Hockett, Robert Casad, Ph.D.
(CTR Scientific Director) Scientific Director of the Council for Tobacco Research from 1972-1974 (WSJ 2/11/93; Allman complaint). Bio-Research Institute BRI conducted a study for the CTR. When Syrian hamsters were exposed to smoke twice a day for 59 to 80 weeks, 40% of those of a cancer-susceptible strain and 4% of a resistant strain developed malignant tumors (WSJ 2/11/93). Before publishing the study in 1974, BRI's founder, Frederic Homberger, sent a manuscript to Robert Hockett, then scientific director of the CTR. Dr. Homberger says he had to do so because halfway through his study, the CTR had changed it from a grant to a contract so they could control publication. They were quite open about that (WSJ 2/11/94. Soon thereafter, Hockett and CTR lawyer Edwin Jacob went to Dr. Homburger's summer house in Maine. Hockett and Jacob did not want BRI to call anything cancer, they wanted it to be "pseudo-epitheliomatous hyperplasis," a euphemism for lesions preceding cancer (WSJ 2/11/93). Dr. Homberger said no, this is not right, it is cancer. Jacob told Dr. Homberger that BRI would never get a penny more if the paper was published without the changes. At the last minute, Dr. Homberger changed the final proofs to read "microinvasive" cancer, a microscopic malignancy. Nevertheless, BRI was never funded by the CTR again (WSJ 2/11/96) Hochett made a statement, as scientific director of the CTR circa February 1972 that neither tobacco and health research in general, nor that of the Council for Tobacco Research has established that tobacco use or cigarette smoking in particular is a major health hazard (Allman complaint, pp. 41-42). Robert C. Hockett was Scientific Director, Vice President and Research Director of CTR. See Bio-Research Institute, TTLA Almanac - Names. (N.M.'s CTR Who's Who)Biographical Information:
Robert Casad Hockett was born on July 1, 1906, the second of four children of Homer Carey Hockett and the former Amy Francisco. It was a scholarly family to say the least and the careers of the three males in it afford some intriguing parallels.
Robert Hockett’s father was a student and protégé of the legendary historian Frederick Jackson Turner at the University of Wisconsin. After graduation, Hockett continued to correspond with his mentor and in one of those letters Turner counseled him on the importance of frequent publication. The advice would prove ironic in two regards. To begin with, Turner was almost as legendary for the scarcity of his published work as he was for his influence among his fellow historians. In addition, Homer Hockett followed the advice, only to have the landscape of the profession shift dramatically and make his lengthy and meticulous works seem less than cutting-edge.
His many books included Western Influences on Political Parties to 1825 (1917), Political and Social History of the United States, 1492-1828 (1925), The Constitutional History of the United States, 1826-1876 (1939), Introduction to Research in American History (1949), and The Critical Method in Historical Research and Writing (1955). Homer Hockett was probably best known for collaborating on two works with colleague and fellow Turner protégé Arthur Meier Schlesinger, Sr. (who is not to be confused with his better-known son): A New Syllabus of American History, 1492-1925 (1925) and Land of the Free: A Short History of the American People (1944). Typically, their “short history” came in at nearly eight hundred pages.
Yet even as Homer Hockett was launching his career, the influence of Frederick Jackson Turner was waning. A new school of historians, led by Charles Beard and Carl Becker, had begun to question many of the fundamental tenets of the profession, most notably the assumption that facts could be determined objectively and would “speak for themselves.” Traditionalists like Hockett were appalled and in a review of one of Becker’s books he contended that Becker was not really a historian at all because his methodology was “almost incompatible with usual historical procedure” and his work “fails to show the conventional regard for events narrated in sequence.” But these complaints did nothing to slow the dramatic shift in the profession that brought such new approaches to the fore and marginalized those of historians like Homer Hockett.
Meanwhile Robert Hockett’s only brother, Charles F. Hockett, would receive a Ph.D. in linguistics from Yale where he studied under renowned linguist and anthropologist Edward Sapir. Like his mentor Charles Hockett become passionate about the need to blend linguistics and anthropology and he became a pioneer in the field of structural linguistics, serving for many years as Goldwin Smith Professor of Anthropology and Linguistics at Cornell University. Charles Hockett also followed in his father’s footsteps by becoming an accomplished and prolific an author as his father, with well over a hundred publications to his credit. His best known work was his 1955 book A Course in Modern Linguistics, which became a standard introductory work on the field. Most of the other publications were in the fields linguistics or anthropology, but Hockett also took pride in having written many of the B entries in the American College Dictionary (“I am especially proud of the entry on ‘bubble’”).
Charles Hockett’s contributions were, however, overshadowed when the “Chomsky Revolution” of the late 1950s created a quantum shift in the field of linguistics. In particular, Hockett was appalled that the Chomskyans separated linguistics from anthropology and thereby, in his view, deprived language of its social context. “In the form of an aphorism that paraphrases Stalin and Einstein,” Hockett wrote in 1979, “linguistics without anthropology is sterile; anthropology without linguistics is blind.” He spent the rest of his life denouncing Chomskyan linguistics as “a theory spawned by a generation of vipers” and when he died in 2000 his obituary in the New York Times called him “one of the last great champions of structural linguistics.”
Robert Hockett was born in Fayette, Missouri, but had no real connection with that place. In the first few years of their marriage, his parents moved around frequently, living in Indiana in 1904, Madison, Wisconsin, in 1905, and in Missouri in 1906. Their wanderings ended in 1909 when Homer Hockett accepted a position on the faculty of Ohio State University. He bought a home in the nearby town of Worthington and lived there for most of the remainder of his life.
