Sir Richard Doll (left) and Sir Richard Peto, with Dr. Elizabeth Whelan, Oxford, England,  March 5, 2005.  (Both Sir Richards attended the Whelan gala to celebrate the Whelans' daughter, Christine, receiving her Ph.D.)

Dr. Whelan and Dr. Peto discussed Dr. Peto's forthcoming, comprehensive paper, " Mortality from Smoking in Developed Countries, 1950-2000" (2nd edition) to be published this summer.

Sir Richard Doll, former Regius Professor of Medicine and founding Warden of Green College, is widely regarded as the greatest cancer epidemiologist of his time and is perhaps most famous for establishing the causative association between smoking and lung cancer. In 1951 Sir Richard initiated the first major prospective study on death related to smoking.

Sir Richard Peto is Professor of Medical Statistics & Epidemiology at the University of Oxford. Professor Peto's work has included studies of the causes of cancer in general and of the effects of smoking in particular, and the establishment of large-scale randomized trials of the treatment of heart disease, stroke, cancer and a variety of other diseases. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of London in 1989 and was knighted (for services to epidemiology and to cancer prevention) in 1999.