30 SCIENTIST 



number of cigarettes in just the way something was done 

 to control rats when they were found to carry the plague 

 or mosquitoes when they were found to be associated with 

 malaria and yellow fever. As a matter of fact, a move has 

 been made in England to control cigarette advertising, but 

 as yet no such definite moves have been made in the United 

 States. 



There are, of course, a lot of arguments against doing 

 anything about it: people enjoy smoking and may be 

 willing to trade the pleasure for a significant increase in 

 mortality; many farmers and the economy of whole states 

 depend on the raising of tobacco; widows and orphans 

 depend on the income from tobacco stocks; and so on. 

 What interests us here are the "scientific" arguments. 

 Some scientists have tended to dismiss the evidence just 

 reviewed as "only statistical" and argue that it hasn't 

 demonstrated that cigarettes are the cause of cancer. The 

 difficulty with these two statements, both of which are 

 perfectly true, is that they could equally well be directed 

 against a great deal of scientific knowledge which we 

 confidently employ every day. The best evidence we have 

 that penicillin prevents people from dying is "only statis- 

 tical." Indeed, the evidence wouldn't be much good if 

 statistics had not been used. In an even more profound 

 sense, our knowledge of certain important events inside 

 the atom is "only statistical," and there now seems to be 

 no possibility of getting any other kind. Furthermore, any 

 number of public health measures have proved useful be- 

 fore scientists have identified the cause of the disease in 

 question, and we have already seen that the notion of 

 cause and effect is somewhat of a chimera anyhow. 



What the opponents of the cigarette theory are really 

 saying (and they have every right to say it and to be taken 

 seriously) is something like the following: "You have not 



