May 19, 2011
CDDEP board member Sir Richard Peto has been named the 2011 recipient of BMJ s Lifetime Achievement Award for having contributed much to the decrease in neoplastic, vascular, and respiratory mortality from smoking, both in the UK and elsewhere.
BMJ’s annual Lifetime Achievement award is given to someone who, through a working lifetime, has made a unique and substantial contribution to improving healthcare. Sir Richard received the award over two other shortlisted candidates, including Sir George Alleyne, chair of the CDDEP board, and Dr John Wennberg. The winners of the BMJ awards were announced last night at a ceremony in London.
Sir Richard is currently Professor of Medical Statistics and Epidemiology at the University of Oxford, and co-director (with Professor Sir Rory Collins) of the Clinical Trial Service Unit and Epidemiological Studies Unit (CTSU). He was made a Fellow of the Royal Society of London in 1989 for introducing meta-analyses of randomised trials, was knighted by Queen Elizabeth in 1999 for services to epidemiology and received in 2010 the inaugural Cancer Research UK Lifetime Achievement Award.
Richard Peto, Rory Collins and the Oxford CTSU have, by their large randomised trials, large prospective studies and worldwide meta-analyses, increased substantially the estimated importance of blood lipids, blood pressure and smoking as causes of premature death, and their publications have attracted more than 60,000 citations. Peto s investigations into the worldwide health effects of smoking have helped to communicate effectively the vast and growing burden of disease from tobacco use, have helped change national and international attitudes about smoking and public health, and have helped many smokers to stop. He was the first to describe clearly the future worldwide health effects of current smoking patterns, predicting one billion deaths from tobacco in the present century, as against only 100 million in the 20th century. He has recently collaborated in major studies of alcohol in Russia and of malaria in Africa and south Asia, and was a member of the committee responsible for the 2004 IOM report on the economics of anti-malarial drugs.
In response to the award, Sir Richard offered the following: “The BMJ 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.”
Congratulations to Sir Richard and Sir George!
Photo credit: Clinical Trial Service Unit & Epidemiological Studies Unit, University of Oxford
