Day 030 - 03 Oct 94 - Page 48
1 A. Yes. This is the page labelled Grant Review
2 Procedures which at the bottom in a box lists the panel
3 that review not only the applications for research grants,
4 but also who reviewed this document itself.
5
6 MR. MORRIS: So, really this document shows that the
7 organisation you work for are involved not only in
8 assessing the state of evidence as it is but in
9 encouraging research to get further evidence?
10 A. Yes, but I think the relevance of pointing out the
11 status of this document now is simply to say the
12 statements on page 3 which really, I think, quite simply
13 repeat what I said this morning and have said in my own
14 statement, these statements are ratified by the Research
15 Grant Review Panel whose chair is Catherine Geissler who
16 is head of the department of Nutrition and dietetics at
17 Kings College, London, and then the Review Committee
18 including Paul Ciclitira of St. Thomas's Hospital,
19 Professor Paul Ciclitira, Dr. John Hunter of Addenbrookes,
20 Timothy Key of the Imperial Cancer Research Fund, Cancer
21 Epidemiology Unit, Professor Anthony Nias who is an
22 Emritus Professor of Cancer Research and Professor David
23 Southgate who is best known as coeditor of the standard
24 government document, Composition of Foods, sometimes known
25 as McCance and Widdowson.
26
27 Q. Can we move on to the next document which is a summary of
28 the work of the World Cancer Research Fund. Are there any
29 particular pages you want to refer the court to or points?
30 A. I think one value of having this document is that,
31 unlike some of the others, it is written in, I was going
32 to say, decent English, because it incorporates the annual
33 report of the World Cancer Research Fund. It is designed
34 to be seen by opinion formers and also by any interested
35 party.
36
37 So that if, for example, you look on pages 3 and 4, that
38 is the first -- that is the second spread, those pages
39 again give a summary, I think, in plain language of the
40 development of the state of science and scientific opinion
41 on diet and cancer since 1982.
42
43 Q. There is one point I did not bring up before. I was
44 trying to estimate the percentage. If you look on page 3
45 on the right column, it quotes Sir Richard Doll: "In 1981
46 Professor Sir Richard Doll estimated that on average 35%
47 of fatal cancers are linked to diet. He currently
48 estimates that between 20-60% of fatal cancers might be
49 reducible by practical dietary means". Is this a feature
50 of cancer research, trying to estimate what percentage of
51 cancers may be reducible by dietary changes?
52 A. Not many people are trying to do this. The document
53 you are referring to or, rather, the document originally
54 referred to here, is a long paper that was commissioned by
55 the US Congress in the late 70s from Doll and Peto --
56 Professor Richard Peto who was already mentioned this
57 morning -- and politicians sometimes get to the point, and
58 the concern of the US government following originally the
59 Nixon anticancer initiative was to identify to what extent
60 diet played a role in cancer, hence Doll and Peto's
