"I do not think smoking is addictive on any reasonable definition… If it means that tobacco smokers would become physically dependent, like heroin users, then tobacco smokers are not addicted."

This sounds like something a tobacco executive might say, and indeed it is. What is surprising is that the person who uttered these words to a Senate Community Affairs References Committee has now been appointed as CSIRO's new Communications Director.

Donna Staunton is a former lawyer who acted on behalf of the tobacco industry before becoming Vice President of Corporate Affairs at Philip Morris and then Chief Executive Officer of the Tobacco Institute of Australia. Since moving into the PR game she has not publicly retracted her defence of tobacco.

Staunton takes on the CSIRO role after a 10-month search by recruitment consultants had failed to find a suitable candidate, yet Staunton's only previous experience in science has been to use it to outmanoeuvre health authorities and tobacco litigants.

Her appointment must gall CSIRO scientists, particularly given the launch last year of CSIRO's Preventative Health Flagship. The credibility of any research emanating from P-Health will be diminished when its public communication is orchestrated by a former tobacco executive who has actively thwarted preventative health measures.

CSIRO's communications unit has lost a great deal of credibility since the highly regarded National Awareness Program was axed almost 3 years ago. For example, last October Australasian Science published an evaluation of CSIRO media releases from the previous 12 months. While 30% promoted unpublished technological claims that can only be substantiated in hindsight, only 4% announced the publication of original research in peer-reviewed journals.

However, this trend is not limited to the merchants of spin. Professor Simon Chapman of the University of Sydney recently followed up newspaper stories published 10 years ago in the Sydney Morning Herald. His study, published in the Medical Journal of Australia last December, asked cancer specialists to evaluate whether the claims made at the time had lived up to the hype. He found that half of all cancer "breakthroughs" reported had not been substantiated by further research or refuted outright, and only one-quarter had been or soon would be incorporated into medical practice.

None of this fares well for public trust in science. In the United Kingdom, mismanagement of an outbreak of mad cow disease has fuelled mistrust of information about genetically modified foods. The fallout from this continues to spread worldwide. For example, a recent survey by Biotechnology Australia has found that local acceptance of genetically modified foods and medicines decreased between 2001 and 2003.

The public's mistrust of science in the UK has led to special investigations there by the House of Lords and the Royal Society. The Lords concluded that public trust in science could only be fostered if communication is characterised by dialogue, not monologue, with decisions on science-related issues reached through open and transparent processes.

This is the antithesis of the tobacco industry's modus operandi, which has now been recruited into CSIRO with Staunton's appointment as its Communications Director. It's unlikely that trust in science can improve in Australia when public comment from its premier scientific research organisation is filtered by a manager who has used science to put corporate interests ahead of community health.

Guy Nolch is Editor of Australasian Science (www.control.com.au).