STOCKHOLM, June 13 (AFP) - The Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, which each year awards the Nobel Prize for Medicine, said Thursday it plans to cut all links with the tobacco industry so as not to be associated with the damage smoking causes to public he

"It is incredibly important that we who are supposed to work to improve people's health are in no way associated with the tobacco industry," the rector of the Karolinska Institute, Hans Wigzell, told the daily Upsala Nya Tidning. "Its attempts at scientific cover-ups about the dangers of smoking tobacco have in many ways been downright repugnant," he said. As a result, researchers will no longer be able to receive research grants or undertake projects commissioned by tobacco companies. The Karolinska board decided to cut ties after Wigzell was contacted by a lobbyist from the US tobacco group Philip Morris. He was offered research grants in exchange for mentioning a planned Philip Morris fund in future scientific articles that would be financed by the fund. Meanwhile, several Swedish newspapers reported Thursday that tobacco companies recruited Swedish researchers at the end of the 1980s as paid consultants in a bid to prevent a tightening of tobacco laws in the Scandinavian country. The researchers were led to believe that their work was merely a critical review of scientific literature on indoor air.

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