Italy

WARNING: This site deals only with the corporate corruption of science, and makes no inference about the motives or activities of individuals involved.
    There are many reasons why individuals become embroiled in corporate corruption activities - from political zealotry to over-enthusiastic activism; from gullibility to greed.
    Please read the OVERVIEW carefully, and make up your own mind.

OPINION ONLY

Some key documents

University of Florence

1944 March 13: Born in Florence, Italy

1978: Medical degree from University of Florence

1971: Assistant Professor of Pharmacology, University of Florence

1977–78: He is at the Washington University, St Louis, Center for Biological Systems, doing food research

1980: Visiting scientist at the NCI in the USA

1981–82: With the Department of Environmental Toxcology, Madison WI

1983: Associate Professor of Phamracology, University of Florence

1986: Fully tenured Professof of Pharmacology and Toxicology at University of Florence.

1991 Sept: Cancer Letters publishes a study which, in the introduction states:

Smoking is one of the main causes of cancer of the urinary bladder. Aromatic amines have been suggested to be the most relevant carcinogens of cigarette smoke for the induction of bladder cancer.

[Not likely to endear him to the tobacco industry]  

1991 Nov 26: Dolara wrote to Florince Castiglioni [SCR Associati public relations] looking for a grant from the tobacco companies. He has developed a sensitive mass-spectrometry technique that detects aromatic amines in ETS.

On the basis of these results, which will be made public in a specific paper in the scientific press, yet to be published, we are planning a campaign for monitoring indoor air pollution by aromatic amines from passive smoke.

    We think it could be appropriate to develop specific programs, in cooperation with cigarette companies interested in this type of research, for developing tobacco brands which are less likely to produce aromatic amines.

    We would be interested in developing such cooperation.

1992 Jan 29: Philip Morris's "In-house Database for P Dolara" lists his relevant tobacco/smoking studies.

[He obviously specialises in techniques of detecting carcinogentic or mutagenic chemical traces in urine.] His CV from about this time.

1992 Apr 16: He has had a meeting with Tony Andrade of Philip Morris Europe, who is based in Lausanne, Switzerland, and he writes following their meeting:

I finally got in touch with people that have a sufficiently sound technical expertise for assisting in the modelling of air exchanges in indoor environments. They are two engineers that work in the Occupational Hygiene Service of Florence, and we agreed to begin thinking about the proposal.

    Also my friend Prof. David Kriebel of Lowell University in Massachusetts expressed a preliminary interest in our plan of research.

    I was thinking, therefore, to submit a proposal to the CIAR [the US Center for Indoor Air Research] as you suggested, and before the summer a second proposal to Philip Morris Europe.

1992 /E: Philip Moris's Worldwide Scientific Affairs has an evaluation of their consultant, Dr Angelo Cerioli mentions his value partly in mediating with Dolara.

1993 May 24: Dolara's group have put a proposal to the CIAR to investigate aromatic amines in human blood, and the correlation these chemicals have with ETS exposure. They want $323,000 for a major 2.5 year study (Jan 1994 to 1996)

    Someone from the Scientific Advisory Board (SAB) of the CIAR gives the proposal a favourable review.
[But this is not the sort of study the industry would want to see published]

1994 Jan 25: The CIAR proposl has been rejected and Dolara writes to Tony Andrade again at Philip Morris trying to get some money for a lesser study. He also casts his net wider:

I would appreciate a comment and a suggestion from you. I would obviously be very happy of discussing possible alternative cooperation schemes with you and your organization. I also informed Dr. Cerioli of the proposal and he encouraged us in trying further.

[Obviously he knows that Cerioli works for the tobacco industry]

1994 May 16: He now tries Mitchell Ritter, who has taken over from Tony Andrade as the chief organiser of Philip Morris' disinformation operations in Europe. Dolara now has a cut-down version of his study to try out in Tuscany only and Philip Morris appear to have been willing to fund it.

1994 July 4: Philip Morris must have agreed to some funding, because in this letter Dolara asks for a formal letter/contract from the company which will confirm the research funding.

1995: The Science & Technology Strategy paper of Philip Morris. This is a 'To Do' list with important activities and "on-going contacts with Epidemiologists (& Others)" for the imminent release of the IARC anti-smoking study.

    Many of those named are well-known scientific lackeys of Philip Morris in Europe, and a few are grentees (but not necessarily easy to manipulate).

• Indisputable lackies:
  David Warburton, John Gorrod, Peter Lee, Odd Nilsen, John Wahren, Max Weetman.
• Arguable:
  Jim Parry, Douglas McGregor, Schmidt Kitzikis, Don Barry, Gerome Scheckar, Pietro Dolara.

1996: A draft of the actual study, acknowledging Philip Morris's grant, is in their files.

    This criticim in draft form also turns up in Philip Morris files. The abstract says

The authors conclude:

'On the basis of these data we conclude that the risk of being exposed to carcinogenic AA from environmental tobacco smoke varies widely but is likely to be higher whenever a high number of smokers is associated with a poor ventilation.'

The analytical method is not validated. No data is given for recovery and reproducibility. This point is extremely important because of the small air volumes sampled. For some of the venues (e.g., discotheque) it is highly unlikely that even an 8 hour sampling time was used. In no place in the paper were the actual sampling times given.

    In summary, the presented manuscript fails to make a contribution to the science of an important class of compounds which appear to be ubiquitousin the human environment.

[These are probably all totally valid comments. However they are probably due to the forced reduction in the original study budget.

    It is a well-tested tobacco industry technique to fund dangerous studies to limited levels only, and then attack the results for not being scientifically significant.]

1997 June 12: Dolara is now dealing with Helmut Reif (now the head of Science & Technology, Europe) and Ms Ragsdale at Lausanne.

1999 May 7: This e-mail to Helmut Reif, two years later says

I apologize in being so late in the completion of our report and paper.

    Following our discussion, we decided to complete our outdoor measurements and re-draft a final paper including most of our measurements and analysing aniline levels separately.

    I am attaching what I regard as a final draft. My opinion is that the results are quite interesting and partly unexpected.

    We will be happy to discuss the manuscript with you and Dr Cerioli, before sending it finally to publication (we wrote in the Chemosphere format).

CONTRIBUTORS:ent2 qdr2 SHHS