Biography:Robert N. Proctor

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Short description: American historian of science (born 1954)
Robert N. Proctor
Proctor in 2009
Proctor in 2009
Born (1954-06-25) June 25, 1954 (age 72)
Corpus Christi, Texas, United States
Occupation
  • Historian
  • professor
Alma materIndiana University Bloomington
SpouseLonda Schiebinger
Children
  • Geoffrey Schiebinger
  • Jonathan Proctor

Robert Neel Proctor (born 1954) is an American historian of science and Professor of History at Stanford University, where he is also Professor by courtesy of Medicine.[1] While a professor at Pennsylvania State University in 1999, he became the first historian to testify against the tobacco industry.[2]

Education

Robert N. Proctor graduated from Indiana University Bloomington in 1976 with a Bachelor of Science in biology. He then took up studies at Harvard University, earning master's and doctoral degrees in the history of science in 1977 and 1984, respectively.[1]

Career

At Pennsylvania State University, he and his wife, Londa Schiebinger, co-directed the Science, Medicine and Technology in Culture Program for nine years.[3]

Proctor has worked on human origins and the history of evolution, including changing interpretations of the oldest tools.[1] His 1988 book Racial Hygiene: Medicine Under the Nazis, which identified Nazi Germany as an effort to create a biomedical utopia. Adolf Hitler was celebrated as "the doctor of the German people"[4] and physicians joined the Schutzstaffel in greater numbers than any other professional group. Proctor details how racial theorists in Nazi Germany were inspired by eugenicists in the United States, including Madison Grant and Harry H. Laughlin, and how one reason the Nazis mandated sterilization of "the unfit"[5] and anti-miscegenation laws was to prevent the United States from becoming “the world’s racial leader.” [6][7][8][9]

Race was also the focus of his 2003 article "Three Roots of Human Recency", which won the 2004/2005 Award for Exemplary Interdisciplinary Anthropological Research from the American Anthropological Association. In this article he exposes the racism implicit in celebrating "leaving Africa" as a fundamental stage in human evolution; he aims to show that anthropological ideas of human origins, including efforts to answer the question "when did humans become human?", have been scarred by changing notions of race.[10][non-primary source needed]

His 2008 book Agnotology: The Making and Unmaking of Ignorance, co-edited with Londa Schiebinger, examines the concept of agnotology, a term coined by Iain Boal in 1992[11][12] to describe the study of intentionally induced ignorance or doubt, particularly the publication of intentionally inaccurate or misleading scientific data.[13][14][15]

His 2012 history of the tobacco industry, Golden Holocaust: Origins of the Cigarette Catastrophe and the Case for Abolition, won the Rachel Carson Prize in 2014.[16][17] He has also published several articles related to the history of the tobacco industry.[18][19][20][21]

A central theme in Proctor's work is the history of race and racism. In the 1970s, he taught "The changing concept of race" with Nathan Huggins and Barbara Rosenkrantz in the African American Studies department at Harvard University. In 2008, Proctor served as an expert witness in a wrongful death suit against Philip Morris International and used the n-word in his testimony, triggering a mistrial.[22] In 2019, Proctor again drew scrutiny for repeatedly saying the racial slur aloud when quoting from cigarette advertisements in a guest lecture at Stanford Law School. He responded to this backlash with, "I didn't 'use' the N-word in my lecture, I showed and cited its use in three different brands of cigarettes sold in the middle decades of the twentieth century."[23]

Personal life

He is the longtime partner of fellow historian of science Londa Schiebinger, whom he met at Harvard. They have two sons together, named Geoffrey Schiebinger and Jonathan Proctor. Before having children, the couple decided they would have two and each would receive one of their surnames.

Bibliography

Books

Selected articles

Prizes and fellowships

  • Senior Scholar-in-Residence, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, 1994[24]
  • Fellow, American Academy of Arts and Sciences, 2002[25]

