Big Tobacco Is Cursing the Day This Expert Witness Took the Oath

The first witness called to the stand in Department 19 of Los Angeles Superior Court was a natty, bushy-browed chap of 89. Sir Richard Doll had flown from England for this moment, and though he is frail and bent by age, he sent a shudder through the dark heart of Big Tobacco the second he took the oath.

Doll, an epidemiologist, spoke elegantly and with great modesty of the work for which he had been knighted by the queen of England. Prodded by the attorney for a Newport Beach woman who is dying of lung cancer and has sued the Philip Morris Cos., he told a medical detective story that began in 1949.

Great numbers of Londoners were being diagnosed with lung cancer at that time, and doctors were stumped as to the cause. But Doll had a hunch.

“I thought it was something to do with the tar in the roads,” he said from the witness stand last week. There had been such an expansion of paving in England of the 1940s, it was the only thing that made sense.

But when Doll set out to examine 700 patients who had been discharged from hospitals with a preliminary diagnosis of lung cancer, he made a discovery that startled him.

“If the patient was a nonsmoker, the diagnosis of lung cancer was almost always wrong,” he told a rapt jury in the courtroom of Judge Warren Ettinger.

Doll, who had smoked cigarettes for 20 years, immediately quit and implored his wife to do the same. He also stepped up his research, and published a groundbreaking 1950 report contending that “smoking is a factor, and an important factor, in the production” of lung cancer.

A smaller study in the United States reached similar conclusions. But both were met with skepticism from doctors and the public. By 1956, though, Doll had convinced most of the world’s scientific community that he was right.

In a sense, the stooped, white-haired man who took the witness stand last week is still David to Big Tobacco’s Goliath. Doll got in his first shot in 1949, and yet seven tobacco executives stood before Congress in 1994 and claimed under oath that there was no scientific proof that smoking causes lung cancer.

That shamelessness, which has lured millions of people to early death, has kept Doll on the case for half a century. Going on 90, he’s still investigating tobacco’s role as one of the greatest killers man has known.

“Cigarette smoking is the most significant cause of death in developed countries,” Doll testified, and kills as many people as all other causes combined.

Dignified, affable and decorated with honors, Doll is a tobacco lawyer’s worst nightmare. He sits there with noble countenance and solid science, his virtue unimpeachable, and wins the day. By the time he was done answering questions from the plaintiff’s lawyer, the Philip Morris attorneys might as well have been representing Genghis Khan.

One of them rose, and in the gentlest way, led Doll to acknowledge that the Newport Beach smoker could have reduced her cancer risk by heeding warnings and kicking the habit. A few minutes later, the attorney rested and slid back into his seat.

If the trial goes the way several others have recently, Big Tobacco is in Big Trouble. A devastating trail of dirty documents that surfaced in the 1990s will be dragged out, establishing that the industry hid knowledge of health risks.

Outraged juries have stung tobacco for huge payouts. Michael Piuze, the attorney for the Newport Beach woman, won a $3-billion punitive judgment in a similar case last year. It was later reduced to $100 million.

It didn’t quite dawn on me, until I left the courtroom with Doll last week, whose company I was keeping. I was with a man who arguably has helped save millions of lives, and I couldn’t immediately think of another person, living or dead, about whom I could say such a thing.

We glorify actors and make heroes of jocks, and the man who made one of the most significant finds of the 20th century remains virtually anonymous.

Although an estimated 2 million people die annually from smoking-related causes worldwide, the proportion of male smokers in the United States and England has been roughly halved in the past half century.

“Sir Richard Doll is a giant in the field, and perhaps the father of the science upon which all tobacco-prevention efforts are based,” says Matt Myers, president of the Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids. “There aren’t a lot of people I stand in awe of. But of Richard Doll, I do.”

Doll remained modest as we chatted. For him, science speaks for itself, and adding ego or politics is not a gentleman’s way. When I suggested his work helped save countless lives, he answered with nothing more than a gleam in his eye. He said he respects the right of Big Tobacco to sell cigarettes, but believes the industry shouldn’t be allowed to advertise, particularly if the marketing is aimed at teenagers.

Sixty-five anti-tobacco lawsuits are pending in California. One can argue, Doll acknowledged, that smokers help dig their own graves. But it’s all the more difficult to quit, he said, when tobacco industry policy for decades was to “spread doubt about the harmful effects of smoking.”

The motive, Doll said, was nothing other than greed. So billion-dollar judgments against Big Tobacco are OK by him.

“I think they’ve been thoroughly immoral, and they deserve whatever they get.”

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Steve Lopez writes Sunday, Wednesday and Friday. Reach him at steve.lopez@latimes.com.