[TeMPOraL]

I'd cut scientists some slack here. People often forget that almost all of the actually useful and used medicine is less than 100 years old; that almost all that goes into items of everyday life is less than 100 years old too. Cigarettes in the form we recognize today are less than 200 years old, and for most of the time since then 'till now, neither medicine nor biological sciences knew shit about anything, or had any useful equipment to measure anything.

The exponential progress of technology isn't just the Internet and rockets and GDP. It's all knowledge and all tools derived from it, many of which are necessary to make further scientific advances. Arguably, all that's useful has been invented or refined in the last 200 years, with the distribution leaning heavily towards the present.

So yeah, it took scientists a while to declare that smoking is bad. There were many reasons for it, but a major contributing factor was that they had neither good models nor good tools until very recently.