Tobacco company metal powder research

Tom's example of how even tobacco research has a material-science angle. Used to illustrate the breadth of externalities and how industry research money flows.

What are some other externalities? Student: Farming, smoking. Smoking is an externality. I'm not sure that immediately I can think about how to tie that into material science. Actually I can. When I was department head, Nick Grant was a faculty member in the department, and he was trying to get some research money. He was well into his 80s. He was going to get some money from one of the tobacco companies, because he made metal powders all his life, and they wanted him to make some powders of different composition to absorb the smoke. So the cigarettes might have metal powders — rather than activated charcoal. They were going to give him hundreds of thousands of dollars. Here we're trying to raise research money from the government — these guys were just floating in money. Even in smoking there's some material science somewhere.