Day 256 - 04 Jun 96 - Page 35


     
     1        showing degrees of significance.  But what one really needs
     2        to do with data of that sort is to look at it more
     3        carefully, probe more deeply, and to see if there are
     4        certain determining factors, tease away things, that sort
     5        of thing.
     6
     7   MR. JUSTICE BELL:  Could I ask, Mr. Rampton, does the book
     8        actually draw any conclusions, or does it just contain the
     9        data on the basis of which a number of people have written
    10        articles drawing their own conclusions, including yourself
    11        and colleagues, for instance?
    12        A.  Well, it depends on what one calls the conclusion.  If
    13        one looks at all the univeric associations in there (of
    14        which there are some 100,000) and one also considers the
    15        statistically significant ones (of which there are at least
    16        8,000), in that sense one might regard those as
    17        conclusions.  At least, a lot of investigators would.  But
    18        they are not correlated and organised in a fashion so that
    19        they are properly discussed and probed in depth, and that
    20        sort of thing; so, in that sense, they are not fully
    21        conclusions.
    22
    23        What I do not have here, though, is a much larger, two book
    24        binders about that thick, I think, including the various
    25        publications that have come from these data.  That is it,
    26        I guess.
    27
    28   Q.   For instance, the article we have got, Diet and Chronic
    29        Degenerative Diseases, Perspectives from China, that is one
    30        of a vast number of articles which have been written by
    31        various investigators, using the material which is in the
    32        volume which is there?
    33        A.  Right.
    34
    35   Q.   Do I understand you correctly?
    36        A.  Yes -- except in this case that particular article that
    37        I sent along, when inquiry was made, that article includes
    38        virtually in every case a summary of those papers that were
    39        actually submitted for publication and were reviewed by my
    40        peers; and they also, for the majority of them, they
    41        include publication from their own group or a colleague's.
    42        There are two or three that did not, I think.  But that is
    43        a summary kind of article that includes, as I say, only
    44        those papers that were properly reviewed by my peers.
    45
    46   Q.   Yes.  What I am trying to get to is, Mr. Rampton asked you
    47        whether the volume there would contain material that a
    48        layman could read and draw conclusions from, and you gave
    49        your answer to that; but what I want to know is, is it
    50        basically data there, rather than conclusions such as those 
    51        which have been drawn in the various articles which have 
    52        been written on the basis of that data --- 
    53        A.  Yes.
    54
    55   Q.   -- or does that amount to a very extended article itself,
    56        as it were?
    57        A.  Well, there is some little bit of both.  It is hard to
    58        really answer.  The majority of the book includes the
    59        original data with all the correlation co-efficients, but
    60        in the beginning part of the book there is a lot of text

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