Sir Richard Doll, the British scientist who first established a link between smoking and lung cancer, died Sunday. He was 92. The epidemiologist, whose research was credited with preventing millions of premature deaths, died at the John Radcliffe Hospital in Oxford after a short illness, according to Oxford University, where Doll worked at the Imperial Cancer Research Center.His seminal 1950 study, which he wrote with Austin Bradford Hill, showed that smoking was “a cause, and a major cause” of lung cancer.During groundbreaking research, he and colleagues interviewed some 700 lung cancer patients to establish a common thread.
