Stanford Humanities Center
Robert N. Proctor is professor of history at Stanford, where he writes on human origins, Nazi science, rockhound aesthetics, cigarette design, and the history of ignorance (agnotology). He was the first Senior Scholar in Residence at the U.S. Holocaust Museum and the first historian to testify against the cigarette industry in court.
SHC Project
Agnotology in the Archives: Probing Cigarette Invisibility and Cigarette Deception
Scholars spend a lot of time exploring knowledge, leaving ignorance largely in the dark. As if we had medicine without pathology, or the study of law without the study of crime. One focus of agnotology has been to look at how ignorance is produced through the disinformation engines created by Big Tobacco or Big Carbon. Proctor seeks to explore the production of ignorance inside large corporate entities—for internal consumption. Cigarette makers often used their own employees as a kind of proving ground for denialist campaigns, for example, with the goal also being to police morale and ensure corporate loyalty. Proctor explores how cigarette makers managed health and safety in the cigarette workplace, while perfecting the world’s deadliest consumer product.
Racial Hygiene: Medicine Under the Nazis (Harvard University Press, 1988). A study of biomedical science and science policy under National Socialism, exploring how political values structured the practice of science.
Value-Free Science? Purity and Power in Modern Knowledge (Harvard U. Press, 1991).
Cancer Wars: How Politics Shapes What We Know and Don't Know About Cancer (Basic Books, 1995). A review of what causes cancer, including radiation and radon gas, genetic predisposition, cigarettes, etc. Translated into Japanese, Turkish, and German.
The Nazi War on Cancer (Princeton U Press, 1999). Why did Germany under Hitler have the world's most aggressive anti-cancer campaign? Winner of the Viseltear Award from the APHA, translated into Italian, Turkish, Polish, Japanese, German, and French.
Agnotology: The Making and Unmaking of Ignorance (Stanford UP, 2008). Co-edited volume (with Londa Schiebinger) exploring the history and politics of ignorance, with chapters on corporate denialism, racial ignorance, colonial bio- prospecting, military secrecy, the journalistic “balance routine,” etc. Translated into Spanish and Arabic.
Golden Holocaust: Origins of the Cigarette Catastrophe and the Case for Abolition (University of California Press, 2011). How do we explain the global rise of the cigarette? Winner of the Rachel Carson Prize from the 4S and the Prescrire Prize in France. Translated into French and Slovenian.
Packaged Pleasures: How Technology and Marketing Revolutionized Desire (with Gary S. Cross). U. Chicago, 2014. The tubularization of the world, explored through photography and recorded sound, machine-rolled cigarettes, and candy and soda pop. Winner of 2015 Rollins Book Award; Korean translation.
Recent Articles:
“Prohibition No, Abolition Yes! Rethinking How We Talk about Ending the Cigarette
Epidemic” (with Ruth E. Malone), Tobacco Control, 31 (2022): 376-81
“How Industry Weaponizes Science and Sows Doubt to Serve Their Agenda” (with Peter
Galison), MIT Press Reader, Nov. 2021
“What Is the Most Important Scientific Development of the Last 50 Years?” Gizmodo, Aug. 30,
2021
“The World’s Most Evil Scientist?” Gizmodo, April 5, 2021
“Camels: 100 Years and Still Killing” (Op-ed), Los Angeles Times, Oct. 20, 2013
