This project continued into the 1970s, long after the 1964 US surgeon general summary of the scientific consensus holding cigarettes instrumental in lung cancer.
The payment scheme was exposed when US Judge H Lee Sarokin pierced the lawyer-client barrier as violating the criminal fraud exemption in the landmark case of Haines v Liggett Tobacco.
Prominent and otherwise praiseworthy scientists had been caught up in the tobacco public relations effort to discredit or present alternative views that would deliberately confuse or delay efforts to stop people smoking.
One of my own medical school professors, outstanding surgeon Dr Thomas Burford, a pioneer of open heart surgery, gave speeches denying the cancer-smoking link, all the while smoking himself -- a habit that led to his own death from lung cancer.
He was neither a pathologist nor an oncologist, but his position as chief of cardio-thoracic surgery at Washington University Medical School gave his divergent views more persuasive power than they deserved.
The use of noted scientists lacking the specific expertise in the contentious issue has been thoroughly documented in Merchants of Doubt (subtitled How a handful of scientists obscured the truth on issues from tobacco smoke to global warming) by Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway.
While the tobacco issue is still with us, the same group of public relations firms and their co-opted scientists are working their wiles to create doubt about the scientific consensus on human activity and the burning of fossil fuels as instrumental in global warming.
We've been treated locally with a fine example of the workings of the doubt inducers.
Dr Guy McPherson lectured in Whanganui recently on his apocalyptic views on global warming, according to reports in this newspaper. He is a retired or emeritus professor of environmental resources and ecology, not climatology. He contends, based on his own models, that we've already passed the tipping point where the greenhouse gas effect is irreversible.
His term for this is "Near Term Extinction" and he predicts -- on theoretical ground -- that we'll all be extinct by 2030.
If you believe this stuff, you'd be scared stiff. Which is what the beneficiaries of global warming denial would like you to be.
Yes, it's worth being scared if that motivates you to act and not to be paralysed by fear. A total of 50 per cent of the smokers in the US quit after the 1964 cancer report.
Fortunately enough, McPherson's views are out of sync with 97 per cent of the people who actually practise climate science. They tell us that, "Yes, it's happening -- see this film on the disappearance of glaciers (http://bit.ly/2hQjS74) -- but we still have time to act to prevent disaster".
Decision theory may hold that if your knowledge is uncertain, then it is best to do nothing.
That's great when the stakes are limited -- but if you're dealing with ultimate questions, doing nothing is not a good option.
Taking a leaf from Pascal's wager about the existence of God, his "just in case" argument, the potential benefit from acting on the knowledge we have now so far completely outweighs the danger of doing nothing. Go, Perseus!
�Jay Kuten is an American-trained forensic psychiatrist who emigrated to New Zealand for the fly fishing. He spent 40 years comforting the afflicted and intends to spend the rest afflicting the comfortable.
