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Published on Friday, December 8, 2006 by the Guardian / UK
Renowned Cancer Scientist Was Paid by Chemical Firm for 20 Years
by Sarah Boseley

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, the Guardian can reveal.

Sir Richard Doll
Sir Richard Doll, the celebrated epidemiologist who established that
smoking causes lung cancer, was receiving a consultancy fee of $1,500
a day in the mid-1980s from Monsanto, then a major chemical company
and now better known for its GM crops business.

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.

Documents seen by the Guardian reveal that Sir Richard was also 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 World Health
Organisation disagrees. Sir Richard's review was used by the
manufacturers' trade association to defend the chemical for more than
a decade.

The revelations will dismay scientists and other admirers of Sir
Richard's pioneering work and fuel a rift between the majority who
support his view that the evidence shows cancer is a product of modern
lifestyles and those environmentalists who argue that chemicals and
pollution must be to blame for soaring cancer rates.

Yesterday Sir Richard Peto, the Oxford-based epidemiologist who worked
closely with him, said the allegations came from those who wanted to
damage Sir Richard's reputation for their own reasons. Sir Richard had
always been open about his links with industry and gave all his fees
to Green College, Oxford, the postgraduate institution he founded, he
said.

Professor John Toy, medical director of Cancer Research UK, which
funded much of Sir Richard's work, said times had changed and the
accusations must be put into context. "Richard Doll's lifelong service
to public health has saved millions of lives. His pioneering work
demonstrated the link between smoking and lung cancer and paved the
way towards current efforts to reduce tobacco's death toll," he said.
"In the days he was publishing it was not automatic for potential
conflicts of interest to be declared in scientific papers."

But a Swedish professor who believes that some of Sir Richard's work
has led to the underestimation of the role of chemicals in causing
cancers said that transparency was all-important. "It's OK for any
scientist to be a consultant to anybody, but then this should be
reported in the papers that you publish," said Lennart Hardell of
University Hospital, Orebro.

Sir Richard died last year. Among his papers in the Wellcome
Foundation library archive is a contract he signed with Monsanto.
Dated April 29 1986, it extends for a year the consulting agreement
that began on May 10 1979 and offers improved terms. "During the
one-year period of this extension your consulting fee shall be $1,500
per day," it says.

Monsanto said yesterday it did not know how much work Sir Richard did
for the company, but said he was an expert witness for Solutia, a
chemical business spun off from Monsanto, as recently as 2000.