Twisted history

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Twisted history

http://www.canada.com/vancouversun/news/editorial/story.html?

id=edb7fa5f-912d-4fe2-8000-6ff6c1e85ebe

The savaging of Sir Doll reveals what some activists will do

when scientists don't say what they want them to say

Dan Gardner, CanWest News Service

Published: Thursday, January 03, 2008

Most people have never heard of Sir Doll, but most who have

think Doll -- a cancer researcher who died in 2005 at the age of 92 -

- was a horrible man.

For years, he said things about synthetic chemicals that the

chemical industry wanted to hear. There is no cancer epidemic, he

said. And chemicals wouldn't be to blame if there were. What Doll

didn't say is that he secretly accepted huge payments from major

chemical companies.

This is the standard portrait of Doll among environmentalists and

other activists fighting what they see as the terrible danger of

synthetic chemicals.

Google Doll's name along with the words " chemical " and " cancer " and

it appears in thousands of variations. It can also be found in the

pages of The Secret History of the War on Cancer, a new book by

epidemiologist Devra that has garnered huge media attention

and high praise from the journalists reviewing it.

But talk to top scientists in Doll's field and a different image

emerges. Doll was one of the great scientists of the modern era,

they believe. His work saved millions of lives. It advanced science

by giant leaps.

" This book is dedicated to the memory of Sir Doll, " begins

the dedication of a tome about the global burden of disease released

recently by the World Health Organization. " It is entirely fitting

that an assessment of world health at the end of the 20th century

should be dedicated to the memory of a man whose work did so much to

improve it. "

How can there be such a vast gap in one man's reputation? Therein

lies a tale, one worth telling because it reveals what some

activists are prepared to do when scientists don't say what they

want them to say.

There's little controversy about Doll's early career. In the early

1950s, he was one of several scientists to identify smoking as a

major cause of cancer. He then fingered asbestos and several other

occupational hazards. He became a leader in his field and, over the

course of decades, helped lay the foundations of modern

epidemiology. He was knighted in 1971 and received a heap of awards

and honours in the years that followed.

In the same era, Carson's Silent Spring -- the seminal book

that launched the environmental movement in 1962 -- raised an

important new hypothesis. For the first time in history, Carson

noted, we are exposed to large numbers of synthetic chemicals. Some

are demonstrably harmful. Some we know nothing about. That toxic

stew, Carson argued, is the cause of the apparent epidemic of cancer.

Some of the statistics Carson used to prove an epidemic was underway

were misleading and exaggerated. Worse, she ignored the massive role

of smoking. Still, her hypothesis was reasonable. It merited

investigation.

Over the years the data grew and Doll and his long-time colleague

Sir Peto were asked by the U.S. government to put it all

together. Delivered in 1981, that report concluded that occupational

hazards like asbestos probably accounted for only four per cent of

all cancers, while all forms of pollution were estimated to cause

two per cent of the cancer burden, with most of that coming from car

exhaust. Chemicals were simply not a big part of the cancer picture.

Doll's and Peto's conclusions starkly contradicted those of a small

minority of cancer researchers who felt there really is an epidemic

of cancer and chemicals are to blame. Chief among them was a

University of Illinois scientist named Sam Epstein. Devra of

the University of Pittsburgh was another.

Most scientists sided with Doll and Peto. Their 1981 paper became a

landmark in the field and it influences policy and research to this

day.

Still, Epstein and the others remained unconvinced and they

continued to pursue the chemicals-and-cancer hypothesis. That was

fine, to an extent. Debate is an essential feature of science. But

some of the critics -- notably Epstein, who embraced the role of

scientist-as-activist -- went beyond science and started making

personal accusations.

The chemical companies were buying scientists, they alleged. And

their biggest purchase was Sir Doll.

These charges had been percolating for years when Doll died in 2005.

