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Editors of medical journals have given mixed reactions to last week's revelations that more than a dozen scientists received $156,000 from the tobacco industry to write letters and manuscripts disputing the carcinogenicity of second-hand smoke.

One of the targeted journals, the Journal of the National Cancer Institute (JNCI ), is expected to change its policy and require future authors to divulge whether they have been paid by outside interests for a particular letter, and whether those interests reviewed and edited the letter.

Barnett Kramer, the journal's editor-in-chief, says the proposed change in policy aims “to be sure that we don't miss what a reasonable reader could interpret as a potential conflict”.

But George Lundberg, editor of another targeted publication, the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA ), says he is not troubled by the fact that a scientist was paid by the tobacco industry to write to his journal. This is because the journal acknowledged in a footnote that the Tobacco Institute provided support for the analysis contained in the letter. Lundberg says: “Our policy worked well, all sides were heard and the readers were informed.”

The letters were written in 1992 and 1993, just before and soon after the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) published a controversial report declaring second-hand smoke a dangerous carcinogen. They appeared in journals including JNCI, The Lancet, JAMA and Pediatrics .

The authors were paid $2,250 to $10,000 per letter by the Tobacco Institute, according to formerly confidential tobacco industry documents, which also reveal that two law firms representing the industry revised some letters before submission. The documents were made public during a lawsuit brought by the state of Minnesota against the industry.

The revelations were first reported in the St Paul Pioneer Press , a Minnesota newspaper. The Tobacco Institute declined to comment. The law firms — Covington and Burling of Washington and Shook, Hardy & Bacon of Kansas Citty, Missouri — could not be reached for comment.

Four of five letters published in JNCI noted that their authors received support from the institute, or had done so in the past, as did a letter to JAMA for which Nathan Mantel, a biostatistician at the American University in Washington, DC, was paid $10,000.

But there was no acknowledgement of support on a letter from Gio Batta Gori, a former deputy director of the Division of Cancer Causes and Prevention at the NCI, published in The Lancet on 10 April 1993, for which Gori was paid $4,000. It attacks the January 1993 EPA report as being shoddy science and concludes that “these are no trivial partisan questions in defence of tobacco interests”. The Lancet has since changed its policy to require declaration of conflicts by authors.

Richard Horton, editor of The Lancet , says his reaction is one of “disgust”. Gori, he says, “has breached a bond of trust as a scientist between himself and the scientific community”. This, adds Horton, “is at best unethical and at worst an example of research misconduct”.

Horton draws a distinction between an author receiving acknowledged support for continuing work and entering into a quid pro quo letter contract. “This is a project to seed the literature with a particular point of view for a defined sum of money⃛ That's what I find so appalling.”

The documents state that Gori, a consultant in Bethesda, Maryland, received $20,137 from the Tobacco Institute for five letters. But Gori says the fact that he was paid for each letter is irrelevant: “The scientific issue is: are we right or are we wrong?”

Any attack is “libellous”, he adds, “because it does not concern the substance of the matter but rather resorts to the time-honoured trick of killing the messenger when you don't like the message”.

According to industry documents, the institute's strategy focused on recruiting scientists “at or near retirement with no dependence on grant-dispensing bureaucracies”.

A federal judge in North Carolina ruled last month that the EPA report was based on inadequate science and was wrong in declaring environmental tobacco smoke a dangerous carcinogen. The EPA is to appeal against the decision.