Today's Globe: tobacco-funded research, veterans' suicide program, Vytorin, Zetia doubts, healthcare cost controls

The nation's largest cigarette maker has paid for scientific research at four Massachusetts universities since 2000, a practice that critics of the tobacco industry liken to the Mafia underwriting crime fighting.

With suicide rates on the rise among military personnel, Massachusetts last month launched a one-of-a-kind program to prevent suicide among veterans of wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Two widely prescribed cholesterol-lowering drugs, Vytorin and Zetia, may not work and should be used only as a last resort, a panel of four cardiologists told an audience of more than 5,000 people at a major cardiology conference yesterday.

"With its massive cost overruns and missed deadlines, the healthcare reform law is quickly becoming the Big Dig of the next generation, an ambitious and beneficial but deeply flawed public initiative with back-breaking costs to the taxpayers," Christopher R. Anderson, president of the Massachusetts High Technology Council, writes on the op-ed page. "Unlike the Big Dig, Massachusetts taxpayers, not Congress, will pay most of the healthcare tab."