Foundation for Behavior and the Environment

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The Foundation for Behavior and Environment (VerUm) was founded on December 21, 1992 by the Association of the Cigarette Industry (VdC) as a public foundation under civil law and is based in Munich . It is the successor organization of the "Research Council Smoking and Health", the scientific department of the VdC. In August 2004, the VdC waived its right to appoint two members of the Board of Trustees. The statutes of the Foundation for Behavior and the Environment were then revised. In June 2007 the VdC announced its dissolution.

Purpose and role of the foundation

The purpose of the foundation is to promote scientific studies on behavioral and environmental influences on human health in order to create the conditions for prevention, diagnosis and therapy of a number of chronic degenerative diseases. The funds are financed from income from the foundation's capital (approx. € 4.1 million) and from donations. In the meantime, the VdC has stopped providing financial support to VerUm. Corresponding funds are now also being acquired with research proposals from the EU Commission.

The foundation is the successor organization to the “Research Council Smoking and Health”, the scientific department of the VdC. The “Research Council on Smoking and Health” and the VerUm Foundation were set up by the tobacco companies with the aim of being able to influence German doctors, scientists and media reporting in the interests of the tobacco industry. The outsourcing to external institutions served, among other things, to be able to act less conspicuously in science and the media. In an internal letter it says: "... if this separate institution takes care of the administration of the research projects, it is easier to avoid identifying these projects with the Association of the Cigarette Industry ..."

Numerous other documents, which American tobacco companies were forced to publish in the late 1990s, document the relationship between the VerUm Foundation and its predecessor organization and the tobacco industry. The Berlin researcher Thilo Grüning accuses VerUm of wanting to divert attention from the health damage caused by smoking by using other causes of cancer such as B. Cell phone radiation would be shown.

Franz Adlkofer , former managing director and former member of the foundation board, explicitly denied any connection to the tobacco industry in a publication published in 1998. Internal documents of the tobacco industry published shortly afterwards show that for decades it has played a central role in the scientific and political influence of the tobacco industry.

Other functionaries of the VerUm Foundation have also had close ties to the tobacco industry for a long time. For example, according to a report by Stern, Rupert Scholz received DM 50,000 consulting fee from the VdC in 1994  . Scholz has taken legal action against the impending smoking ban on several occasions in recent years. Member of the Board of Trustees Klaus Thurau had close ties to the tobacco industry as early as the 1980s and was chairman of the VdC committee for the Research Council on Smoking and Health, while Franz Adlkofer was managing director there at that time. In a brochure published by the tobacco company Philip Morris in the late 1980s , Thurau denied the existence of diseases that were specifically associated with tobacco smoking; rather, smoking was just one of numerous risk factors. The consulting firm of the former board of trustees Roland Berger , who is considered politically influential and is very close to government institutions, has been involved in projects for the tobacco industry several times in recent years. On the basis of a study carried out by the consulting firm Roland Berger for the VdC, the tobacco industry argued, for example, against the increase in tobacco tax planned in 2003 because it would allegedly reduce sales of taxed cigarettes by almost a third.

Documents from the founding time of the foundation show that those responsible at the tobacco company Philip Morris (an influential member of the VdC at the time) attached great importance to maintaining long-term control over what the foundation does with the money from the tobacco industry.

Since it was founded, around 100 research projects, around 40 scientific events and four post-doctoral theses have been financed with almost € 15 million. The following research focus has been funded since 2012:

  • Age-related neurodegenerative diseases

Research project

The EU project “Risk Evaluation of Potential Environmental Hazards from Low Energy Electromagnetic Field (EMF) Exposure Using Sensitive in Vitro Methods” ( REFLEX study ) started in 2000 and ran from February 2000 to May 2004 with 11 European research institutions. The results of the project are discussed extremely controversially. Franz Adlkofer, coordinator of the REFLEX program, concluded that all results were obtained exclusively from cell cultures and were therefore not suitable for proving a causal relationship between EMF exposure and the development of chronic diseases or even functional disorders in humans. However, they would increase the plausibility for such an assumption. The progress achieved by the project consists primarily in the fact that new ways are shown for the orientation of future research projects.

The Reflex study had initially apparently shown that with extremely strong fields, there can be a reproducible relationship between everyday electromagnetic radiation and cell damage. These laboratory results, even if they were true, did not suggest any disease caused by such radiation. According to media reports, the reflex study is now invalid with regard to allegedly identified strand breaks in the genome, since laboratory results at the Medical University of Vienna have apparently been deliberately falsified. The Council for Scientific Ethics of the Medical University of Vienna was unable to find any evidence of deliberate falsification, but found "scientific misconduct" by the project employee who was supervised by laboratory tests and came to the conclusion that the data obtained in this way "did not exceed to be described scientifically reliable are ".

Board of Trustees

The Chairman of the Board of Trustees is Hans-Jürgen Möller , the Deputy Chairman is Bernd Kriegeskorte. The board of trustees also includes Peter Falkai, Christian Haass , Eckhard Mandelkow , Michael Sendtner and Klaus Thurau.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b verum-foundation.de: History , accessed on October 21, 2007 ( Memento from October 18, 2007 in the Internet Archive )
  2. ↑ a b Tobacco Industry and Doctors: "Paid by the devil ..." . In: Deutsches Ärzteblatt , 2007, 104 (12), p. A-770; Retrieved March 27, 2008
  3. ^ Thilo Grüning, Anna B Gilmore, Martin McKee : Tobacco Industry Influence on Science and Scientists in Germany . In: Am J Public Health , 2006, 96, pp. 20-32
  4. ↑ a b Tobacco Industry - The Great Fog, Stern, December 16, 2005, accessed on March 27, 2008
  5. ^ Udo Ludwig: Secret ambassadors . In: Der Spiegel . No. 23 , 2005, pp. 156-158 ( online ).
  6. ^ Franz Adlkofer. In: Circulation , 1998, 97, p. 1870. “ Asked for a possible conflict of interest, I declare categorically that I am not in any way, financially, economically, or otherwise, linked to the cigarette industry ”.
  7. ↑ Result of the search for the search terms "Adlkofer VdC" ( Memento from April 15, 2013 in the web archive archive.today )
  8. ↑ Fighters for the smoke . ( Memento of May 3, 2005 in the Internet Archive ) In: Stern , 45/2002; Retrieved March 27, 2008
  9. ↑  ( page no longer available , search in web archives )@1@ 2Template: Toter Link / www.stern.de
  10. ^ Translation of a Philip Morris brochure, circa 1988. ( Memento of December 3, 2013 in the Internet Archive )
  11. ^ Drastic warning to smokers . In: Abendblatt , September 30, 2003; Retrieved March 28, 2008.
  12. ↑ Internal memo by Philip Morris from July 1991. ( Memento from December 3, 2013 in the Internet Archive ) “ [Walter Fink by Philip Morris] says that the PM [Philip Morris] position should be that we are, not, in principle, opposed to a foundation, but that the foundations charter (or whatever) must be structured such that we can guide / control what they choose to do with the money. ”
  13. ↑ REFLEX project ( Memento from September 29, 2007 in the Internet Archive ) In vitro experiments of EM irradiation on single cells (English)
  14. ↑ BfS statement on the REFLEX study ( Memento from August 20, 2010 in the Internet Archive )
  15. ↑ Caught doing tricks . Spiegel Online . Der Spiegel , issue 22/2008
  16. ↑ Final report of the Council for Scientific Ethics of the Medical University of Vienna (PDF; 214 kB) accessed on February 15, 2013.