Have you continued your focus on tobacco?
I recently collaborated on an exhibit of the most outrageous tobacco ads called “Not a Cough in a Carload.” It’s centered on medical-themed tobacco ads: that tobacco’s good for your T-zone, that it calms your nerves. Scientific tests prove that brand A is better than B, or, you know, 20,000 physicians recommend Camels, and so forth. The use of athletes and models, and the artwork is just beautiful.

How did this kind of marketing come about?
It was pioneered by the tobacco industry. They set out to have a massive public relations campaign to defend tobacco at all costs against science. They wanted science that was good PR. I think it’s mainly a post–World War II phenomenon, although there are a couple of exceptions if you go back earlier for specific industries. In the 1920s, lead was almost banned from both paint and gasoline, and the lead industry set out to have a campaign that softened the critiques. And then in the 1930s, you get Big Tobacco manufacturing consumer drive and convincing people this is a cool, natural thing to do, so it’s part of the history of marketing. It’s the applying of marketing techniques to science, which is rather diabolical in a lot of ways.

You’ve been very involved in tobacco litigation. What is the history of that industry’s response to challenges?

The tobacco industry started responding particularly in the 1950s with propaganda. That’s when they started their doubt campaign—the manufacturing of doubt, the manufacturing of ignorance. It was really rather new, certainly on the scale at which they pursued it. It was a new way of using science as an instrument of deception. And that’s become important recently. Franchised down into the global warming issue are the same techniques. Demanding ever-greater precision, invoking doubt, questioning the physical methods. Raising alternate possibilities. The whole realm of smoke screens and distractions.

How do you maintain the perspective essential to your kind of research?
Well, I have three emotional principles in all my work. One is wonder, another is sympathy, and the third is critique. These are virtues of different disciplines that are generally not combined. Wonder we think of as a traditional scientific discipline or motive. It’s great to wonder at the grandeur and glory of the universe, the childlike wonder, the Stephen Jay Gould wonder, the Einsteinian wonder.

But there’s also the traditional historical virtue of sympathy, which is to realize that the world we live in really is kind of a moment in time when we have the entire history of the universe behind us that we can explore as well. And when it comes to human interpretation, it’s important to see the past the way the people saw it. So I’ve written two books on Nazi medicine, and the goal there was not just to condemn them, but to see how in the world they came up with those ideas and those movements and how they justified them to themselves. So we see them as full humans and not just scarecrows, so we can actually understand the depth of the depravity or whatever. But at least we see it honestly, and that’s a traditional historical virtue.

The third principle is critique, which is to realize that we’re humans first. If we’re cosmologists or historians, we’re at least humans first and then cosmologists and historians. We need to critique and show that there’s a lot of garbage out there, and we don’t want to be apologists for some horrific status quo where people are dying by the millions. And so we don’t just want to see things through other people’s eyes and we don’t want to just wonder at the glory of nature. We want to realize that there’s horrific suffering in the world and that we, as humans and as scholars, have a duty to do something about it.

Should other scientists be driven by the same motives?
I think they’re good principles, certainly. We need to see the big picture. Scientists are often involved in work that’s just a small fraction of the picture. There are going to be specific motives for the research we do. Geology is centered on exploration for new fuels and things like that. But anytime we decide to fund one type of research rather than another, that’s a kind of political decision. It’s a social decision. It’s a collective decision about what we want to view as important.

You work in such widely different fields. Why didn’t you choose a specialty?
Something is lost when people specialize. I like to see things like an amateur. The word amateur is literally “lover,” it’s from amore. Professionalism is often the death of intellectual inquiry. So I think there’s a kind of virtue of systematic amateurism that really needs to be rekindled. If you don’t love and hate and play and joke with your objects of study, then you’re really not treating them properly. I tell my students if you’re not angry and excited and enthralled by your topic, you should choose a different one.

How difficult is it to always be sorting out truth from lies—and to spend so much time thinking about ignorance?
I’m not a skeptic; I’m a pragmatist. I think we have to live in the world and can’t be skeptical of everything. Trust is a fundamental part of being human. You have to evaluate the source, but you can’t be hypercritical or you’d drive yourself crazy. I believe in the common sense of most people. There’s a great deal of common sense in the world. There’s also a lot of common ignorance. It’s nearly boundless.