Don Shopland: Writing the 1964 Surgeon General’s Report on Smoking and Health

In 1964, the Office of the Surgeon General issued a report on smoking and health that ended a debate that had raged for decades—stating that cigarettes cause lung cancer and other diseases.

Sixty years later, Alan Blum, professor and Gerald Leon Wallace M.D. Endowed Chair in Family Medicine at the University of Alabama, as well as the director of the Center for the Study of Tobacco and Society, sits down with Donald S. Shopland, an original member of the staff of the Advisory Committee to the Surgeon General upon its formation in 1962.

Since 1962, Shopland has served as an editor of 17 reports of the surgeon general on smoking and health, as interim director of the Office on Smoking and Health for two years in the 1980s, and as an advisor on smoking and health at NCI. He retired in 2014.

You can read the transcript here.