Feminist Peace Network

Few of us know the name Sir Richard Doll, but an article by Judy Brady in the latest Breast Cancer Action Newsletter, provides a chilling biography that sheds a great deal of light on how and why the impact on industrial chemicals and toxins has been so discounted in the discussion of what causes cancer. According to Brady,

“Knighted in 1971 for his contributions to the science of epidemiology, Doll criticized many industry practices at the beginning of his career in the early 1950s. But later his views apparently changed, and in 1981 he published a paper that became the standard for estimating what causes cancer, a paper important enough in the scientific world to be cited over 440 different times in the scientific literature. In this paper he maintained that smoking was the single most important cause of the disease. He then stated that occupational pollutants might account for 4 percent of cancers and environmental exposures for 2 percent. Two percent. That’s all, despite the fact that in 1964 the World Health Organization had estimated that 80 percent of cancers in industrialized countries were environmentally caused.”

As she explains, the reason Doll changed his point of view isn’t so hard to understand. In November, 2006 an article was published about the conflicting relationships between cancer researchers and industry which

“revealed that Doll had failed to divulge his ties to Monsanto, a giant biotechnology and agricultural chemical company. That’s scary enough, but that’s not all.

For instance, Doll was a long-standing, well-paid consultant for Turner and Newall, a leading British asbestos corporation. He was originally responsible for lowering the acceptable exposure limits for workers, but he also falsely assured workers that they were now safe. When workers sued Turner and Newall because they got cancer from asbestos exposure, Doll, who had received a 50,000 (pounds) gift from the company, filed a sworn statement in U.S. courts in its favor. A year later in 1983, in a report heavily funded by General Motors, Doll claimed that lead in gasoline did not harm children. He also discredited evidence that exposure to ionizing radiation from nuclear power plants was linked to childhood leukemia. This dismissal appears to be gratuitous, although Monsanto (Doll’s principal benefactor) had been conducting an experiment during which it fed radioactive material to pregnant women, for which it was later sued. The company was also involved in research on uranium for the Manhattan Project. Regarding radiation, Doll was quoted as saying that “people are ridiculously frightened of it.�

There is a great deal more in Brady’s article which just adds to the growing evidence that we need to immediately start putting a great deal more emphasis on undertaking un-biased research into the relationship between man-made chemicals and cancer.

Filed under: Uncategorized, Atrocities