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Lung cancer researcher's work saved many lives

By V. UPENDER RAO
Published September 5, 2005

Sir Richard Doll was born in Hampton, England, in 1912 and graduated from St Thomas' Hospital Medical School in London in 1937. He served in the Royal Army Medical Corps between 1939 and 1945 and joined the Medical Research Council in 1946.

In 1951, he co-authored a paper with Austin Bradford Hill revealing the link between cigarette smoking and lung cancer. In 1954, he co-authored another paper confirming the causal role of cigarette smoking in lung cancer. Over the next 50 years, they asked nearly all doctors in Britain about their smoking history and tracked them to see what caused their deaths. This study was published last year by Dr. Doll at age 91.

Dr. Doll was 41 when he started working at the Medical Research Council. He interviewed 700 lung cancer patients to identify a possible cause for lung cancer. In 1951, council researchers recruited 40,000 British doctors into the study. They asked them about their smoking history, followed them over the next three years and found a significant risk of lung cancer among smokers. People started quitting smoking after his landmark study of 1954 was published. Dr. Doll, who was a smoker himself, gave up smoking during the course of the study.

In 1954, 80 percent of British adults smoked, as compared with 26 percent today. It is reported that in the first 10 years of smoking more smokers die of causes other than lung cancer. But after 20, 40 and 50 years of smoking, nearly half of them die of lung cancer. Quitting at age 50 cuts the risk in half; stopping at age 30 negates the risk altogether.

As a consequence of this and other evidence, millions of people quit smoking. Dr. Doll's associate of 30 years, Sir Richard Peto, said: "Richard Doll's work has prevented millions of deaths in the 20th century and will prevent tens of millions of premature deaths in the present century. He was unique in medical history."

Dr. Doll's research also established that cigarette smoking can cause many other cancers, heart disease, respiratory disease and peptic ulcers. It also showed that all radiation is potentially harmful, which wasn't always thought to be the case; that power lines do not cause cancer; that alcohol can cause breast cancer; and that aspirin can protect against heart disease.

After a brief illness, Dr. Doll, 92, died July 24 at the John Radcliffe Hospital in Headington, Oxford, England. This is a large multispecialty hospital attached to the Institute of Molecular Medicine, where cutting edge research by some of the world's leading scientists is conducted. It is different from Radcliffe Infirmary, which is located on Woodstock Road.

Dr. Doll will be remembered not only as an epidemiologist and a clinical researcher par excellence, but also as an inspiration and a mentor to a generation of scientists. He spent all his professional life in research and never retired. It is, then, only fitting that Oxford University will establish a Richard Doll Building, which will bring together work on population studies into the causes, treatment and prevention of cancer, heart attacks, strokes and other major illnesses.

--Dr. V. Upender Rao practices at the Cancer and Blood Disease Center in Lecanto.

[Last modified September 5, 2005, 01:15:10]