In 1954 an article looking at the health of UK doctors was published. Richard Doll was one of the authors. It was to become a landmark, with regular follow ups over the next 50 years, and Richard Doll was on the author list to the end.

From the original paper "The questionary was sent ..... to 59,600 men and women on the Medical Register.....40,564 were sufficiently complete to be utilized." In 2004, the last installment was printed. 34 439 British male doctors, 50 years of data. And smoking causes lung cancer. Richard (later Sir) Doll has been credited with being the first to link smoking and lung cancer. More accurately (and nothing is being taken from his to say this), his work is the most complete. As these early journal articles show there were a number of contemporaneous researchers willing to link smoking and lung cancer. Though that was quite a contentious issue at the time; the man himself thought that tarred roads were probably to blame for the increase in lung cancer incidences. "Mortality from lung cancer was increasing every year in the first few decades of the last century," said Sir Richard. "People didn't pay any attention to these mortality rates during the war. "But in the years that followed, they started to become concerned." Linking smoking and lung cancer was his most famous work, but in this interview it was his work on the dose response of cancer to ionizing radiation that he holds in highest regard. After Hiroshima "It was quite a difficult study to design and carry out, but it was the first paper to demonstrate that the effect of ionising radiation is proportional to the dose. Before then it was thought cancer was only produced with big doses sufficient to cause macroscopic damage to tissue and that it was the repair process that caused cancer." There are four portraits in the National Portrait Gallery of the UK. Oxford University has a building named in his honour, though it was opened after his death. If you've ever wondered how we know that smokers die at twice the rate of nonsmokers, or that on average they lose 10 years of lifespan, or even that if you quit early enough you will be able to live a similar lifespan to if you had never smoked at all....well, this study is it.