Smoking and Lung Cancer

Witness History

BBC

History, Personal Journals, Society & Culture

4.4 • 1.6K Ratings

🗓️ 16 June 2016

⏱️ 9 minutes

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Summary

It was not until the 1950s that British researchers first connected cigarette smoking with the huge rise in people suffering from lung cancer. Initially, scientists had thought pollution was a much more likely cause. Hear an archive interview with Sir Richard Doll who carried out the original studies and Sir Richard Peto who worked with him.

This programme was first broadcast in 2013

(Photo: A man smoking a cigarette. Credit: Press Association)

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello and thank you for downloading witness from the BBC World Service with me Louis Adaggo.
0:05.6	And today I'm taking you back to the 1950s when a groundbreaking study first showed the link
0:11.4	between smoking and lung cancer.
0:14.0	The man who made the breakthrough was then a young medical researcher
0:18.0	trying to find out why there had been a big rise in lung cancer,
0:21.0	which had previously been a rare disease. The
0:24.1	researcher's name was Richard Dahl and years later he spoke to the BBC about his
0:29.1	study. For a long time people thought this was just due to improve diagnosis because back in those days clinical medicine was improving enormously
0:37.4	X-rays were becoming available it was possible to operate on the chest all sorts of things were changing. But it got so large the increase
0:47.2	that it really didn't seem wise to attribute it all to better diagnosis. And they had a conference of medical research
0:53.8	counts which decided that it would be better to at least it would be wise to try to find
0:59.2	a cause in case there was one. Dahl was working under the eminent epidemiologist Austin Bradford Hill at the time, and both of them
1:06.5	thought that if there was one cause, it was most likely to be car exhausts, or maybe
1:11.9	the tarmac atom used on roads. The last thing they thought
1:15.0	it would be was smoking. It was such a common thing everybody smoked and
1:19.3	apparently been doing so for years. It was very difficult to believe that this apparently innocuous
1:25.6	habit once you got over the nausea that came from inhaling a lot of nicotine could be harmful.
1:32.1	Sir Onis Kenaway at the time, he was one of the advisors of the Medical Research Council.
1:37.0	He thought smoking was quite a likely cause,
1:40.0	but I must say Bradfittel and I both thought that motor car exhaust were much more likely to be the explanation.
1:47.0	Dole and Bradford Hill asked patients at 20 London hospitals about their lives, about what jobs they'd done, where they lived, what they've been exposed to.
1:57.0	It wasn't long before they realized that the thing linking the patients who had lung cancer was that they smoked or that they had smoked.
	...

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