stopped. Publication led to such enormous public outrage and concern that within ten days, the Minister of Health, Michael Bassett, established an inquiry. Green's experiment In June 1966, Green received permission from the NWH's Senior Medical Staff (SMS) and the Hospital Medical Committee (HMC) to undertake a study of following women with CIS (now, together with severe dysplasia, termed Cervical Intraepithelial Neoplasia 3, CIN3) without treatment. Green's proposal stated that all patients with a diagnosis of CIS under the age of 35, with positive smears and no colposcopic evidence of invasive cancer and without a ring or cone biopsy, would be followed. The Minutes recorded that Green stated that 'his aim was to attempt to prove that carcinoma-in-situ is not a pre-malignant disease'. He also said that if at any stage concern was felt for the safety of a patient, a cone biopsy would be performed. Green published the evolving results of his study in the natural history of CIS in a series of papers from 1966 to 1975. In 1969, he wrote about his methods more clearly than in his proposal: "In 1965 [sic] the SMS of NWH initiated a project under the supervision of the author, for patients up to 35 years of age whose only abnormal finding was positive cervical cytology.... a histological diagnosis was to be established by punch biopsy of the most colposcopically significant area. Provided the biopsy did not remove the entire significant area, or reveal invasive carcinoma, there was to be no further treatment. As of the end of 1967, 33 such patients were studied." Green reported that none of the patients had been subsequently diagnosed with invasive cancer, as of June 1968. In 1970, Green published further results and described his study: "The only way to settle finally the problem of what happens to in situ cancer is to follow indefinitely patients with diagnosed but untreated lesions. This is being attempted." Again, he recorded no patients developing invasive cancer. A further paper from 1970 provided mathematical estimates of the invasive potential of CIS by using "follow-up observations on 75 patients who were untreated or incompletely treated". No patients were reported to have developed invasive cancer. In the last paper, in 1974, Green again described his study: "This series of 750 cases of in situ cervical cancer, and the following of 96 of them with positive cytology for at least two years, represents