In 1970 I joined the research department of a British tobacco company which has subsequently, through processes of merger and acquisition, lost its identity. I remained there until an opportunity for early retirement, too good to refuse, sent me on my way.
Since then, I have from time to time provided former colleagues with reviews of the scientific literature. What they do with them I know not. Mostly, however, I have thought a lot. For nearly 30 years I slowly accumulated knowledge, and even developed a few provisional opinions, but never had the time to consolidate it all. A further ten years later, with my knowledge augmented by the current literature, this web site has emerged.
No-one asked me to launch this site and I have had no assistance in doing so. While my views may differ from the conventional wisdom, they have arisen from scientific analysis and thought rather than any external motivation, and I would like others to have the chance to consider them and agree or disagree as they choose.
The reasons for my continuing interest in the scientific aspects of Smoking and Health are no more and no less than curiosity. I have worried at this bit of science for a long time now, and while I am not so naive as to think I will find a simple answer, it is certainly fun trying.
I hope that I have not lost too many readers now that I have admitted my previous affiliation, for now I am going to tell you why I think it has rendered me well qualified for my self-imposed task of exposition and explanation.
I joined a tobacco company because I needed a job and had expectations of an ample supply of free cigarettes. I was disappointed in the latter but the job lasted. I was hired because my post-graduate experience in organ and tissue culture was needed and I spent several years attempting to develop, with some success, methods for the bioassay of carcinogenesis in vitro. The advent in the 1970s of genotoxicity and its methods rendered specialised techniques largely redundant, and I became more and more a desk scientist. An episode around the same time of particularly disreputable behaviour by the Department of Health in the United Kingdom led to a lot of sulking in the Tobacco Industry and research fell, for a while, into disfavour and more time was spent in assessing published literature and its implications. With various interruptions, which I will describe below, this remained the main thrust of my work and, ultimately, it was my lot to advise, through my functional director, the board of the company on matters of smoking and health.
I find it necessary at this point to state that no-one ever told me what to think or what to say. Had they done so, I would have left. It should be an obvious and simple fact that my employers really wanted and needed to know what the science about their product meant.
I enjoyed a number of interesting diversions from the main thrust of smoking and health. For several happy years I became an agronomist and learned about how tobacco was, and could be, grown. This helped my understanding of the basic ingredient of the cigarette. Only once did I take three weeks holiday and, on my return, found that I was no longer an agronomist but a toxicologist. This led to more learning and finding out a lot about the chemistry of tobacco smoke. I even had a spell managing research into smoking behaviour, from the scientific rather than marketing perspective. So now I found out how people smoked and how good they were at telling one cigarette from another.
Throughout all of this I kept abreast with the science of smoking and health. My initial role was, as I said, biological and I did my best to assimilate the information without feeling the need to form any strong opinions about it. Such a turning point as there was came with the first reports which ultimately concerned the large and controversial field of environmental tobacco smoke or passive smoking or second hand smoke, call it what you will. This was challenging in that it made little sense from either biological or toxicological viewpoints. Something was wrong somewhere. As the problem seemed to lie in the question rather than the answer, I started to read more and more epidemiology in an attempt to find out why people around smokers seemed to be at a risk which was quite disproportionate to the hazard. I had hitherto regarded epidemiology as a form of arithmetic alchemy, but as I came to learn its ways, I began to enjoy trying to understand what epidemiological data really meant.
In essence, I have some experience in both the biological and epidemiological aspects of smoking and health, together with background knowledge of the cigarette and its smokers which is useful in interpreting and qualifying the scientific findings of those who lack it.
I have decided to write using a nom de plume. This is not because I want to conceal my identity; this would be a fatuous endeavour in any case, as it would be easy enough to find out who I am. Rather, I use a nom de plume because my name is of no importance and it pleases me to affect the style of the gentleman scientist of old who did not want to sully a reputation for serious hunting, shooting and dissipation with any hints of frivolous intellectual aspiration.
So if you ever wish to refer to me, I am the Teuchter. In case you want to know, teucther (pronounced chooCter) is an old Scots work, usually derogatory, for a person from the countryside or a highlander. The equivalent in British English might be 'country bumpkin' or in the US, 'hayseed'. I try to use the simple and direct thinking of the countryman to cut through gloss of sophistication which embelishes so much of modern thinking.