A tobacco critic urged Boston University’s School of Medicine to eliminate tobacco funding from its medical research Monday, saying the decision to allow cigarette companies to pay for cancer research compromises the college’s integrity. Alan Blum, director of the Center for the Study of Tobacco and Society at the University of Alabama, sharply criticized the school’s decision to accept funding from tobacco companies as an ethical mistake unbefitting of an institution that is supposed to do no harm. The lecture, which was held on the medical campus, was organized by BU’s School of Public Health. The Daily Free Press revealed in a March 27 article that BU medical research projects had received almost $4 million from the tobacco company Philip Morris since 1995. The money was used to fund projects at the BU’s Cancer Research Center, Pulmonary Center and the medical school’s genetics and genomics department. BUSM currently has a $600,000 grant from the Philip Morris External Research Program that is set to last through 2010. Philip Morris USA spokesman David Sutton declined to comment on potential conflicts of interest between researchers and the company’s External Research Program, but he said the corporation is ending the grant-making program because Phillip Morris has in-house research capability. Calling for a ‘gathering of students, researchers [and] trustees,’ Blum asked students and faculty from the School of Medicine and other area medical schools to work to reject tobacco-related funding. ‘Research can be the last refuge of a scoundrel,’ he said. ‘If it’s research from a nefarious entity, that’s pretty much a slam dunk that you shouldn’t get involved in. There are a lot of gray areas, and I don’t think tobacco is one of them.’ Blum rejected the argument that regulating the sources research funding would cause schools to reject other sources of funding. ‘I don’t think anyone at this university would take money from Al Qaeda or the apartheid government,’ he said. ‘So there is a line that people draw, and why they don’t draw it for the cigarette industry is beyond me.’ The debate grew out of SPH’s 2001 decision to reject funding from the American Legacy Foundation, a program that provides grants to universities that conduct anti-tobacco studies. SPH Dean Robert Meenen said the school chose not to agree to ALF requirements that it fund tobacco education fellowships and prevention research only if the dean of each public health school signed a letter stating that neither the school nor any of its researchers would not accept tobacco money for the duration of the grant. ‘ ‘We were making two points: First, individual investigators have the academic leeway to decide what they want to investigate,’ he said. ‘The second point: We said you would not let any organization that gives us money tell us what to do with other organizations that give us money.’ Meenen said the decision was made in concurrence with academic freedom issues. ‘It’s a bit of a slippery slope,’ he said. ‘One can argue that tobacco companies were particularly bad, but a lot of people don’t like the drug companies or the food companies.’ SPH social and behavioral sciences professor Michael Siegel said the debate over the 2001 vote focused more on maintaining the school’s general right to determine its own funding without regulations from donors. ‘The faculty voted against it, because they felt it was inappropriate for one funder to dictate what funding goes to school,’ Siegel said.’ ‘The issue was not taking tobacco money, but was that one group should not dictate funding.’ SPH health law, bioethics and human rights professor Leonard Glantz said he did not find anything wrong with the researchers who used money from Philip Morris to fund cancer research. ‘They don’t say you shouldn’t take automobile money because hundreds of people suffer trauma from accidents,’ he said. Glantz said researchers who take money from the tobacco industry should practice full disclosure and be sure to publish both the positive and negative results of their research. ‘There is very little clean money in the world, if you go back far enough,’ he said. ‘The key to all research is not who funds it, but how it was done.’ Harvard University public health professor Gregory Connolly said it is unethical for researchers to take money from an industry that develops a product that kills people. ‘With academic freedom comes academic responsibility, and you can’t dissect the two,’ he said. ‘If a company you are taking money from intentionally sells a product that kills people, that’s really unethical. If we take money voluntary, we’re shafting responsibility.’