But papers Doll bequeathed to the archives of the Wellcome Trust,

one of the world's largest medical research charities, seemed to

verify the sordid truth. One 1986 contract with the multinational

corporation Monsanto, for example, showed Doll had been consulting

with the company since 1979 and his fee would be raised to $1,500

per day of work.

In December 2006, the British newspaper The Guardian trumpeted the

discovery. In a joint letter to the newspaper, the heads of the

Royal Society, the Academy of Medical Science, the Wellcome Trust

and Cancer Research U.K. denied Doll had done anything wrong. But it

made no difference.

Doll's old foes gloated. Activist groups spread the news on the

Internet. Today, environmentalists scorn any mention of Doll and

Peto and treat everything they wrote as mere industry propaganda.

The first clue that there's something wrong with this story lies in

the fact that the allegations were confirmed by papers Doll himself

made public. That's a strange way to keep a secret.

" There was no secret, " Sir Peto says on the phone from the

Clinical Trial Service Unit at Oxford University. " The fact that he

was consulting for Monsanto and that they would pay him an

honorarium to do so, this is not a secret. Everybody knew he did

this and everybody knew he gave stuff away. "

What Doll's critics ignore, Peto says, is that the money didn't go

in his pocket. " Under oath, a few years ago, he said that he did not

take consultancy money from industry, " Peto says. " And when he says

that, what he means is that he's not going to take stuff for

personal gain. "

Although the issue of conflicts of interest in science only became

heated in the 1990s -- when disclosure rules were first created --

Doll, Peto and other scientists in the Clinical Trial Service Unit

long ago worried that personal enrichment could diminish their

credibility. So they established a policy that any money they made

in honoraria or consulting fees would be donated to charity.

" I've given a lot to Oxfam over the years, " Peto notes. " The co-

director of this unit, Roy , when he produced results showing

a cholesterol-lowering drug worked really effectively, he went

around the world giving lectures on it and that year he gave more

than £100,000 to Oxfam. It's because we want not to be

misrepresented as paid hacks. "

So why did Doll consult with industry if not for the money? " He

wanted industry to listen to him, " Peto says. Doll began his career

in a time when corporations kept shoddy records and didn't bother to

ask if workers were dying before their time. " And so he was prepared

to consult with individual industries to actually identify hazards

earlier than they would have done. "

The misrepresentations of Doll's record do not end with money. Among

many accusations made by in The Secret History of the War on

Cancer is the claim that, in their seminal 1981 paper on the causes

of cancer, Doll and Peto " had not looked at all " at cancer rates

among black Americans or at cancer incidence rates (diagnosed cases

of cancer, as opposed to cancer mortality rates.) Worse, they had

omitted cancer among whites older than 65 even though that's where

most cancers occurred. A layperson reading this would have to

conclude Doll and Peto were either foolish or up to no good.

But is wrong. The 1981 paper included all the data for blacks

and for whites over 65. It also included the incidence data. Doll

and Peto didn't use these numbers in their final calculations for

reasons they carefully explained in the paper -- they felt the data

were distorted for complicated methodological reasons -- but they

ignored or hid nothing. It's all there.

And there's plenty of reason to think they got it right. A recently

released major study of the causes of cancer in France conducted by

the World Health Organization's International Agency for Research on

Cancer (IARC) came to conclusions about the role of chemicals that

look almost identical to those of Doll's and Peto's 1981 paper.

Will that matter to Doll's public reputation? Probably not.

Reviewing The Secret History of the War on Cancer in the British

medical journal The Lancet, Boyle, director of IARC, was

scornful: " Devotees of conspiracy theories and aficionados of gossip

and innuendo will be drawn towards this book like wasps to a juicy

piece of meat. "

" You can do this sort of character assassination and it works, " Peto

says wearily. " Nothing you write in Canada will stop it from

working. It actually works. It's bizarre to see somebody of such

integrity so easily misrepresented. But that is what has happened

and what will continue to happen. "