Here are the 2 case studies the Guardian has published alongside its report on Sir Richard Doll's undisclosed industry connections.
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CASE STUDY 1: Intervention in Vietnam inquiry
Sarah Boseley The Guardian, December 8 2006 http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/story/0,,1967382,00.html
In 1985, while Sir Richard was a paid consultant for Monsanto, he stepped into the debate over the herbicides Agent Orange and dioxin, which had been sprayed from the air in the Vietnam war. An Australian royal commission was investigating whether the herbicides, made by Monsanto, had caused cancers in Australian personnel involved in the war. Sir Richard offered his unsolicited views in a letter to Justice Phillip Evatt, who headed the inquiry, and gave Agent Orange a clean bill of health.
"There is no reason to suppose that they [the herbicides] are carcinogenic in laboratory animals and that even TCDD [dioxin], which has been postulated to be a dangerous contaminant of the herbicides, is at the most, only weakly and inconsistently carcinogenic in animal experiments," he wrote.
Lennart Hardell, the professor in the department of oncology at University Hospital who has now become the leading critic of Sir Richard's industry funding, had also offered evidence to the inquiry. Professor Hardell considered Agent Orange a cancer hazard, but Sir Richard warned the commission not to place much value on his work. Many of his published statements, wrote Sir Richard, "were exaggerated or not supportable and ... there were many opportunities for bias to have been introduced in the collection of his data. His conclusions cannot be sustained and in my opinion, his work should no longer be cited as scientific evidence."
Prof Hardell says of Sir Richard: "My colleagues and I could never understand his standpoint. He was at the same time negotiating a new contract with Monsanto." The commission concluded that Agent Orange was not a health hazard.
Prof Hardell says that the passage reviewing the scientific evidence in its report was taken word for word from Monsanto's evidence.
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CASE STUDY 2: Company paid for published review
Sarah Boseley The Guardian, December 8 2006 http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/story/0,,1967403,00.html
Vinyl chloride is used in the manufacture of plastics. In 1984, Sir Richard was approached by the London-based medical adviser of ICI chemicals, Brian Bennett, who wanted to know whether he would agree to carry out a review of the safety of vinyl chlorides which, Mr Bennett said, the American industry would be happy to pay for.
Sir Richard agreed, but wanted a guarantee that his report would be published - whatever it said. He added that he would like the fee paid to a charity he would nominate. That turned out to be Green College, Oxford, which he helped found as a graduate teaching institution for medical and allied disciplines. Sir Richard was its first warden.
The fee was set at GBP15,000 plus expenses and split between the Chemical Manufacturers Association (CMA) and two of the biggest manufacturers, ICI and Dow Chemicals. Monsanto, also a manufacturer of vinyl chloride, had been paying Sir Richard a consultancy fee since 1979 and was still giving him money at the time.
But none of his funding from Monsanto was declared in the article that was eventually published in 1988 as Effects of Exposure to Vinyl Chloride in the Scandinavian Journal of Work, Environment and Health.
The review came to the conclusion that there was no significant extra carcinogenicity associated with the manufacture of vinyl chloride other than in the liver - a fact that was already known. This contradicted a review by the World Health Organisation's International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC), which in 1979 had listed vinyl chloride as a human carcinogen, affecting not only the liver but also the brain, lungs and lymphatic system.
Sir Richard's review was used by the industry to defend the safety of the chemical by the manufacturers' trade association for more than a decade. In 2001, the American Chemical Association, as the CMA was renamed, said: "The world's leading researchers have studied vinyl chloride and brain cancer and concluded that the evidence does not support a link between brain cancer and exposure to vinyl chloride."
The review also led to the US Environmental Protection Agency taking the view that only liver cancer could be linked to vinyl chloride.
There have been a number of cases in the US where workers who contracted other sorts of cancer after exposure to vinyl chloride have tried to sue. During one of these brought against Dow Chemicals and also Solutia - a company spun off from Monsanto to run its chemical business in 1997 - by the widow of a man who died of a brain tumour, Sir Richard was cross-examined about the lack of any mention of the industry funding he had received in his review.
Documents show that Sir Richard told lawyers during a hearing behind closed doors in London that he had asked Mr Bennett whether he should disclose the GBP15,000 payment and Mr Bennett had said there was no need. Sir Richard was paid by Solutia for his attendance as an expert witness.