Professor Sir Richard Doll

Professor Sir Richard Doll0:00

Hello, I'm Kirsty Young, and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs archive. For rights reasons we've had to shorten the music. The programme was originally broadcast in two thousand and one, and the presenter was Sue Lawley.

Presenter0:31

My castaway this week is a doctor. It's a rather general description for the man who discovered smoking causes cancer. He wanted to be a mathematician, but drank too much before his scholarship exam and flunked it. He has no regrets. He went on the Jarrow March, he fought in the war, and then as a medical researcher more than 50 years ago, realised that it wasn't traffic fumes which had increased cases of lung cancer, but cigarettes.

Presenter0:55

To day his interest has moved to what we eat, and links between diet and heart disease. His recipe for a long life is a happy marriage, not getting fat, not smoking, of course, and, he says, perhaps with that failed exam in mind, having a couple of drinks. He is the former Regis Professor of Medicine at Oxford University, Sir Richard

Presenter1:15

You were, of course, a smoker yourself before you analysed its its link with lung cancer, weren't you? How many years had you smoked for? Oh, I smoked quite a long time. I started when I was about nineteen, yes, and I gave up, I think

Professor Sir Richard Doll1:22

Yeah.

Presenter1:28

When I was thirty seven, so eighteen years. Good heavens. But reassuringly you've discovered that as long as you give it up in your mid thirties there are no long term effects. Yes, it does look like that. If you give up

Professor Sir Richard Doll1:37

Uh

Presenter1:40

Ten or fifteen years smoking, no really detectable effects. I won't say none, but uh trivial effects, if you give up soon enough. It's interesting that you did smoke, though, because I think your father bribed you with fifty pounds, which was a lot of money in what the early thirties it would have been, not to smoke. Yes, indeed. He did offer me that money, not because he thought smoking was bad for you, but very sensibly because he thought it was a waste of money. And uh I was determined to get that fifty pounds, but I had a horrid little brother.

Presenter2:12

And in company, if ever I was offered a cigarette and said no, thank you, my brother would pipe up and say, Oh, Richard's not going to smoke when he's twenty one, then he's going to get fifty pounds. And a time came when I said, I can't stand this any longer. Give me a cigarette.

Presenter2:26

And when you discovered the link wi with lung cancer, did you give it up overnight just like that? Yes, I did. But you had more trouble persuading your wife, apparently.

Professor Sir Richard Doll2:30

Yes.

Presenter2:34

Oh, I had great trouble persuading her, yes. She used to smoke about forty a day, or she maintains that uh she used to give a lot of them away, but she bought forty a day.

Presenter2:44

She kept on saying she would cut down, but after having cut down for about three years, she was buying two packs of cigarettes a day.

Presenter2:52

Finally I thought the best thing to do was to bribe her. I said, Well, if you don't uh smoke any cigarettes until uh the end of the week I'll give you so much money. I said you go out and buy something that you wouldn't buy, some luxury.

Presenter3:05

Well, after a f few weeks she got hooked on this, who going on buying some luxury. Then I had the problem of breaking her of the habit of spending about twenty pounds a week on luxury. That would make her poor, but it wouldn't kill her, I suppose, is the point.

Professor Sir Richard Doll3:18

Yeah.

Presenter3:20

Tell me about your first record for this island.

Presenter3:23

I'd like to have a Mendelssohn violin concerto, because uh violin is such a beautiful instrument, but I particularly would like one with Isaac Stern playing it, because he's the only brilliant musician that I have met personally, and I have very happy memories of having met him, so that will double the pleasure of it.

Presenter4:40

Isaac Stern playing the opening of Mendelssohn's violin concerto in E minor with the Philadelphia Orchestra conducted by Eugene Ormondy.

Presenter4:48

We've lived, Professor, with the link between smoking and cancer for so long now that it's difficult to believe that it wasn't obvious fifty years ago, but I gather it wasn't at all. There were other theories that were far more popular.

Presenter5:00

Yes, it was very far from obvious. It was such a common thing. Eighty per cent of men were smoking. And some doctors I kn knew, psychiatrists I have to admit, used to offer patients a cigarette when they consulted them, to put them at their ease. Extraordinary, really, though, when you think about it, but breathing in those fumes, even though we didn't know they were noxious, to sort of suck in all that hot air. Yes, indeed. And of course.

