Robert N Proctor
Biographic Data
| ID | 93933 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Robert N Proctor |
| GIVEN NAMES | Robert N |
| FAMILY NAME | Proctor |
| SIGNATURE | PROCTOR R N |
| AFFILIATIONS | Stanford University |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-8910-5647 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 31 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 38 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 30 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1976 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 3 |
Cigarettes and Soviets
The Making of the 1964 Surgeon General’s Report on Smoking and Health
Why Did Philip Morris Stop Making Cigarettes at Auschwitz
After the collapse of communism in the satellite states of the Soviet Union, global cigarette makers began acquiring factories throughout Eastern Europe to capitalize on this new market opportunity. Drawing on victims' accounts of the Holocaust, this article rediscovers the Philip Morris cigarette factory at Auschwitz-a manufacturing plant once used by the SS to torture and execute prisoners from the first transports to the killing center. Confid…
Poisonous Pandas
A favorite icon for cigarette manufacturers across China since the mid-twentieth century has been the panda, with factories from Shanghai to Sichuan using cuddly cliché to market tobacco products. The proliferation of panda-branded cigarettes coincides with profound, yet poorly appreciated, shifts in the worldwide tobacco trade. Over the last fifty years, transnational tobacco companies and their allies have fueled a tripling of the world's annua…
Big tobacco focuses on the facts to hide the truth
Quantitative analysis can reveal heretofore hidden patterns in courtroom rhetoric, including the weaponisation of pronouns and the systematic avoidance of certain terms, such as 'profits' or 'customer.' While cigarette makers use words that focus on the individual smoker, attorneys for the plaintiffs refocus agency onto the industry. We show how even seemingly trivial parts of speech-like pronouns-along with references to family members or words …
From Maverick to Mole
Previous articleNext article FreeSpecial Section: Second LookFrom Maverick to Mole: John C. Burnham, Tobacco ConsultantNicolas Rasmussen and Robert N. ProctorNicolas RasmussenUniversity of New South Wales Search for more articles by this author and Robert N. ProctorStanford University Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRed…
The industry must be inconspicuous’
Objective To investigate how and why Japan Tobacco, Inc. (JT) in 1986 established the Smoking Research Foundation (SRF), a research-funding institution, and to explore the extent to which SRF has influenced science and health policy in Japan. Methods We analysed documents in the Truth Tobacco Industry Documents archive, along with recent Japanese litigation documents and published documents. Results JT’s effort to combat effective tobacco control…
Packaged Pleasures
1. The Carrot and the Candy Bar 2. Containing Civilization, Preserving the Ephemeral, Going Tubular 3. The Cigarette Story 4. Superfoods and the Engineered Origins of the Modern Sweet Tooth 5. Portable Packets of Sound: The Birth of the Phonograph and Record 6. Packaging Sight: Projections, Snapshots, and Motion Pictures 7. Packaging Fantasy: The Amusement Park as Mechanized Circus, Electric Theater, and Commercialized Spectacle 8. Pleasure on Sp…
Why ban the sale of cigarettes? The case for abolition
The cigarette is the deadliest artefact in the history of human civilisation. Most of the richer countries of the globe, however, are making progress in reducing both smoking rates and overall consumption. Many different methods have been proposed to steepen this downward slope, including increased taxation, bans on advertising, promotion of cessation, and expansion of smoke-free spaces. One option that deserves more attention is the enactment of…
Robert Proctor et la production de l'ignorance
International audience
Golden Holocaust
The cigarette is the deadliest artifact in the history of human civilization. It is also one of the most beguiling, thanks to more than a century of manipulation at the hands of tobacco industry chemists. In Golden Holocaust , Robert N. Proctor draws on reams of formerly-secret industry documents to explore how the cigarette came to be the most widely-used drug on the planet, with six trillion sticks sold per year. He paints a harrowing picture o…
The Secret and Soul of Marlboro
