Big academic guns roll out (again) to protect Richard Doll's reputation

It was no surprise to see the big scientific and academic guns being wheeled out in defence of Sir Richard Doll's reputation. Despite clear and obvious flaws in his studies and massive undeclared payments made to him from interested parties at the time, Sir Richard was always an establishment and industry favourite. Here injurywatch poses the questions his supporters must answer...

Under his mentor Austin (Tony) Bradford Hill, who discovered the link between smoking and lung cancer, Richard Doll justifiably built a reputation as one of the world's great epidemiologists.

But in later life the beknighted professor secretly took payments from the leading UK asbestos polluter Turner and Newall for more than thirty years.

Injurywatch can document a £50,000 payment from Turner and Newall to Green College, where Sir Richard Doll was founding warden, and which was led by his wife, and has film available of Sir Richard touring Turner and Newall sites in 1982 following a TV exposure warning of the dangers of asbestos.

The purpose of Doll's trip round the T&N plants was to tell workers their industrial exposure to asbestos was "largely safe".

Sir Richard Doll later expressed his gratitude for the T&N payment to Green College in gratitude "for the work I have undertaken on their behalf."

Currently in excess of 4,000 people a year die from asbestos-related cancers in the UK and more that 1900 people die from the cancer of the thorax, mesothelioma, where exposure to asbestos is the only known cause.

Turner and Newall, with plants across the UK, went into chapter 11 bankruptcy in 2001 and UK victims agreed to settle earlier this year. Many claimants are dead, but their descendants are only likely to receive between 10 and 20p in the pound of the compensation due to them.

Monsanto
In the chemical sector, injurywatch has been able to verify that secret payments were made to Sir Richard Doll by Monsanto of at least $1000 a day (later increased to $1500 a day) between 1976 and 2002.

During the time he was secretly being paid, Doll consistently produced reports which would be deemed to support the Monsanto position. He testified in favour of the Monsanto product Agent Orange before an Australian Royal Commission in 1985 without ever declaring a financial interest of being paid by the company which produced the chemical.

Injurywatch believes there were flaws in both the Doll-Peto study: The Causes of Cancer: Quantitative Estimates of Avoidable Risks of Cancer in the United States Today,” (Journal of the National Cancer Institute 66 (1981).

Specifically we would like to know why the parameters of what purported to be a neutral study of environmental illness would be drawn to exclude African Americans and those aged over sixty when cancer is known to be a disease of the poor and the old.

Doll also produced a 1998 study into vinyl chloride, Effects of exposure to vinyl chloride. An assessment of the evidence. Scand J Work Environ Health 14(2):61-78. Doll R. 1988. The study was not declared at the time to have been funded by the Chemical Manufacturers' Association and Doll's contract with Monsanto, a major vinyl chloride manufacturer was again undeclared.

The study, which largely exonerated the vinyl chloride industry of any blame, seems to have obvious perversities. High risk/exposure individuals seem to have been deliberately excluded from the study while low risk/unexposed workers were drafted in.

Respected scientists have long called into question Sir Richard Doll's findings and motivation and yet 35 years after Doll Peto when its core figure of 6,000 annual environmental cancer deaths is demonstrably wrong, HSE continues to promote the research as the best available.

It is regrettable that Blakemore, Walport, Rees, Bell, Markham and Peto have not put their efforts into conducting an immediate review rather than viewing the exposure of Sir Richard Doll's financial links as an attack on his otherwise emeritus legacy.

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