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
