Sir – Bill Clinton in his video message to those gathered at the Examination Schools to mark Leonard Blavatnik’s £75m gift for the establishment of an Oxford University school of government (Feature, September 23) can, in the light of Sir Richard Doll’s work in Oxford from 1969 to 2005, be forgiven for claiming that “It was at Oxford that the link between smoking and cancer was discovered”.
In fact the link was first signalled in 1950, when Richard Doll, then at the Medical Research Council-sponsored statistical research unit based at the Central Middlesex Hospital, and his colleague, Austen Bradford Hill, Professor of Medical Statistics at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, published in the British Medical Journal their paper Smoking and carcinoma of the lung. Preliminary Report and then firmly established in their 1954 paper The mortality of doctors in relation to their smoking habits, also published in the British Medical Journal, which is not for a moment to suggest that Richard Doll and his colleagues’ researches here in Oxford were, have been, and are, anything other than momentous.
Bruce Ross-Smith, Headington
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