Robert Proctor is professor of the history of science at Stanford University. His Golden Holocaust (2011) on the origins of the tobacco epidemic and the disease it causes sits with Alan Brandt from Harvard’s The Cigarette Century (2007) as the two seminal doorstopper-length books chronicling and critically analysing the rise of smoking and its disease epidemics, the tobacco industry’s central role in this and the rise of tobacco control.

Proctor is a friend. We first met in 2008 when I visited him while in California. We got  on like a house on fire, with shared instincts on everything we discussed. In 2003-4, I’d published two sets of 31 papers on the tobacco industry’s dissembling efforts to reassure its customers about smoking and health, addiction, passive smoking, pesticides and how it cultivated tame doctors and scientists in these efforts in Australia and Asia.

He loomed large in my list of scholarly mavens in my field whom I wanted to meet. His contributions to historical scholarship commenced in 1982 with a series of papers Nazi racial hygiene, the corruption of science and bioethics and a hugely-cited book The Nazi War on Cancer (1999), which examines how the Nazis advanced science to try and defeat cancer, often using utterly deplorable experimentation and shredding all relevant bioethics.

The Nazis were also very anti-smoking. Predictably, the opponents of tobacco control have often sought to  cultivate that meme to paint those in public health as neo-Nazis. In 2008 when I edited the BMJ’s Tobacco Control journal, I commissioned Proctor to write an editorial, On playing the Nazi card, looking at the veracity of that claim. He wrote:

“The industry’s reductio ad Hitlerum is superficial, and ahistorical. The Nazis excelled at rocketry—does this mean that the Apollo mission was ballistic fascism? Many Nazis urged fitness and health through exercise: is jogging therefore athletic fascism? The fact that healthful or progressive policies were occasionally endorsed by the Nazis does not mean they are inherently fascist or oppressive.”

The tobacco industry have long been the sine qua non of industrial-scale efforts to lie and deceive their customers about tobacco use. Its global network conspired to reassure people and politicians that tobacco should not be subject to the controls it is today. It has become the index case in mass commercial deception, inspiring many other industries to use its copybook of strategies and tactics.

In 2008 with Londa Schiebinger he published Agnotology: The making and unmaking of ignorance  which to date has been cited 2188 times, turbo-charged from 2016, when Trump elevated the production of fake news to a new apotheosis (see Google Scholar citations figure below).

He coined the word agnotology to denote efforts to deliberately produce and promote lying and deception to create ignorance. The word is from the neo-classical Greek agnosia, meaning “ignorance” or “not knowing”. A limited preview of the book is available here.

Proctor has now edited a second book with Schiebinger, Unmasked: Essays in the New Science of Agnotology (due September 2025).

This recently updated 80m podcast with Alie Ward interviewing Proctor is 80m very well spent by anyone concerned or enegaged in exposing and countering commercially-driven efforts to lie to the public, as is this summary conversation between two voice robots resulting from Proctor and his co-editor  feeding the entire text of their new book into Chat-GPT4.

With MAGA and Trump in turbo-overdrive to keep the public ignorant of inconvenient science and to gut scientific institutions in the service of their mission, the emergence of the science of agnotology could not be more timely.