James Enstrom sacked by UCLA

Very worrying news from the People's Democractic Republic of California, where James Enstrom has been fired from the University of California, Los Angeles because "your research is not aligned with the academic mission of the Department". Readers may know Prof. Enstrom from the British Medical Journal study (Enstrom and Kabat, 2003) which found no association between secondhand smoke and lung cancer and heart disease.

That study is not the official reason for his dismissal—he has recently been studying air pollution—but it seems that it has cast a long shadow:

Beate Ritz, a leading air pollution scientist with UCLA who works in the Epidemiology Department, did respond.

She said she hadn't read Enstrom's 2005 study on air pollution.

But, based on his 2003 findings that second-hand cigarette smoke doesn't kill people, she said she knows him "for letting his interpretations go beyond the data and his personal biases to be strong enough to not allow for a balanced and appropriately cautious interpretation of the numbers."

Her attitude wasn't surprising to Enstrom, who said his 2003 paper, published in the British Medical Journal, was widely attacked.

"Not a single error was ever identified in that paper and I refuted all claims made against me and my research," he said. "My work isn't about being politically correct, it's about honest research and being faithful to the science."

Frankly, I don't know what's been going on. The news is here and Carl V. Phillips has this to say. Please read both.

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