggestions that something bad might be going on out there somewhere hardly have any bearing on whether the university should have accepted the USSTC funding. Indeed, they appear to be arguments against doing any research work at all. Additionally, if whoever actually made this claim (Leier or Ruttan) had taken the time to look at Dr. Phillips's work before attacking him, they would have realized that most of it focuses on improving major biases and errors in the health science literature; he is a loud voice in favor of fixing some of what are presumably the very problems referred to here.
Dr. Ernie Lam, an oral health researcher who recently moved from the U of A to the University of Toronto, said it's hard to convince granting agencies to fund research on smokeless tobacco.	We can certainly agree with this statement. Most of the biggest potential funders are on record making unsupportable claims about the risks from ST, so it is difficult to convince them to fund research that will bring out the truth.
The result is there's not much good data on the health effects of smokeless tobacco, he said. Still, it's clear that smokeless tobacco has the same carcinogens as cigarettes and those chemicals can enter the body through the mouth, said Lam.	Dr. Lam's wisdom runs out here, however (if he was correctly quoted). There is a huge amount of data (as good as any other health science data) on the health effects of ST, and it makes it clear that it is much less harmful than cigarettes. ST does not have the same carcinogens as cigarette smoke (as we will present in the FAQ, smoke – no matter what is burning – is very bad for you), and even if it did, the evidence is that it is much much less harmful , so noting what chemicals are in it is moot (as we explain in more detail here). (Version 1.00)

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