Hello, I'm Kirstie Young, and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs archive.

For rights reasons, we've had to shorten the music.

The program was originally broadcast in 2001, and the presenter was Sue Lolly. My castaway this week is a doctor. It's a rather general description for the man who discovered smoking causes cancer.

He wanted to be a mathematician but drank too much before his scholarship exam and flunked it. He has no regrets. He went on the

Jaro March, he fought in the war, and then as a medical researcher more than 50 years ago

realized that it wasn't traffic fumes which had increased cases of

lung cancer but cigarettes. Today his interest has moved to what we eat and

links between diet and heart disease. His recipe for a long life is a happy marriage, not getting fat, not smoking of course,

and he says perhaps with that failed exam in mind having a couple of drinks.

He is the former Regis Professor of Medicine at Oxford University, Sir Richard Dahl.

You were of course a smoker yourself before you analysed its link with lung cancer, weren't you?

How many years had you smoked for?

Oh, I'd smoked for quite a long time. I started

when I was about 19, yes, and I gave up, I think, when I was 37, so 18 years.

Good heavens. But reassuringly, you've discovered that as long as you give it up in your

mid-30s, there are no long-term effects. Yes it does look like that. If you give up

10 or 15 years smoking, no really detectable effects.

I won't say none, but trivial effects,

if you give up soon enough.

It's interesting that you did smoke, though,

because I think your father bribed you with 50 pounds, which was a lot of money in what early 30s it would have been not to smoke

yes indeed he did offer me that money not because he thought smoking was bad for you but very sensibly because he thought it was

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