The industry had realized you could create the impression of controversy simply by asking questions

An all purpose expert is an oxymoron

An all-purpose expert is an oxymoron.

Doubt is crucial to science in the version we call curiosity or healthy scepticism, it drives science forward – but it also makes science vulnerable to misrepresentation, because it is easy to take uncertainties out of context and create the impression that everything is unresolved. This was the tobacco industry's key insight: that you could use normal scientific uncertainty to undermine the status of actual scientific knowledge.