May 25, 2013
The week's top five must-sees,
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The week's top five must-sees,
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Description
Frederick Seitz was an American physicist and a pioneer of solid state physics. In 1979, Fred Seitz was hired by the R. J. Reynolds Tobacco Company, makers of Camel cigarettes, to head their Medical Research Committee. In this position, Seitz was in charge of the campaign to smudge the facts regarding the harmful effects of tobacco. Seitz directed $6.3 million to researchers who consistently found no evidence conclusively linking tobacco to serious medical problems. Seitz was president of Rockefeller University, and president of the United States National Academy of Sciences 1962–1969. The National Academy of Sciences then disassociated itself from Seitz in 1998 when Seitz headed up a report designed to look like an NAS journal article saying that carbon dioxide poses no threat to climate. The report, which was supposedly signed by 15,000 scientists, advocated the abandonment of the Kyoto Protocol. The report was not peer-reviewed. The NAS went to unusual lengths to publicly distance itself from Seitz' article. Seitz was the recipient of the National Medal of Science, NASA's Distinguished Public Service Award, and several other honors. He founded the Frederick Seitz Materials Research Laboratory at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign and several other material research laboratories across the United States. Seitz was also the founding chairman of the George C. Marshall Institute, a tobacco industry consultant and a prominent skeptic on the issue of global warming.
(via Freebase)
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