Sir Richard Doll | |
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Born | William Richard Shaboe Doll 28 October 1912 |
Died | 24 July 2005 Oxford, England | (aged 92)
Alma mater | St Thomas's Hospital Medical School |
Known for | Epidemiology of smoking Armitage–Doll model |
Awards | Gairdner Foundation International Award (1970) Buchanan Medal (1972) Charles S. Mott Prize (1979) Royal Medal (1986) Prince Mahidol Award (1992) Shaw Prize (2004) Gold Medal for Radiation Protection (2004) King Faisal International Prize (2005) |
Scientific career | |
Fields | Physiology Epidemiology |
Sir William Richard Shaboe Doll CH OBE FRS (28 October 1912 – 24 July 2005)[1] was a British physician who became an epidemiologist in the mid-20th century and made important contributions to that discipline. He was a pioneer in research linking smoking to health problems. With Ernst Wynder, Bradford Hill and Evarts Graham, he was credited with being the first to prove that smoking increased the risk of lung cancer and heart disease. (German studies had suggested a link as early as the 1920s but were forgotten or ignored until the 1990s.)[2][3]
He also carried out pioneering work on the relationship between radiation and leukaemia as well as that between asbestos and lung cancer, and alcohol and breast cancer. He however, initially for many years, stood in opposition to research done by Alice Stewart which connected radiation exposure of pregnant mothers to development of leukaemia in their children due to her 'questionable' analysis.[4][5] On 28 June 2012, he was the subject of an episode of The New Elizabethans, a series broadcast on BBC Radio Four to mark the Diamond Jubilee of Queen Elizabeth II, dealing with 60 public figures from her reign.[6]
[our] approach requires either much larger doses than were encountered in the Hanford study or a much larger data base
The 90 percent confidence interval is bounded by the range from 380 to 448 cancer deaths. Thus 442 deaths is not a statistically significant deviation from the average expectation.…Kneale and Stewart do not claim their results to be statistically significant