UC publishes oral history of Stanton Glantz: Putting Cardiovascular, Epidemiological, Economic, Political, and Policy Research into Action at UC San Francisco and Beyond

Today the Oral History Center at the University of California Bancroft Library published an oral history of my career, which is freely available to all.

Beginning in elementary school in Cleveland, Ohio, the history follows me through college and gradual school.  It discusses my work to develop the emergency protocols for the Apollo 5 mission while still an undergraduate and research on the relationship between the Department of Defense funding and university research while studying for my PhD at Stanford. The history discusses how I moved from rocket science to cardiovascular research and public health.  It talks about the practicalities of working at the interface between science and public policy, including taking on the tobacco industry for decades and emerging (relatively) unscathed.   

The history also covers my less-known administrative service to UCSF and the larger University of California system, including advocating for fair and equitable treatment of graduate and post-doctoral students, adjunct and clinical faculty, and research into and advocacy demonstrating the feasibility of restoring free high-quality higher education in California and how little it would cost the typical family.

Guided by Paul Burnett, an expert historian of science (and now director of the Oral History Center), the history addresses questions including the nitty gritty of epistemology and on how knowledge is produced and shaped through formal and informal practices for arriving at scientific truth. How do we know what we know, and how does being a human being in the world impact what and how we can know? What can science tell us about whether we can really be free to choose to do something, and how we can evaluate the scientific research about this matter if some of it is supported by an enormous industry whose existence depends on marketing that activity? How would you design research to illustrate this problem? Would the current state of our world make more sense if we understood that a familiar political strategy evolved in part from one industry’s attempts to influence, suppress, attack, and distort scientific research? What is the relationship between structured learning and a less-structured engagement with the problems of the world, and the motivation to repair the world under conditions of adversity and uncertainty?

Here is the Oral History Center’s summary of the history:

Dr. Glantz received his doctorate in applied mechanics from Stanford University before embarking on a multi-decade career at UC San Francisco. He contributed engineering concepts to cardiovascular research, biostatistics to epidemiology, and economics to the study of second-hand smoke and policymaking to regulate second-hand smoke, among many other research projects. The oral history explores his political and policy activism, the history of the clean indoor air movement, and his commitments to science and public health, in particular his long struggles with the tobacco industry and efforts to make UC San Francisco a world center for research into second-hand smoke, nicotine addiction, and the broader social determinants of health. His service to UC San Francisco and the University of California is also explored, in particular, his research and advocacy for policy changes on issues ranging from the rights of adjunct faculty to state funding of the UC system. These interviews showcase Glantz’s applied epistemology, his continual reflection on how knowledge is produced and shaped through formal and informal practices for arriving at scientific truth.

The full history is available for free here.