Robert Hockett attended Ohio State University for both his undergraduate and graduate studies, receiving a Ph.D. in chemistry in 1929. He was awarded a National Research Council Fellowship in Chemistry and was a guest scientist at the Hygienic Laboratory of the National Institute of Health in Washington from 1929 to 1931. He was then hired by the Institute as an Associate Chemist, doing research on carbohydrates. He remained in that position until 1935, when he joined the faculty of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology as a Professor of Chemistry.
After eight years at MIT, he accepted the position of Scientific Director of the Sugar Research Foundation, Inc., remaining there for nearly a decade. Then in 1954 he joined the New York-based Tobacco Industry Research Committee (which later became the Council for Tobacco Research), as an Associate Scientific Director under Clarence Cook Little. At the time, Little was still living in Maine and running the Roscoe Jackson Memorial Laboratory. So Hockett immediately became Little’s stand-in in New York and even after Little moved to New York, he remained a trusted adviser. Over the next seventeen years, Hockett’s title changed several times but his duties never did. As Richard Kluger puts it, “Hockett had a serviceable, encyclopedic mind and played the dutiful Sancho Panza to his superior’s Quixote and his quest for ‘the whole truth.’” Essentially Robert Hockett, like his father and brother, had joined Little in a losing battle against a paradigm shift.
Clarence Cook Little was a biologist by training and he clung to the notion that scientific causation could only be established by identifying a specific biological mechanism. This precept had long been accepted within the scientific community, but by the time of the formation of the Tobacco Industry Research Committee it was beginning to be challenged as epidemiology gained credence. The case of smoking and lung cancer, in particular, pitted the traditional perspective against both the new outlook and the stark reality of the epidemic of lung cancer cases among smokers. But the Tobacco Industry Research Committee, under the leadership of Little and Hockett, remained steadfast in their position and for the remainder of the 1950s they still had the support of many in the medical and scientific community.
The early 1960s, however, were difficult ones for Robert Hockett, both personally and professionally. His father died in 1960, followed in short order by the death of his son in 1961 and his wife in 1963. Meanwhile, the epidemiological evidence linking smoking to lung cancer was steadily mounting and was convincing more and more scientists that causation could be established by epidemiology. The trend culminated in 1964 when the historic Surgeon General’s report declared causation to exist.
Robert Hockett, however, remained unconvinced and, like his father and brother, became the champion of a philosophy that most within the field looked upon as outmoded. Soon after the 1964 Surgeon General’s report, Little returned to Maine and Hockett again began to handle the day-to-day operations of the organization now known as the Council for Tobacco Research (CTR). When Little died in 1971, Hockett succeeded him as Scientific Director and he remained with the CTR until he finally retired in the mid-1980s.
Throughout his thirty-year tenure with the Council for Tobacco Research, Hockett worked closely with the organization’s Scientific Advisory Board in choosing which grantees to fund and then monitored the research that resulted. In the early years, it was not difficult to find distinguished scientists to serve on the board and to find research projects to fund that did not threaten the positions of the industry. But this too changed over time. Slowly but surely, Hockett’s role began to include running the findings of grantees past the industry’s ever-growing litany of attorneys. Adding to his mounting problems were grantees whose findings seemed to support causation.
The most notorious incident occurred in 1974 when Freddy Homburger sent Hockett a draft of the findings of a smoke inhalation study using Syrian hamsters. Homburger’s draft used the term “cancer” to describe the precancerous lesions that resulted and that word choice prompted a visit from Hockett and Council for Tobacco Research attorney Edwin Jacob. According to Homburger, they asked him to instead use the term “pseudo-epitheliomatous hyperplasia” and threatened to withhold funding if he didn’t comply. Homburger eventually tried to compromise by adding the modifier “microinvasive” but he never again received funding from the Council for Tobacco Research.
Yet while everyone else’s views of the dangers of smoking were changing, there is no sign that Robert Hockett’s ever did. At a meeting of the Tobacco Working Group in 1974, his parroting of the industry position so angered Philippe Shubik that Shubik attacked him personally, declaring, “It shocks me that twenty years later, you have not joined the community of men. You will go down in history denying facts well known to the scientific community.”
Robert C. Hockett continued to represent the industry until close to his eightieth birthday. In a 1985 deposition, he reported that he was in the process of retiring but was still putting in full-time hours. After finally retiring, he moved to Franklin, New Hampshire, where he died on March 14, 1994.
Sources:
Allan M. Brandt, The Cigarette Century: The Rise, Fall and Deadly Persistence of the Product that Defined America (New York: Basic Books, 2007).
Margalit Fox, “Charles Hockett, 84, Linguist With an Anthropological View,” New York Times, November 13, 2000.
Deposition of ROBERT CASAD HOCKETT, Ph.D., December 16, 1985, I.D. ROGERS v. R.J. REYNOLDS TOBACCO CO., http://tobaccodocuments.org/datta/HOCKETTR121685.html.
Richard Kluger, Ashes to Ashes: America’s Hundred-Year Cigarette War and the Unabashed Triumph of Philip Morris (New York: Vintage Books, 1996).
Peter Novick, “That Noble Dream: The ‘Objectivity Question’ and the American Historical Profession (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988).
For More Biographical Information:
American Men & Women of Science: A biographical directory of today's leaders in physical, biological, and related sciences (various editions).