Hans Selye and the Tobacco Industry

[managing]

http://www.npr.org/blogs/health/2014/07 ... -of-stress

An interesting article. But very strange that the author tries to sow doubt about Selye's motives, yet the only damning evidence he has is that two other unrelated researchers were influenced by Selye's.

 

[narouz]

Yeah, I heard that today too.
Very interesting.
They did assert that Selye met with them (tobacco boys),
listened to their entreaties,
and massaged his language in their direction.
Doesn't necessarily mean he falsified his stuff.
Did they say he took their money?
I think so...can't remember.

Still, doesn't discredit Selye in my book.
But...does make me want to look at him a bit more critically.

 

[Mittir]

@narouz
Did your read the original article or NPR one?
NPR article is based on this original article by Petticrew M
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3036703/
It is a quite interesting read. Hans Selye was nominated 10 times for
Nobel prize and never won one, he was not appreciated for his work.
It seems like the guy simply needed money for
research and probably tobacco people were the only one to give him money
for some favor in return. It would been a different issue if he had other available source
of research fund but he decided to get only the Tobacco money.
His research probably did not have much commercial value.
Article also mentioned he was probably senile at later period of his life
and did not do much research for the last 10-15 years of his life.

 

[narouz]

Thanks, Mittir.
I didn't read either--
I just heard it on the radio this afternoon.
But I will read via the link you supply.

Selye is a fascinating person.
I know next to nothing about him.

 

[andras48]

Hello
This article is very disturbing. First of all, its terrible scholarship, a search of tobacco company documents. Now, the council of tobacco research started handing out money for research in 1958. By this time, Dr Selye has been a researcher for 26 years had already established the major foundation of theories of stress. So he did not get a single penny for this research from the tobacco companies. He applied for some funds in 1958, but got rejected. He did get $ 300,000 in 1966 (by this time he was semi retired). He had the view that stress was a major cause of disease in the sense that disease was a result of unsuccessful adaption to environmental stimuli. The stress could be counteracted by other stimuli, a process he called “deviation,” of which smoking was a form. This sentence is repeated 3 times in Pettigrews article, indicating that he had not idea what this meant. Thus Selye was making a general and not specific point about smoking. Pettigrew also states that Selye wrote 39 books, a fact from the website of the canadian medical hall of fame. Any google search immediately reveals he only wrote 7 books for public consumption. Pettigrew then casts a wide web and claims that Selye was an appologist for the tobacco industry. He was not, and Mr. Pettigrew should some reading of Dr. Selyes work.

 

[jyb]

It seems like Pettigrew wrote a whole journal article on Selyes - see pubmed ref on this academic page.

 

[aguilaroja]

...the only damning evidence he has is that two other unrelated researchers were influenced by Selye's.

Yes, Selye's work was voluminous and wide-ranging, though he is remembered for "stress" as it relates to psychology and the pace/demands of life. His output could only have happened with a large academic infrastructure/organization. He deserves good biographies and better reviews of his ideas and findings. I expect Selye had his faults, but I don't know enough to say what they were and how they were counterbalanced by contributions.

Petticrew and Lee's have a rationale point about scrutinizing hidden commercial sway on research and policy:

"The case of Selye, therefore, has implications, not just for how the tobacco industry sought to influence research on stress but also for understanding corporate influences in general on public health research and policy, and it strengthens the case for improved disclosure of all industry influence on research"

But Petticrew and Lee appear to try to hold Selye to standards that appeared two generations after his work. It is probable that tobacco interests tried to use views of dozens or hundreds of prominent scientists to prop up their arguments. I have not reviewed the history of tobacco industry lobbying, but probably many scientific and public ideas were invoked to support tobacco safety arguments.

To accomplish large scale research enterprises, Selye probably had to solicit hundreds of funding sources. Petticrew and Lee search internal tobacco industry documents and "triangulated" them "with secondary sources about Selye..." There is no attempt to understand Selye's ideas nor their context.

The NPR piece by Alix Spiegel suggests that there is something "secret" about modern ideas of "stress". In fact, modern ideas about "stress" have been skewed by popularizations of small parts of Selye's work, selecting disproportionate bits of thousands of studies, and the trumping of helpful biology by pop psychology. Whatever the faults of the tobacco industry, its role in modern understanding of "stress" via tweaking Selye themes is minor.

 

[Blossom]

At the time accepting money from the tobacco industry was probably not viewed in a negative light like it is today.