Sir Richard Doll - Smoking and Cancer Alarm False
Doll wins a place in Hell's Hall of Shame.
Sir Richard Doll celebrated epidemiologist who established that smoking causes lung cancer, was receiving a consultancy fee of $1,500 a day in the mid-1980s from Monsanto, then a major chemical company and now better known for its GM crops business.
Elevator to Hell's Hall Of Shame
The Guardian UK has reported that among Doll's papers was a very interesting 10 year consultancy contract with Monsanto which goes back to 1979 and is renewed in 1986 with a new phat fee attached.
So Sir Richard Doll went around claiming that smoking and life style were the main causes of cancer, when he knew very well that it was chemical pollution from the big petro-chemical companies like Monsanto who are to blame.
Like Luis Pasteur's death bed confession, the microbe is nothing, the terrain is everything, Doll too retracted his assertion that the cause of cancer was smoking and life style related:
Faced with growing evidence of the scientific untenability of his virtual dismissal of causes of cancer other than smoking and lifestyle, coupled with damaging revelations of conflicts of interest, Doll has suddenly retracted his long-standing dismissal of environmental causes of cancer. As a member of a recent IARC scientific working group, convened to review evidence relating tobacco smoking and cancer, Doll finally admitted:
"It does look as if it's the cancers that are principally caused by hormones that are not affected by smoking. Most of the other cancers throughout the body are induced by exposure to chemicals, often environmental ones" (68). This retraction, countless cases of avoidable cancers and deaths late, has been ignored by cancer establishments worldwide.
Excerpted from Stop Cancer Before It Starts: How to Win the War On Cancer by Samuel S. Epstein, Ph.D. 2003
So Mr Doll, off to Hell's Hall of Shame for you but what about the corruption left behind?
There are some fine people like Martin Walker, author of the controversial book, "Dirty Medicine" who has tirelessly investigated and reported on the corrupt practices of the petro-chemical cartels. He exposed Sir Richard's role in many industry cover-ups over the years. It was not easy for Martin Walker and as he said himself:
I have relied to a great extent in my criticisms of Sir Richard’s role in this particular case, on what might be called circumstantial evidence, or less value-laden, ‘similar fact evidence’. I have tried to take this particular work of Sir Richard’s out of the constraints of its academic discipline, and place it in the industrial, PR and propaganda culture, which more realistically describes the public face of contentious industries. I have allowed reflections and information on the chemical industries covert tactics, to extend beyond vinyl chloride and beyond the exact period of Sir Richard’s review. This looseness of method is necessary, I think, in order to show clearly that chemical companies and academics have worked to a strategy for decades, a strategy within which Sir Richard Doll, either consciously or unconsciously, has played an important role.
Now with the discovery of the Doll's papers, perhaps some action should be taken to review his past research. After all, now he is in Hell's Hall of Shame".
Here is a nice article by Injurywatch , which lists the studies that Sir Richard Doll was involved in and what was done to skew the outcomes and what steps need to be done to rectify the system that allows for such unethical behavour on the part of our scientists and our corporations.
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