See also

  • Tobacco in the United States

References

  1. ↑ 1.0 1.1 1.2 "Robert N. Proctor" (in en). https://history.stanford.edu/people/robert-n-proctor. 
  2. ↑ Cohen, Patricia (2003-06-14). "History for Hire in Industry Lawsuits". The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2003/06/14/arts/history-for-hire-in-industry-lawsuits.html. 
  3. ↑ "IRWG director hopes to create 'go to' center for gender studies". Stanford News Service. 2004-10-13. http://news-service.stanford.edu/news/2004/october13/londa-1013.html. 
  4. ↑ Proctor, Robert (1988). Racial hygiene: medicine under the Nazis. Harvard University Press. pp. 64. ISBN 978-0-674-74580-3. https://archive.org/details/racialhygienemed0000proc/page/64/mode/2up. 
  5. ↑ Proctor, Robert (1988). Racial hygiene: medicine under the Nazis. Harvard University Press. pp. 97. ISBN 978-0-674-74580-3. https://archive.org/details/racialhygienemed0000proc/page/97/mode/2up. 
  6. ↑ Seidelman, William E (April 1992). "Racial Hygiene: Medicine Under the Nazis Robert N. Proctor" (in en). Canadian Bulletin of Medical History 9 (1): 148–151. doi:10.3138/cbmh.9.1.148. ISSN 0823-2105. https://utpjournals.press/doi/10.3138/cbmh.9.1.148. 
  7. ↑ "RACIAL HYGIENE: Medicine Under the Nazis". May 15, 1988. https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/robert-n-proctor-3/racial-hygiene-medicine-under-the-nazis/. 
  8. ↑ Friedlander, Henry (April 1990). "Racial Hygiene: Medicine Under the Nazis". The American Historical Review 95 (2): 530. doi:10.2307/2163866. https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.2307/2163866. 
  9. ↑ Nolan, Mary (1989-11-26). "New & Noteworthy" (in en-US). The New York Times. ISSN 0362-4331. https://www.nytimes.com/1989/11/26/books/new-noteworthy.html. 
  10. ↑ Proctor, Robert N. (April 2003). "Three Roots of Human Recency: Molecular Anthropology, the Refigured Acheulean, and the UNESCO Response to Auschwitz" (in en). Current Anthropology 44 (2): 213–239. doi:10.1086/346029. ISSN 0011-3204. https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/346029. 
  11. ↑ Funnell, Antony (2017-01-28). "Agnotology: understanding our ignorance" (in en-AU). https://www.abc.net.au/listen/programs/futuretense/agnotology:-understanding-our-ignorance/8123452. 
  12. ↑ Proctor, Robert N., ed (2008). Agnotology: the making and unmaking of ignorance. Stanford University Press. pp. 27. ISBN 978-0-8047-5652-5. http://archive.org/details/agnotologymaking0000unse. 
  13. ↑ Arenson, Karen W. (2006-08-22). "What Organizations Don't Want to Know Can Hurt". The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/22/business/22mistakes.html. 
  14. ↑ Kenyon, Georgina (2016-01-06). "The man who studies the spread of ignorance" (in en-GB). https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20160105-the-man-who-studies-the-spread-of-ignorance. 
  15. ↑ Kreye, Andrian (2007). "We Will Overcome Agnotology (The Cultural Production Of Ignorance)". Edge Foundation. https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10488. 
  16. ↑ "Robert N. Proctor" (in en). https://shc.stanford.edu/stanford-humanities-center/about/people/robert-n-proctor. 
  17. ↑ "2014 Rachel Carson Prize". https://4sonline.org/2014_robert_proctor.php. 
  18. ↑ K. Michael Cummings; Robert N. Proctor (12 January 2014). "The changing public image of smoking in the United States: 1964–2014". Cancer Epidemiology, Biomarkers & Prevention. doi:10.1158/1055-9965.EPI-13-0798. PMID 24420984. PMC 3894634. https://aacrjournals.org/cebp/article/23/1/32/158084/The-Changing-Public-Image-of-Smoking-in-the-United. Retrieved 22 January 2026. 
  19. ↑ Cummings, K. Michael; Proctor, Robert N. (2014-01-01). "The Changing Public Image of Smoking in the United States: 1964–2014" (in en). Cancer Epidemiology, Biomarkers & Prevention 23 (1): 32–36. doi:10.1158/1055-9965.EPI-13-0798. ISSN 1055-9965. PMID 24420984. PMC 3894634. https://aacrjournals.org/cebp/article/23/1/32/158084/The-Changing-Public-Image-of-Smoking-in-the-United. 
  20. ↑ Proctor, Robert N. (May 2004). "The Global Smoking Epidemic: A History and Status Report" (in en). Clinical Lung Cancer 5 (6): 371–376. doi:10.3816/CLC.2004.n.016. https://linkinghub.elsevier.com/retrieve/pii/S1525730411701899. 
  21. ↑ Stevenson, Terrell; Proctor, Robert N. (July 2008). "The SECRET and SOUL of Marlboro: Phillip Morris and the Origins, Spread, and Denial of Nicotine Freebasing" (in en). American Journal of Public Health 98 (7): 1184–1194. doi:10.2105/AJPH.2007.121657. ISSN 0090-0036. PMID 18511721. PMC 2424107. https://ajph.aphapublications.org/doi/full/10.2105/AJPH.2007.121657. 
  22. ↑ Alanez, Tonya; Holland, John (5 December 2008). "N-word causes mistrial of suit over cigarettes" (in en-US). https://www.sun-sentinel.com/news/fl-xpm-2008-12-05-0812040418-story.html. 
  23. ↑ Booker, Ella (2019-12-10). "Professor's use of racial slur in lecture sparks backlash at Law School" (in en-US). https://stanforddaily.com/2019/12/10/professors-use-of-racial-slur-in-lecture-sparks-backlash-at-law-school/. 
  24. ↑ "Robert Proctor" (in en). https://www.ushmm.org/research/about-the-mandel-center/all-fellows-and-scholars/robert-proctor-1994. 
  25. ↑ "Robert N. Proctor" (in en). https://www.amacad.org/person/robert-n-proctor. 



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