Richard Doll

Richard Doll (1912–2005) was a British physician and epidemiologist whose research helped establish cigarette smoking as a cause of lung cancer and other diseases.

Smoking and lung cancer: The causal association between tobacco smoking and increased risk of lung cancer. Doll’s studies supplied landmark evidence that smoking causes lung cancer.
Case-control study: An observational study comparing people with an outcome to similar people without it, examining prior exposures. Doll and Bradford Hill compared smoking histories of lung-cancer patients and controls.
Lung cancer: A malignant tumor arising in the tissues of the lung. Rising lung-cancer deaths prompted the investigations that made Doll’s career famous.
Richard Peto: A British medical statistician and epidemiologist whose research includes major studies of tobacco and cancer. Peto worked with Doll on long-term analyses of smoking and mortality.
Association and causation: The distinction between variables occurring together and one variable producing changes in another. Doll’s findings raised the central question of whether smoking caused cancer or merely accompanied it.
British Doctors Study: A long-running study that tracked smoking habits and mortality among British physicians. Doll and Austin Bradford Hill used it to show how smoking affected long-term mortality.
Prospective cohort study: An observational study that follows a defined group over time to compare outcomes by exposure. The British Doctors Study followed physicians to measure later deaths by smoking status.
Ernst Wynder: An American physician and cancer researcher who studied the link between smoking and lung cancer. Wynder’s independent case-control research appeared alongside Doll and Hill’s early findings.
Oxford University: A university in Oxford, England, and one of the world’s oldest universities. Doll led epidemiological research at Oxford after earlier work in London.
Lung cancer screening: Testing people without symptoms to detect lung cancer at an earlier stage. Doll’s contribution concerned preventing exposure, not detecting tumors through screening.

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MesotheliomaRelated: His research contributed to evidence connecting asbestos work with lung cancer and mesothelioma.