Philip Morris and other tobacco companies have been using ammonia in their manufacturing for more than half a century, and for a variety of purposes: to highlight certain flavors, to expand or “puff up” the volume of tobacco, to prepare reconstituted tobacco sheet (“recon”), to denicotinize (reduce the amount of nicotine in) tobacco, and to remove carcinogens. By the early 1960s, however, Philip Morris had also begun using ammonia to “freebase” t…
Logos," "-Ismos," and "-Ikos
How are names for new disciplinary fields coined? Here a new (and fun) way to look at the history of such coinages is proposed, focusing on how phonesthemic tints and taints figure in decisions to adopt one type of suffix rather than another. The most common suffixes used in such coinages ("-logy," "-ics," etc.) convey semantic and evaluative content quite unpredictable from literal (root) meanings alone. Pharmaceutical manufacturers have long gr…
Explaining Human Origins
Book Review| October 01 2004 Explaining Human Origins: Myth, Imagination and Conjecture By Wiktor Stoczkowski. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. xxx +244 pp., preface, introduction, bibliography, index. $75.00 cloth, $25.00 paper.) Translated from the French (1994) by Mary Turton. Robert N. Proctor Robert N. Proctor Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Ethnohistory (2004) 51 (4): 825–827. https://doi.org/10.1215/…
Three Roots of Human Recency
Conceptions of human antiquity have changed dramatically over time, with recent evidence (and opinion) pointing to the relative recencyca. 105 years agoof language, kindled fire, compoundtool use, and a number of other presumed signs of human symbolic intelligence. A concomitant change has been the dehumanizing of early hominids, a transformation visible in the separate sciences of archaeology, paleontology, and molecular anthropology. Understand…
The Nazi War on Cancer
The Breast Cancer Wars
Breast cancer is a baffling disease from several different points of view. Age-adjusted death rates in America today are about what they were in 1930, despite more than a decade of breast cancer activism, billions of research dollars, and radical revisions in diagnosis and treatment. The topic remains heavily charged, as controversies persist about the appropriate direction of research, the most effective methods of treatment, and the steps to be…
Anti-Agate
Configurations - Volume 9, Number 3, Fall 2001
The Nature of Diamonds . George E. Harlow
The Nazi War on Cancer
Collaboration in Holocaust. Murderous and torturous medical experiments. The euthanasia of hundreds of thousands of people with mental or physical disabilities. Widespread sterilization of the unfit. Nazi doctors committed these and countless other atrocities as part of Hitler's warped quest to create a German master race. The author of this text, Robert Proctor, made discovery however, that Nazi Germany was also decades ahead of other countries …
The Nazi War on Tobacco
Bulletin of the History of Medicine - Volume 71, Number 3, Fall 1997
Lysenko and the Tragedy of Soviet Science
Suffering Made Real
Word imperfect
Value-Free Science? Purity and Power in Modern Knowledge
Three Roots of Human Recency
Conceptions of human antiquity have changed dramatically over time, with recent evidence (and opinion) pointing to the relative recencyca. 105 years agoof language, kindled fire, compoundtool use, and a number of other presumed signs of human symbolic intelligence. A concomitant change has been the dehumanizing of early hominids, a transformation visible in the separate sciences of archaeology, paleontology, and molecular anthropology. Understand…
Packaged Pleasures
1. The Carrot and the Candy Bar 2. Containing Civilization, Preserving the Ephemeral, Going Tubular 3. The Cigarette Story 4. Superfoods and the Engineered Origins of the Modern Sweet Tooth 5. Portable Packets of Sound: The Birth of the Phonograph and Record 6. Packaging Sight: Projections, Snapshots, and Motion Pictures 7. Packaging Fantasy: The Amusement Park as Mechanized Circus, Electric Theater, and Commercialized Spectacle 8. Pleasure on Sp…
The Secret and Soul of Marlboro
Philip Morris and other tobacco companies have been using ammonia in their manufacturing for more than half a century, and for a variety of purposes: to highlight certain flavors, to expand or “puff up” the volume of tobacco, to prepare reconstituted tobacco sheet (“recon”), to denicotinize (reduce the amount of nicotine in) tobacco, and to remove carcinogens. By the early 1960s, however, Philip Morris had also begun using ammonia to “freebase” t…
