On proving disease causation, research bias and misuse of science in the case of the tobacco industry

In the year 1953 numerous medical studies as well as internal tobacco industry studies showed that tobacco smoke causes cancer. That is why the tobacco industry began an enormous campaign to deny the effects of smoking. Science that they financed was not usually directly flawed but rarely had anything to do with the effect of smoking on health. If the dangers of smoking were shown, they stopped the project or denied the rights of publishing the research. They have financed researchers from various fields to testify on behalf of the tobacco industry in courts, in the American congress and publically supported them without revealing their financers. A known biostatistician testified before the American congress that smoking and lung cancer were not statistically related. Another professor of mathematics received around 10 mio. USD to ridicule the number of deaths due to smoking. Another author of the history of lung cancer wrote that lung cancer was not really increasing, that this was just a consequence of improved diagnostics. He did not reveal that the tobacco industry was paying him. Several psychologists and psychiatrists testified that smoking is a habit and not an addiction; they denied the effects of nicotine and stressed the genetic factors. In 2016 the Economic Faculty in Ljubljana was funded by the tobacco industry to dispute various measures in the tobacco law. This perpetual denial of the cause relationship of smoking and disease is the biggest misuse of science since the Nazi period but it also involuntarily contributed to the evolution of evidence based medicine.