Blame It On Your Genes

Secret documents reveal that British-American Tobacco has spent millions of pounds funding university research to back the controversial theory of "genetic predisposition," which argues that some people are more susceptible to lung cancer than others because they have "bad genes." The environmental group Gene Watch has obtained internal memos from BAT showing that research into "bad genes" was by far BAT's largest area of university funding in the early 1990s. "In conjunction with the anti-smoking group Ash, GeneWatch is preparing to publish a list of UK scientists who have received BAT funding but not declared it in their research papers, something which opens them up to the accusation that they failed to declare a conflict of interest," reports Jamie Doward. Ash and GeneWatch are also preparing to release a major new collection of tobacco industry documents.