Logos," "-Ismos," and "-Ikos
How are names for new disciplinary fields coined? Here a new (and fun) way to look at the history of such coinages is proposed, focusing on how phonesthemic tints and taints figure in decisions to adopt one type of suffix rather than another. The most common suffixes used in such coinages ("-logy," "-ics," etc.) convey semantic and evaluative content quite unpredictable from literal (root) meanings alone. Pharmaceutical manufacturers have long gr…
Capitalist Development, Class Struggle, and Crisis in Italy, 1945-1975
Italy emerged from the Second World War a semi-industrialized nation with low industrial and agricultural productivity. Once the Italian Communist Party (PCI) decided that a socialist revolution at that time was not possible, the question in Italy became how to rebuild under capitalism. Any attempt to expand production was bound to come up against the problem of low internal demand (wages and per capita income were low, and unemployment was high)…
Why Did Philip Morris Stop Making Cigarettes at Auschwitz
After the collapse of communism in the satellite states of the Soviet Union, global cigarette makers began acquiring factories throughout Eastern Europe to capitalize on this new market opportunity. Drawing on victims' accounts of the Holocaust, this article rediscovers the Philip Morris cigarette factory at Auschwitz-a manufacturing plant once used by the SS to torture and execute prisoners from the first transports to the killing center. Confid…
Golden Holocaust
The cigarette is the deadliest artifact in the history of human civilization. It is also one of the most beguiling, thanks to more than a century of manipulation at the hands of tobacco industry chemists. In Golden Holocaust , Robert N. Proctor draws on reams of formerly-secret industry documents to explore how the cigarette came to be the most widely-used drug on the planet, with six trillion sticks sold per year. He paints a harrowing picture o…
Lysenko and the Tragedy of Soviet Science
Capitalist Development, Class Struggle, and Crisis in Italy, 1945-1975
Italy emerged from the Second World War a semi-industrialized nation with low industrial and agricultural productivity. Once the Italian Communist Party (PCI) decided that a socialist revolution at that time was not possible, the question in Italy became how to rebuild under capitalism. Any attempt to expand production was bound to come up against the problem of low internal demand (wages and per capita income were low, and unemployment was high)…
Racial Hygiene
Introduction 1. The Origins of Racial Hygiene 2. Neutral Racism: The Case of Fritz Lenz 3. Political Biology: Doctors in the Nazi Cause 4. The Sterilization Law 5. The Control of Women 6. Anti-Semitism in the German Medical Community 7. The Destruction of Lives Not Worth Living 8. The Organic Vision of Nazi Racial Science 9. Medical Resistance: The Association of Socialist Physicians 10. The Politics of Knowledge Epilogue. Postwar Legacies Append…
Biology as Destiny
Weber, Irrationality, and Social Order . Alan Sica
The Wellborn Science
Value-Free Science? Purity and Power in Modern Knowledge
A World without Women
Journal Article A World without Women: The Christian Clerical Culture of Western Science. By David F. Noble. (New York: Knopf, 1992. xviii + 329 pp. $25.00, ISBN 0-394-55650-X.) Get access Robert N. Proctor Robert N. Proctor Princeton University, Princeton, New Jersey Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Journal of American History, Volume 80, Issue 2, September 1993, Pages 632–633, https://doi.org/10.2307/2079…
Word imperfect
Suffering Made Real
Lysenko and the Tragedy of Soviet Science
The Nazi War on Tobacco
Bulletin of the History of Medicine - Volume 71, Number 3, Fall 1997
The Nazi War on Cancer
Collaboration in Holocaust. Murderous and torturous medical experiments. The euthanasia of hundreds of thousands of people with mental or physical disabilities. Widespread sterilization of the unfit. Nazi doctors committed these and countless other atrocities as part of Hitler's warped quest to create a German master race. The author of this text, Robert Proctor, made discovery however, that Nazi Germany was also decades ahead of other countries …
The Nature of Diamonds . George E. Harlow
Anti-Agate
Configurations - Volume 9, Number 3, Fall 2001
The Nazi War on Cancer
The Breast Cancer Wars