Professor Sir Richard Doll5:19

Extra

Presenter5:29

People with chronic bronchitis, most of them were heavy cigarette smokers, they used to say, Oh, I must have a cigarette and want to clear my chest. And uh the doctors used to describe it as a smoker's cough and somehow didn't think that the smoking was actually the cause of the chronic disease. But lung cancer had undergone a dramatic increase, hadn't it? That was the problem.

Professor Sir Richard Doll5:51

Yeah, it was the

Presenter5:53

It had been a very rare disease at the beginning of the twentieth century. Then in the about the nineteen twenties it began becoming more common and it got commoner and commoner and clearly something had happened. So what did people think it was that was causing it? What were the popular views? The most popular idea at the time was that it was due to atmospheric pollution, because the town air used to be filled with coal smoke in those days, with every house belching out smoke from its chimneys. I thought it was something to do with motor cars. They had obviously been introduced a reasonable time before lung cancer became common. There was the possibility of the exhaust fumes, but what particularly attracted me was the tarring of roads. We knew there were carcinogenic substances in tar and uh that's what I thought was the most likely explanation when we started to uh look into the possible causes. So how did you make the link eventually with with well we we we drew up a questionnaire which included uh asking about all the things that we could think of that had increased which might result in some more exposure to the lungs and

Professor Sir Richard Doll6:47

Where were you?

Presenter7:01

Naturally we put in cigarette smoking. Was there a moment when you were sort of looking at all sorts of pieces of paper? Because you didn't have computers any everything on cards, lots of lots of information coming in, and you suddenly said, Hang on. I see. I used to keep a a record of the

Professor Sir Richard Doll7:13

I see.

Presenter7:18

principal replies to our questionnaire that patients had given. Then I used to have to go and check the diagnoses after people left hospital because we were studying people who were admitted to hospital with a suspicion of having lung cancers. It was when I went round the hospitals afterwards and looked at the notes and what I found was that if someone has been described as a non-smoker, the diagnosis always turned out to be wrong.

Presenter7:44

Whereas if they were a heavy smoker, it seldom turned out to be wrong. It was that that made me realize that there wa was something in it. Tell me about your second record.

Presenter7:53

I'd like to have some Grieg because my mother was a professional pianist and Grieg was her specialty, but uh I won't have a piano concerto because I want this on Desert Island and I want something to

Presenter8:06

liven me'cause it's pretty dull, I should think, by myself on a desert island, so g some peer gint would be just the thing to wake me up when I was feeling really bored.

Speaker 28:20

Yeah.

Speaker 28:22

The bossum slinger will come with one.

Speaker 28:29

Et to return

Speaker 28:32

Is it good name in this life?

Speaker 28:49

What I'm newers!

Presenter9:17

Urban Maulemberg as Piergint being hunted by trolls in Act Two of Grieg's opera, with members of the Goster Olins Vocal Ensemble and the Pro Musica Chamber Choir, and the Gothenburg Symphony Orchestra conducted by Nerme Yevi.

Presenter9:30

Grieg, you say, um, Professor Doll, who reminds you of your mother, Kathleen Chabot. She was a a a concert pianist. Yes, she was. She was giving concerts uh all over Europe. And I gather she worked with Beecham and Henry Wood and She did, and with um Melbourne. And so did she give it all up for you, then? Yes, in in those days I'm afraid women had to. They they had children, they couldn't continue with their career. But she must have played the piano at home. You must be have been very used to it. Oh, I was. In in fact, as a small boy, I was jealous of it. I can remember myself climbing under the piano and trying to hold the pedals down in order to really get her to pay more attention to me than to the piano.

Presenter10:11

And your father was a GP, so you were reasonably well heeled sort of family. You went to a good public school and so on. But but stop me if I'm wrong, but I have the impression that you were quite a rebellious lad. You were

Presenter10:24

Quite naughty.

Presenter10:25

I don't know that I describe myself as naughty, but rebellious, certainly. And I think any young person being brought up in those days had to be rebellious, because the capitalist society after the First World War was really not producing the homes for heroes to live in that had been promised in the First World War. The sort of housing that I visited when delivering babies was absolutely appalling, the overcrowding. The society just wasn't working. I didn't really mean rebellious in that sense, but I know that you did have left-wing sympathies along with many of your contemporaries, of course, in the thirties. You actually went to the Soviet Union, didn't you? Yes, I did. I'd been given some money for my twenty-first birthday and I spent it on uh uh a trip to the Soviet Union, but I was told that in no circumstances should I allow the person that had given me the money, my godfather, to know what I'd done with it. Did it excite you or did it disenchant you? What was it? It certainly didn't disenchant me, but uh it was a very poor country still in the thirties and of course we were only

Professor Sir Richard Doll11:27

Yeah.

