Program for young scientists is retired

Philip Morris USA pulled research even closer to its vest this year, quietly canceling a multimillion-dollar grant program for young scientists.

Over the past eight years, the Philip Morris External Research Program financed 470 research proposals, providing fellowships of $40,000 a year to recently minted Ph.D.s and medical doctors. It spent about $200 million.

"We felt that a significant scientific body of knowledge had been created," said Bill Phelps, a company spokesman.

"The nature of our current research efforts is more focused than some of the research was under the External Research Program," Phelps said. "It is important to keep in mind that we now have the ability to do some of this kind of research internally at our new Center for Research and Technology."

But the company still is involved in university research, including a $20 million grant to the University of Virginia last year and $30 million the year before to Duke University.

The U.Va. grants will help finance research into genes that may make some people more susceptible to nicotine or other chemical addictions, as well as work on medical-imaging technology, U.Va. President John T. Casteen III said.

Philip Morris also is funding a $6 million project at the University of California at Los Angeles on smokers ages 14 to 21, and it gave $445,000 to the University of Tennessee for research to help tobacco growers. This year, North Carolina State University scientists completed a nearly five-year project to map tobacco's genome, funded by a $17.6 million Philip Morris grant.

A handful of medical schools have banned researchers from accepting tobacco money, arguing that to do so is immoral and threatens grants from major funders of cancer research.

The question of research funded by Philip Morris arose at Virginia Commonwealth University this year after The New York Times described a services agreement with the company as a secret accord that allowed the tobacco giant to suppress research findings.

Under the agreement, VCU staff and students tested sewer emissions from a Philip Morris plant in Chesterfield County and separately studied initial signs of pulmonary disease.

Philip Morris paid VCU $286,000 to fund research this year. VCU researchers are preparing a paper on the pulmonary disease studies.

A VCU task force has recommended that the school no longer sign specially negotiated agreements like the one it had with Philip Morris, and instead use standardized contracts, clinical-trial agreements and grant agreements covering data and material exchanges.

Philip Morris researchers also have teamed with VCU scientists to look at submicroscopic balls of carbon and lithium that can absorb hydrogen, a technology that could be useful in fuel cells.

Two Philip Morris scientists -- Irfan Gunduz, a tobacco researcher who uses math and statistics to examine how molecules behave, and toxicologist William J. McKinney -- are "external fellows" of VCU's Center for the Study of Biological Complexity.

Edward L. Carmines, a Philip Morris principal scientist whose recent research has focused on carbon monoxide, is affiliated with VCU's graduate school, and Mohamadi Sarkar of Philip Morris' clinical-evaluations section has continued as an affiliate professor at VCU, where he was formerly director of the pharmaceutics graduate program. He resigned that post four years ago to become the company's clinical pharmacology director.

Philip Morris has said its main interest in academic research now is on smoking cessation. That was a major thrust of its now-defunct external program for young scientists, too, but the company also sponsored work in other tobacco-related areas.

A study published by the British Medical Journal in 2006 looked into 61 Philip Morris research proposals, 36 of which generated scientific publications, with 65 percent of those dealing with tobacco plants.

Because more than half the researchers had previously accepted tobacco company funding and an internal Philip Morris memo said the program was intended to build goodwill and find young scientists interested in tobacco research, the journal concluded that the program was less about serious research than it was about public relations.
Contact David Ress at (804) 649-6051 or .

Contact John Reid Blackwell at (804) 775-8123 or .