Breast cancer is a baffling disease from several different points of view. Age-adjusted death rates in America today are about what they were in 1930, despite more than a decade of breast cancer activism, billions of research dollars, and radical revisions in diagnosis and treatment. The topic remains heavily charged, as controversies persist about the appropriate direction of research, the most effective methods of treatment, and the steps to be…
Three Roots of Human Recency
Conceptions of human antiquity have changed dramatically over time, with recent evidence (and opinion) pointing to the relative recencyca. 105 years agoof language, kindled fire, compoundtool use, and a number of other presumed signs of human symbolic intelligence. A concomitant change has been the dehumanizing of early hominids, a transformation visible in the separate sciences of archaeology, paleontology, and molecular anthropology. Understand…
Explaining Human Origins
Book Review| October 01 2004 Explaining Human Origins: Myth, Imagination and Conjecture By Wiktor Stoczkowski. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. xxx +244 pp., preface, introduction, bibliography, index. $75.00 cloth, $25.00 paper.) Translated from the French (1994) by Mary Turton. Robert N. Proctor Robert N. Proctor Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Ethnohistory (2004) 51 (4): 825–827. https://doi.org/10.1215/…
Logos," "-Ismos," and "-Ikos
How are names for new disciplinary fields coined? Here a new (and fun) way to look at the history of such coinages is proposed, focusing on how phonesthemic tints and taints figure in decisions to adopt one type of suffix rather than another. The most common suffixes used in such coinages ("-logy," "-ics," etc.) convey semantic and evaluative content quite unpredictable from literal (root) meanings alone. Pharmaceutical manufacturers have long gr…
The Secret and Soul of Marlboro
Philip Morris and other tobacco companies have been using ammonia in their manufacturing for more than half a century, and for a variety of purposes: to highlight certain flavors, to expand or “puff up” the volume of tobacco, to prepare reconstituted tobacco sheet (“recon”), to denicotinize (reduce the amount of nicotine in) tobacco, and to remove carcinogens. By the early 1960s, however, Philip Morris had also begun using ammonia to “freebase” t…
Golden Holocaust
The cigarette is the deadliest artifact in the history of human civilization. It is also one of the most beguiling, thanks to more than a century of manipulation at the hands of tobacco industry chemists. In Golden Holocaust , Robert N. Proctor draws on reams of formerly-secret industry documents to explore how the cigarette came to be the most widely-used drug on the planet, with six trillion sticks sold per year. He paints a harrowing picture o…
Why ban the sale of cigarettes? The case for abolition
The cigarette is the deadliest artefact in the history of human civilisation. Most of the richer countries of the globe, however, are making progress in reducing both smoking rates and overall consumption. Many different methods have been proposed to steepen this downward slope, including increased taxation, bans on advertising, promotion of cessation, and expansion of smoke-free spaces. One option that deserves more attention is the enactment of…
Robert Proctor et la production de l'ignorance
International audience
Packaged Pleasures
1. The Carrot and the Candy Bar 2. Containing Civilization, Preserving the Ephemeral, Going Tubular 3. The Cigarette Story 4. Superfoods and the Engineered Origins of the Modern Sweet Tooth 5. Portable Packets of Sound: The Birth of the Phonograph and Record 6. Packaging Sight: Projections, Snapshots, and Motion Pictures 7. Packaging Fantasy: The Amusement Park as Mechanized Circus, Electric Theater, and Commercialized Spectacle 8. Pleasure on Sp…
The industry must be inconspicuous’
Objective To investigate how and why Japan Tobacco, Inc. (JT) in 1986 established the Smoking Research Foundation (SRF), a research-funding institution, and to explore the extent to which SRF has influenced science and health policy in Japan. Methods We analysed documents in the Truth Tobacco Industry Documents archive, along with recent Japanese litigation documents and published documents. Results JT’s effort to combat effective tobacco control…
Sociology (16 works) · Political science (15 works) · History (14 works) · Law (12 works) · Medicine (11 works) · Philosophy (10 works) · Computer Science (9 works) · History (7 works) · Law (7 works) · Epistemology (6 works)