Boyse [Blackie, Pellow], Sharon, Ph.D.
(BAT Head of Strategic Research; aka Sharon Blackie) Mgr. Smoking Issues, BATCo Corp. Affairs Dept 1994; Dir Applied Research B&W 2001.Biographical Information:
Sharon Pellow was born in Hartlepool, England, on June 30, 1961. She received her Bachelor of Arts in Psychology from the University of Liverpool in 1982 and earned her Ph.D. in Pharmacology from the University of London in 1985. After fellowships in Paris and London, she was hired by the British American Tobacco Company (BATCo) in 1986. Within months of joining BATCo, she married Leonard Boyse and assumed his surname. After her marriage to Leonard Boyse ended in divorce she began using her father's surname of Blackie. Between 1986 and 1991 she served as a Senior Adviser on Scientific Issues and as the secretary of BATCo's Scientific Advisory Group. In 1991 she assumed new responsibilities in the area of communications in the company's Public Affairs Department. After two years, she earned a promotion to head of BATCo's Smoking Issues Department.
In the 1990s the major American tobacco manufacturers changed their litigation strategy and attempted to remake their public image. This shift made it impossible to continue to use many industry scientists as expert scientific witnesses. Typically, these scientists had testified there is no solid scientific evidence that smoking causes lung cancer or any other disease. This position was no longer credible to juries or the general public. Consequently, a younger generation of scientists began to take the stand for the tobacco industry. Dr. Blackie exemplified this development and in a multitude of trials she attempted to depict British American Tobacco and its affiliates as companies that had been searching for the truth and now had finally seen the light. Her earlier testimony was given under the name of Boyse and after her divorce under the name of Blackie.
Blackie left BATCo in October of 1994 to form her own consulting firm, though the company remained one of her clients. Then in October of 1996 she moved to Louisville, Kentucky, where she ultimately became Director of Scientific Communications for Brown & Williamson, BATCo's American affiliate. In this position, she defended her company's positions in interviews with many major media outlets. She also was responsible for finding and recruiting new scientific experts whose views were in keeping with the industry's new stance. Trial testimony was another a key duty – between 1998 and 2004, she testified in numerous lawsuits, including the Engle, Oklahoma, McDaniel, Butler, Newcomb, Steele, Kings County, Medical Monitoring, Boerner, and U.S. versus Philip Morris cases.
By the time of her last testimony in 2004, Sharon Blackie had already left Brown & Williamson. In 2002 she returned to BATCo to assume the position of Head of Strategic Research, but she resigned in June of 2003 and moved to the Scottish highlands to live in a "six-acre croft by the shores of a sea loch, with a collection of rare-breed hens and sheep." She continued to do consulting work for the industry for as long as it took to fulfill commitments she had made, but began putting most of her energies into new projects.
After earning an M.A. in Creative Writing from Manchester Metropolitan University, Blackie launched the Two Ravens Press and began writing a novel. Her first novel, The Long Delirious Burning Blue, was published by her own firm in 2008, and she is now at work on a second novel, tentatively entitled The Bee Dancer. She has also edited two books and translated one of the late Raymond Federman's works from the original French.
According to a recent interview, Sharon Blackie worried about the ethics of defending the tobacco industry during her time with BATCo and its American affiliate. "But," she adds, "I believed in what I was doing, and I believed strongly that a lot of the health factions were manipulating the data much more badly than they could ever accuse the tobacco companies of doing."
She is remarried to David Knowles, a former RAF pilot who is now a poet, but she continues to use the name Sharon Blackie. Her website, www.sharonblackie.com, is the source of most of the information about her current doings.
Sources:
Allan M. Brandt, The Cigarette Century: The Rise, Fall and Deadly Persistence of the Product that Defined America (New York: Basic Books, 2007).
"Curriculum Vitae of Sharon Boyse," http://dale.ckm.ucsf.edu/action/document/page?tid=bgx50a99.
"Deposition of SHARON BOYSE [BLACKIE], Ph.D., August 19, 1998, ENGLE v. R.J. REYNOLDS TOBACCO CO." http://tobaccodocuments.org/datta/BOYSES081998.html.
"Interview with Sharon Blackie," http://www.sharonblackie.com/HTML%20Pages/Interview.html.
Accessed November 6, 2009.
Richard Kluger, Ashes to Ashes: America's Hundred-Year Cigarette War and the Unabashed Triumph of Philip Morris (New York: Vintage Books, 1996).
Sharon Blackie: Biography, http://www.sharonblackie.com/HTML%20Pages/About.html
Accessed November 6, 2009.
Colin Waters, "Country Bound," Scotland Sunday Herald, January 12, 2008.
Synonyms
Boyse, Ph.D., SharonBoyse, Sharon
Boyse [Blackie], Sharon, Ph.D.
Boyse, Sharon, Ph.D.