BMJ Group Award for Lifetime Achievement

BMJ Group Award for Lifetime Achievement winner's showcase

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Professor Sir Richard Peto, Co-Director of the Clinical Trials Service Unit and Epidemiological Studies Unit, Oxford University, UK

The BMJ Group Lifetime Achievement award goes to an epidemiologist and statistician who has demonstrated the extraordinary extent to which the hazards of persistent smoking exceed those from the aggregate of all other known causes of cancer. He also showed that for those who mange to stop smoking before the age of 30 or 40, the eventual long term benefits of cessation are far greater than had previously been thought and thus he has successfully argued the importance of cessation in the UK and many other countries including China, India and Russia. He has contributed much to improvements in treatments which have helped to decrease UK breast cancer mortality since the 1980’s. He is one of the world’s most widely cited medical researchers and was knighted in 1999 for his services to epidemiology and cancer prevention.

Richard Peto said:

"The BMJ Group call it a lifetime achievement award, but actually it's an inter-generational award, given for studies over more than 60 years of the causes and the treatment of chronic disease. These studies were started by Richard Doll, who brought me with him to Oxford 40 years ago, continued by me and are now being carried forward in new ways by Rory Collins and others in the CTSU. At the UK death rates of 40 years ago just over one in 3 would die before age 70, but at current UK death rates just under 1 in 6 will do so. The main reasons that the risk of death before old age has gone down by more than half in the UK over the past 40 years is that lots of people have stopped smoking, and nowadays people at risk of vascular disease are taking drugs that work."