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Philip J. Hilts, who, as science correspondent for The New York Times in 1994, revealed that a tobacco company had been covering up its own research for decades showing that tobacco is harmful and nicotine is addictive, died on April 23. In Lebanon, NH was 74 years old.
His son, Ben, said the cause was complications from his liver disease.
Mr. Hilts was a long-time journalist, writing for The Times, The Washington Post, and other publications, and the author of six nonfiction books on scientific, medical, and social topics.
His work on tobacco made headlines not just in The Times, but across the country. in 1994 internal documents obtained showing that the executives of Brown & Williamson Tobacco Corporation struggled in 1963 whether to disclose to the surgeon general what they knew about the harms of smoking; own research has shown that cigarettes are addictive and cause or predispose people to lung cancer.
The Brown & Williamson executives, Mr Hilts, wrote that they “chosen to remain silent, keep the research results private, stop working on a safer cigarette, and pursue a legal and public relations strategy of accepting nothing.”
Mr. Hilts’ front page article in The Times was published a month after the top executives of the seven largest American tobacco companies. testified before Congress Nicotine was not addictive. Two years later, they were under federal investigation for potentially lying under oath, and Now leads companies.
At the end of the Ministry of Justice dropped his criminal investigation on whether executives have made false statements. But in 1998, four tobacco companies and 46 states The largest lawsuit resolution in American history, The companies agreed to pay the states $206 billion over 25 years. Millions of internal documents, the kind on which Mr. Hilts and other news outlets rely, were made public in the process.
Mr. Hilts has also published important stories about breast implants, birth control methods and cheating in the cosmetic device industry. He was among the first journalists to cover the AIDS epidemic.
The adventurous type – he was a scuba diver and world traveler – wrote a message from an active volcano a mile below the Pacific Ocean. It covered the confessions of a healer who claimed to “cure” AIDS in Zambia. And he studied a law enforcement practice that used hypnosis to “revive” witnesses’ memories; his findings problems with hypnosis led to the release of four people from prison.
Most recently, he served as the director of the company. Knight Science Journalism Program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology from 2008 to 2014.
His books include “Smokescreen: The Truth Behind the Tobacco Industry Cover-Up” (1996), which examines the industry’s 40-year disinformation campaign on smoking; “Saving America’s Health: FDA, Business, and a Century of Regulation” (2003), History of the Food and Drug Administration; and “Rx for Survival: Why We Should Rise to the Challenge of Global Health” (2005), He described how wealthy nations can help combat the threat of new and resurgent disease outbreaks around the world.
Philip James Hilts was born on May 10, 1947 in Chicago. His father, Edward, was a nonfiction writer who also wrote historical fiction for children. His mother, Katherine (Bonn) Hilts, worked in various departments at a Sears store, including a switchboard operator.
Philip was one of seven children and was raised primarily in Hinsdale, Ill., a suburb west of Chicago.
After high school, he briefly served in the merchant navy before attending Georgetown University in Washington from 1965 to 1967. He then dropped out of school and hitchhiked to San Francisco. “The Summer of Love” when the hippie and counterculture movements are in full bloom.
He returned to Georgetown in 1969 but did not graduate, deciding instead to pursue journalism. Before becoming a freelance magazine writer, he held brief positions as a reporter and photographer at small suburban newspapers and the Washington Daily News in Washington DC and The Rocky Mountain News in Denver.
He joined The Washington Post as a staff writer in the 1980s and spent time on a Nieman fellowship at Harvard from 1984-85. In 1989 he transferred to The Times’ Washington office as a staff writer until 1996, where he was a contract writer until 2002.
Mr. Hilts has received several journalism fellowships, including one that sent him to Botswana, where he taught journalism. Most of his fellowships were devoted to science writings.
He married Washington Daily News reporter Mary Donna McKeown in 1974; He died in 1987. In 1993 he married Carisa Cunningham, who was working for nonprofit AIDS organizations at the time; They divorced in 2011. In 2013, he married Una MacDowell, a researcher in mathematics and science education. Cambridge, Mass. and they lived in Rochester, Vt.
In addition to his wife and son Ben, he is survived by another son, Sean; two daughters, Alexis and Kate Hilts; a grandchild; four brothers, Edward, Paul, Michael and Mark; two sisters, Jeanne Young and Elizabeth Hilts; and his wife’s two children from his first marriage, William and Nora MacDowell Coon.
Mr. Hilts was finishing a book about him when he died in a hospital. Lynn Margulisa biologist whose research on the origin of cells helped transform the study of evolution and who was for a time married to an astronomer Carl Sagan.
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