Jump to full article: Electronic Telegraph (uk), 2005-07-25
Intro: Professor Sir Richard Doll, the epidemiologist and former Regius Professor of Medicine at Oxford University who died yesterday aged 92, was one of the first two scientists to link smoking with lung cancer.
Doll himself stopped smoking - untipped cigarettes - because of his findings in the celebrated report he wrote with Professor Austin Bradford Hill, of the Medical Research Council. The report, published in the British Medical Journal in 1950, was based on a survey of lung cancer patients in 20 London hospitals; it found that smoking was the only factor overwhelmingly implicated in lung cancer, and that it was rare for non-smokers to suffer from the disease.
"The risk of developing the disease increases in proportion to the amount smoked," the report concluded. "It may be 50 times as great among those who smoke 25 or more cigarettes a day as among non-smokers." . . .
This early study was the first in the world to show that smoking could cause not only lung cancer but also heart attacks and emphysema. It was the foundation for the first official reports on the dangers of tobacco.
At first, though, many greeted the connection between smoking and cancer with scepticism. Smoking was seen as just too "normal" an activity to be so dangerous. It took seven years for the Ministry of Health to take Doll's findings seriously; the tobacco industry hired its own statistician to prove that air pollution was the main cause.
Even in 1958, one Harley Street physician objected to the Medical Research Council's link between smoking and cancer as "a staggering and most unscientific claim". He went on: "They will be blaming mother's milk next." . . .
Two years later, as director of the Imperial Cancer Research Fund Epidemiology Unit at Oxford, Doll reported that smoking cigarettes was responsible for 30 per cent of deaths from cancer of all kinds; but he argued that smokers who changed to low tar cigarettes could halve their chances of getting lung cancer (though not of getting heart disease) - a finding which has since been called into question, following evidence that smokers who switch to low tar products tend to smoke more cigarettes. . . .
In 1986 Doll supported the findings of research which suggested that lung cancer could also be caused by "passive" smoking, and during the 1990s he was prominent in the campaign to persuade the Government to ban tobacco advertising.
In 1991 he said: "Young people say smoking cannot be all that bad or the Government would never allow it to be promoted in the way it does… I accept that millions of pounds are at stake, but no price can be put on the misery and suffering of smokers who die of cancer and of their families and friends who are forced to watch one of the most painful ways of dying." . . .
Doll's findings contributed to the development of an increasingly vociferous anti-smoking campaign, and sparked controversy between health experts and civil libertarians about the role of the state in interfering with individual decisions.
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