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22/12/2006
A world-famous British scientist failed to disclose that he held a paid consultancy with a chemical company for more than 20 years while investigating cancer risks in the industry. Sir Richard Doll, the celebrated epidemiologist who established that smoking causes lung cancer and who died last year, was receiving a consultancy fee of $1,500 a day in the mid-1980s from chemical multinational Monsanto. The revelations appeared in The Guardian, and are based on documents uncovered by Injurywatch and trade union safety magazine Hazards in US court papers and in Doll's own archive at the Wellcome Institute. While he was being paid by Monsanto, Sir Richard wrote to a royal Australian commission investigating the potential cancer-causing properties of Agent Orange, made by Monsanto and used by the US in the Vietnam war. Sir Richard said there was no evidence that the chemical caused cancer.
The documentation also reveals Sir Richard was paid a £15,000 fee by the Chemical Manufacturers Association and two other major companies, Dow Chemicals and ICI, for a review that largely cleared vinyl chloride, used in plastics, of any link with cancers apart from liver cancer - a conclusion with which the UN's International Agency for Research on Cancer disagrees. Doll was also receiving chemical industry payments when he co-authored in 1981 a major report which gave an extremely low estimate of the occupational contribution to the total cancer toll, a figure still described by the Health and Safety Executive (HSE) as 'the current best estimate'.
Source: Hazards magazine
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