Name/Title
1950/Chalmers: Cancer and tobaccoDescription
At the beginning of the 1950s, the first research began to emerge, in Britain and the USA, that tobacco smoking was heavily implicated in causing cancer.
"On 30 September 1950, a young physician named Richard Doll concluded in a research paper that smoking cigarettes was 'a cause and an important cause' of the rapidly increasing epidemic of lung cancer. His historic and contentious finding marked the beginning of a life-long crusade against premature death and the forces of 'Big Tobacco'." From "Smoking Kills: The Revolutionary Life of Richard Doll" by Conrad Keating (Signal Books, Oxford, 2009).
The photograph is of Doll circa 1956.
The tobacco industry fought a long and determined rear-guard action against Doll's research as well as research by other parties. By 1965, when Peter Mack published his book "The Golden Weed", the probable connection between smoking and lung cancer had become widespread public knowledge, prompting Peter to write a short chapter in his book entitled "Smoking and Health". It concludes:
"If the point is ever reached where any substance in tobacco smoke is found to be a cause of lung cancer (and it should be noted that no report published to date has gone as far as this) it should be possible to eliminate this substance at some point before the smoke reaches the consumer."