Helen MacDonald

And Eleni later learned from a guy called Stanton Glantz, who's a professor of tobacco control at the University of California, that there's a sort of industry tactic to manufacture doubt about science which doesn't favour their product.

And he explained a bit about how this could be done and described it as a sort of attack on the scientific process.

because it was hard for the tobacco industry to argue that smoking was good for you.

But what they could do was criticise studies which showed some kind of link between smoking and harms.

And the idea was that if you sort of nitpick on these small, relatively minor details, because no study is perfect, you can create a degree of doubt or uncertainty about whether the...

whether there is really that much harm, or encourage a situation where the burden of proof to show harm is sort of unfeasibly high.

And the overall effect is that you distract attention from the overall body of evidence and the bigger picture that smoking is harmful.

Yes.

So, so...

Stanton got involved with Eleni's team and they seem to have struck up some kind of collaboration to look into whether this issue that cropped up with Eleni's response could be tied into COI.

And they went on to produce this paper, which when we read it at the manuscript meeting, I just had no idea of the level of detail and meticulousness and checking and blinding of everybody that they did to really put this beyond doubt.

And they were looking at whether research, education

comment opinion papers who had which had some financial tie to the tanning industry had more favorable conclusions about tanning compared to those without such ties and i think we should listen to eleni again just explain the key findings of the paper so what we found was that overall a small number of articles had financial links to the tanning industry so

And the other bit I found really fascinating, Duncan, in your interview with them, was her colleague explaining why this was such painstaking work and the detail that they have to go into.

That's yogi, yeah.

No, it was the methodological stuff.

And what Yogi was saying was that they blinded all of the assessors to these papers.

So when you were deciding whether the paper was favourable towards tanning or neutral or negative,

you were blinded to whether that paper had financial ties, which is on one level obvious.

But I think just to think through the methodological steps that you need to think of upfront before you start,