The UC Board of Regents postponed its decision to decide on Lt. Gov. and ex officio Regent Cruz Bustamante’s proposal to ban tobacco-funded research in UC schools, saying further discussion is necessary before a decision is finalized.
Following Harvard University, Johns Hopkins University, the University of Washington and approximately 11 other institutions’ example, Bustamante proposed the ban to the board last week as a discussion — not action — item on the agenda.
It was an election-year move by Bustamante to bring the issue to the regents’ discussion, which came after the release of a tobacco company-funded research study by UCLA cancer epidemiologist James Enstrom, which was used to support the tobacco industry in recent court cases, UC Student Association Board of Directors Chair Brent Laabs said.
However, regents have opted to postpone their decision and have asked the UC Academic Senate to “review and consider the proposal and report back to the regents at a later date,” Dolores Davies, deputy director of University Communications at UCSD, stated in an e-mail. Bustamante has also been asked to bring a researcher to provide more information to the board, according to Laabs.
Currently, the University of California has received approximately $29 million from tobacco-related companies for research, training and public service since 1995, according to Ellen R. Auriti, executive director of Research Policy and Legislation at the Office of Research for the UC Office of the President. As significant as the figure may seem, the UC system received approximately $4 billion in total contracts and grants in fiscal year 2005 alone.
“This research amounts to approximately $850,000 — a miniscule amount considering that UCSD’s research portfolio is more than $660 million,” Davies stated in an e-mail.
The main issue is that tobacco money “taints scientific scholarship and is bad business,” according to Bustamante, as reported in the San Francisco Chronicle. He stated, “As regents, we have the responsibility to uphold the integrity of the research produced by our institutions.”
However, according to the Chronicle, Enstrom said that if he allowed the tobacco company donors to influence his research, he would not have been able to keep his job at UCLA for 33 years.
“It has certainly been true that tobacco money has tainted scientific scholarship in the past,” Laabs said. “While I do not like the idea of tobacco industry-funded research gaining the legitimacy of the University of California, we must keep in mind the fact that tobacco is a fully legal product and that UC researchers ultimately work for the university, not a tobacco company.”
UCSD biology professor Darwin Berg’s research, the only tobacco-funded researcher at the university, is currently funded by three sources: the National Institute of Health, the Tobacco-Related Disease Research Program and Phillip Morris, and his research involves understanding the link between synapses and cognition, not tobacco or addiction.
He said that Phillip Morris, the newest donor, would most benefit from the good public relations than from his research findings, and that the company has never had any impact on his research.
According to Berg, the ban may result in a few layoffs and tobacco companies would have to take their money elsewhere.
“Who in society will be better off?” he said. “Outlaw the behavior, not the gathering of information.”
