Sir William Richard Shaboe Doll (28 October 1912 – 24 July 2005) was a British physician who became an epidemiologist in the mid-20th century and made important contributions to that discipline. He was a pioneer in research linking smoking to health problems. With Ernst Wynder, Bradford Hill and Evarts Graham, he was credited with being the first to prove that smoking increased the risk of :lung cancer and :heart disease. (German studies had suggested a link as early as the 1920s but were forgotten or ignored until the 1990s.) He also carried out pioneering work on the relationship between radiation and leukaemia as well as that between asbestos and lung cancer, and alcohol and breast cancer. He however, initially for many years, stood in opposition to research done by Alice Stewart which connected radiation exposure of pregrant mothers to development of leukaemia in their children due to her 'questionable' analysis. On 28 June 2012, he was the subject of an episode of The New Elizabethans, a series broadcast on BBC Radio Four to mark the Diamond Jubilee of Queen Elizabeth II, dealing with 60 public figures from her reign. Biography Doll was born at Hampton, Middlesex (now part of south-west London) into an affluent family, though his father's work as a doctor was cut short by multiple sclerosis. Educated first at Westminster School, Doll originally intended (against the wishes of his parents that he become a doctor like his father) to study mathematics at Trinity College, Cambridge. Doll claimed to have failed the mathematics scholarship from the effects of drinking 3 pints of the College's 8% alcohol own-brewed beer the night before. He subsequently chose to study medicine at St Thomas's Hospital Medical School, King's College London from where he graduated in 1937. Doll was a socialist, and one of the significant figures in the Socialist Medical Association whose campaign helped lead to the creation of Britain's postwar National Health Service. He joined the Royal College of Physicians after the outbreak of World War II and served for much of the war as a part of the Royal Army Medical Corps on a hospital ship as a medical specialist. After the war, Doll returned to St Thomas's to research asthma. In 1948 he joined a research team under Dr Francis Avery-Jones at the Central Middlesex Hospital, run under the auspices of the statistical research unit of the Medical Research Council.