Robert N. Proctor

Robert N. Proctor at a History of Science Society meeting , 2009

Robert Neel Proctor (* 1954 ) is an American historian of science and theorist of science specializing in biomedicine and its political implementation in the United States and Europe . His testimony made him known to a wider audience as the first historian in a trial against the American tobacco industry .

Proctor studied biology at Indiana University until 1976 and history of science at Harvard University until 1977 where he received his doctorate in 1984 . He has taught at Harvard, Princeton and Yale , among others, and is a professor at Stanford University . With his wife, the historian Londa Schiebinger , he led the Science, Medicine and Technology in Culture Program at Pennsylvania State University for nine years . From January to June 2000 he was a visiting scholar at the Historians Commission, which examined the involvement of the Kaiser Wilhelm Society in National Socialism from 1998 to 2005 . He is currently Professor of History at Stanford University in California.

Proctor is the creator of the term agnotology , a line of research that examines the cultural creation and perpetuation of ignorance.

Proctor has two children with his wife Londa. He collects agates and has scientifically researched which factors have contributed to their being considered less valuable than diamonds .

Proctor was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2002.

Publications

• Racial hygiene. Medicine Under the Nazis. Harvard University Press, Cambridge 1988, ISBN 0-674-74578-7 .
• Value-free science? Purity and Power in Modern Knowledge. Harvard University Press, Cambridge 1991, ISBN 0-674-93170-X .
• Cancer Wars. How Politics Shapes What We Know and Don't Know about Cancer. BasicBooks, New York 1995, ISBN 0-465-02756-3 .
• The anti-tobacco campaign of the Nazis. A little known aspect of public health in Germany, 1933–45 . In: British Medical Journal . 1996, No 7070, Volume 313.
• The Nazi War on Cancer. Princeton University Press, Princeton 1999, ISBN 0-691-07051-2 .
  • German translation by Alexandra Bröhm and Katharina Wehrli: Blitzkrieg against cancer. Health and Propaganda in the Third Reich. Klett-Cotta, Stuttgart 2002, ISBN 3-608-91031-X .
  • The lungs of the "chosen people" are clean , review by Oliver Hochadel, Friday , March 22, 2002.
  • Review notes at the pearl diver
• Adolf Butenandt (1903–1995). Nobel Prize Winner, National Socialist and MPG President. A first look at the estate. Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Berlin 2000. online, PDF
• Commentary: Schairer and Schöniger's forgotten tobacco epidemiology and the Nazi quest for racial purity . In: International Journal of Epidemiology. 2001, Volume 30, Number 1, pp. 31-34.
• Tobacco and Health. Expert Witness Report Filed on behalf of Plaintiffs in: “The United States of America, Plaintiff, v. Philip Morris, Inc., et al., Defendants ( litigation opinion dated May 10, 2002). In: The Journal of Philosophy, Science & Law. Volume March 4, 2004.
• Golden Holocaust. Origins of the Cigarette Catastrophe and the Case for Abolition. University of California Press, 2012, ISBN 978-0-520-27016-9 .
  • The deadliest thing in the world , review by Oliver Hochadel, Der Standard , March 3, 2012

Web links

• Literature by and about Robert N. Proctor in the catalog of the German National Library
• Robert N. Proctor on the Stanford University website
• A Historical Reconstruction of Tobacco and Health in the US, 1954-1994 , opinion from November 1998 (PDF)
• Email interview with Robert Proctor by Philippe Boucher on tobacco.org, June 22, 1999.
• Polonium in cigarettes - garbage in the dump , interview by Andrian Kreye in the Süddeutsche Zeitung . 4th December 2006.
• Why Did Western Drs. Promote Tobacco While the Nazis Fought Cancer? , Interview by Michael Abrams in Discover , Jan. 8, 2009.

Footnotes

1. ↑ https://web.stanford.edu/dept/HPS/proctor.html
2. ↑ https://www.mpiwg-berlin.mpg.de/KWG/events.htm
3. ^ Nancy Marie Brown: The Agateer . In: Penn State Research. Volume 22, Issue 3, September 2001.