He may have a date with the Queen at Buckingham Palace to look forward to, but it was no great surprise to find the eminent Oxford professor Richard Peto rather preoccupied with fags and booze.

Tobacco was certainly the cause of his highly excitable state as he rummaged through the mountains of files, rising against every wall of his office at Oxford's Radcliffe Infirmary.

It's not that he is getting nervous about receiving his knighthood on Thursday. As one of the world's leading cancer researchers, he simply cannot hear the word cigarette without diving into piles of nightmarish statistics. Half of all smokers will be killed by tobacco; a quarter of them will die during middle-age to lose on average 25 years of their lives; annual tobacco deaths will rise to ten million by the year 2030. The statistics are soon coming faster than a pole-position lap by the Marlboro- sponsored Ferrari of Michael Schumacher.

For 30 years Prof Peto has worked in Oxford alongside Sir Richard Doll, the man who way back in 1950 famously demonstrated that smoking was a major cause of lung cancer.

But if Sir Richard, still working hard at 87, can claim to have saved countless lives, the younger half of the Two Sir Richards partnership is entitled to make a similar claim. For the clinical trial unit that he leads has made many crucial discoveries, covering a wide range of life-threatening diseases. Most spectacularly, his team established that the humble aspirin is one of the most effective treatment for people suffering heart attacks and some kinds of stroke.

Prof Peto, 56, who lives in Jericho, Oxford, said: "People were so surprised when we found this about something as boring and cheap as the aspirin."

Even some doctors asked to take part in the aspirin research had initially been cynical about the whole thing. Today, thanks to the work of Prof Peto and Prof Rory Collins, the aspirin is used as a life-saver across the globe. So why was aspirin not recognised as a wonder-drug decades before? Prof Peto shrugged: "I'm always reminded of the Fawlty Towers episode, where Basil tells Sybil that on Mastermind she would specialise in 'the bleeding obvious'. Well, that's what we do."

The discovery that simple hormonal treatments could halve the risks of the recurrence of breast cancer after surgery was another major breakthrough for the unit. They also established the potential of another under-valued drug, tamoxifen, showing it could save 20,000 women a year if given after breast cancer surgery.

A key reason why the Oxford CTSU (Clinical Trial Service Unit) findings are so widely accepted is the sheer scale of the studies. Literally thousands of patients, GPs and and hospitals are involved in Britain. The unit is also involved in a huge international projects including a study into smoking and drinking in China, where families of a million dead people were interviewed about tobacco, while in India they have established a link between TB and smoking. Another current study will look at the death toll in Russia from vodka abuse.

Five years ago Prof Peto actually found himself the unlikely toast of drinkers, when he published the results of a 13-year-old study suggesting moderate drinking significantly reduced death rates in middle-aged men. But in any event he will be certainly entitled to a drink when he goes to the Palace with three of his sons, Carl, Russell and Leon, all in their 20s (his fourth son Tom is living in Mexico).

Sir Richard Doll briefly poked his head around the door. The two men are still working together, most recently on a paper demolishing the theory that tobacco reduces the risk of Alzheimer's Disease.

"They don't make them like that anymore," said Prof Peto of the man he followed to Oxford in 1969, just a few years after he gave up smoking himself. It is a fitting tribute to a partnership against cancer that he is to follow him to a Buckingham Palace investiture.

Story date: Tuesday 30 November

Converted for the new archive on 30 June 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.