Harvard School of Public Health

The Harvard School of Public Health is a division of Harvard University in Boston, Massachusetts which appears to operate reasonably autonomously.

It is now known as the T.H. Chan School of Public Health which is the public-health graduate school of the University, located in the Longwood Medical Area of Boston, which is adjacent Harvard Medical School. It has Academic Departments of Biostatistics, Environmental Health, Epidemiology, Genetics and Complex Diseases, Global Health and Population, Health Policy and Management, Immunology and Infectious Diseases, Nutrition, Social and Behavioral Sciences.

HSPH's Ethical History

• The Nutrition Department of HSPH gained much notoriety under Professor Frederick Stare when he was exposed as a paid shill for some food processing companies, which earned him the student nickname "King Sugar". Later he was shown to be providing money laundering and front services for the tobacco industry. Stare provided cover for the notorious Dr. Carl C. Seltzer, who travelled the world on tobacco industry funded meet-the-media tours as a "heart specialist" at Harvard University's School of Public Health. Seltzer rejected the idea that smoking was detrimental to health using his HSPC credentials ... but he was actually a physical anthropologist who's main occupation was identifying tribal areas of Native Americans through the Peabody Museum (also on the Harvard campus).

• Assistant Professor Gary L Huber, a pulmonary physician and lecturer at HSPH, was also employed regularly by the tobacco industry. He was initially funded through the tobacco industry's main cut-out law firm Shook, Hardy & Bacon to run a Tobacco Research Unit at the School. Huber acted as a pro-smoking witness at ordinance and legislative hearings in the 1980s and 90s, until forced out of the university by sustained personal attacks by student activists. He then moved to the University of Kentucky where the local student-activists repeated these attempted ejection -- to the point where RJ Reynolds Tobacco needed to pay a security company to provide physical protection.

During his life-time Huber worked for tobacco at a range of universities -- through the University of Texas Health Science Center; then for the Tobacco Research project at Harvard, and then at the head of the University of Kentucky's Tobacco and Health Research Institute. Under interrogation during a later trial he became a whistleblower, exposing the industry activities in science corruption.

• The Harvard Center for Risk Analysis run by John D. Graham which also worked for the tobacco industry was apparently a totally independent organisation, which paid Harvard University for the use of the "Harvard" name.