Comment by andrewla
As far as I can tell the only reference to something that Fisher said was a clip from a newspaper article where he said that criticizing smoking was terrorism. The rest appears to just be other contemporary evidence that the cigarette execs knew it was bad but some scientists (not Fisher?) didn't believe that it was bad.
Am I missing something -- does this article spell out to what extent Fisher himself defended smoking?
Here is Fisher, in a letter to the editors of _Nature_ (perhaps the most prestigious journal imaginable) "Cancer and Smoking"[1]:
> If, for example, it were possible to infer that smoking cigarettes is a cause of this disease, it would equally be possible to infer on exactly similar grounds that inhaling cigarette smoke was a practice of considerable prophylactic value in preventing the disease, for the practice of inhaling is rarer among patients with cancer of the lung than with others. [...] There is nothing to stop those who greatly desire it from believing that lung cancer is caused by smoking cigarettes. They should also believe that inhaling cigarette smoke is a protection. To believe either is, however, to run the risk of failing to recognize, and therefore failing to prevent, other and more genuine causes.
As a geneticist, he of course took the position that it was a smoking gene confounding the causation.
[1]: https://www.nature.com/articles/182596a0