By the end of the decade, the accumulation of so many different kinds of evidence had convinced almost all experts in the field that smoking indeed caused cancer. Remarkably, even researchers at the tobacco companies were convinced—a fact that stayed deeply hidden until the 1990s, when litigation and whistle-blowers forced tobacco companies to release many thousands of previously secret documents. In 1953, for example, a chemist at R.J. Reynolds, Claude Teague, had written to the company’s upper management that tobacco was “an important etiologic factor in the induction of primary cancer of
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