Presenter11:35

shown the better things. But before all that, let's just spool back to you not getting into Cambridge because of this drinking the night before. Tell me the story. What did you do? What went wrong? Oh dear, that was a rather a shameful episode in my life. As a a a boy the uh only s thing that I really enjoyed at school was mathematics. And I went up to Cambridge to take a scholarship in mathematics. On the last night but one

Professor Sir Richard Doll11:46

Yeah.

Presenter12:04

Some so-called friends of mine took me to dinner and uh gave me some of the Trinity Audit Ale, especially brewed in the college. This was eight per cent beer and I had three pints of it. Well, for an eighteen-year-old that uh was not a good preparation for uh examination the next day and uh I really felt pretty poor the next day. And the examiners rang my father up and said, Well, they'd give me the scholarship on the first three days' work, but they couldn't on the last day. And uh would I take an exhibition? And I was so cross with myself, I said, I won't go to Cambridge, father, I'll do as you want me to do, I'll study medicine instead and go stay in London. Have you ever regretted that that turn of fate, those three pints of Trinity beer? They were the best drinks I've ever had.

Professor Sir Richard Doll12:46

There's three.

Presenter12:50

I shouldn't have been a terribly good mathematician, and I really enjoyed my career as a doctor.

Presenter12:55

Record number three.

Presenter12:57

I would like to have Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue, and this has meant a lot to me, because it was the first piece of music which I, without being told that I should enjoy it, suddenly realised I was enjoying it. It was played in the dormitory when we were getting up at school. Before then I'd had musical appreciation and been told to enjoy, for example, Bach's fugues and the more I was told this was good music, the less I enjoyed it. So I discovered Rhapsody in Blue for myself.

Presenter14:30

That was part of Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue, played by the Columbia Jazz Band conducted by Michael Tilson Thomas, and I'm told that that was Gershwin himself playing the piano, and that the band and Tilson Thomas were sort of embroidered on later. Fascinating.

Professor Sir Richard Doll14:40

Really lambs.

Presenter14:43

I'm still uh taken with this theory, Professor, that you were a rebel. I think really what I mean is that you were very much your your own person. I'm right in saying, aren't I, that you actually went on the Jarrow March in nineteen thirty five? At St Thomas' Hospital we had a student socialist society and we enacted as doctors to the march whilst we were senior medical students. Treating sore feet, I think. Treating sore feet and seeing whether people were really fit to continue, because we did send occasionally somebody to hospital wasn't fit to continue. It was r really pathetic. I remember one occasion when we stopped for the night and we were given food and I saw a man taking ham out of a ham sandwich and putting it in an envelope and I went and asked him what he was doing. He said, Well, I'm sending this home because we haven't had meat at home for six weeks.

Professor Sir Richard Doll15:06

Plus

Presenter15:40

You also, I think, I'm right in saying, in the mid-thirties had had a taste of of anti-Semitism in you went to Germany, didn't you, and witnessed something pretty nasty? Oh, we used to go as students, we had arranged trips to other countries to hear of the medicine of other countries. We went to Amsterdam for a fortnight one year, and one year we went to Frankfurt. I remember one lecture given by a radiotherapist in which uh a slide illustrated uh X-rays destroying cancer cells by having the X-rays labelled Nazi troopers uh and the cancer cells were illustrated as Jews. This was pretty pretty pretty horrible. But did you criticise that, or did you speak up?

Presenter16:27

One couldn't really well in a lecture we were guests there, but uh we certainly didn't uh stand up when he said Heil Hitler and we were told we all should stood up. We all sat very firmly down. But I understand that you had your ankles measured or something. Ah, well of course when I said we went and uh had a fortnight's course, half the time was spent uh drinking with other students, enjoying ourselves. And uh I made some remark criticising the way they were treating the Jews, so I was immediately told I must be a Jew myself and uh I was made to stand on the table so they could measure my ankles was one of the signs of being a Jew apparently was a sickness in the ankles. I came back from that trip with uh absolutely firm determination that uh Hitlerism had to be opposed in every possible way. Next piece of music.

Presenter17:22

Well, I'm going to choose piece of music sung by a German by M Marlena Dietri.

Presenter17:29

When I was in Africa during the war, we had Marlene singing Lili Marlena. This was our favorite bit of music, so I'd love to hear this again.

Professor Sir Richard Doll17:44

We are marching in the mud and cold And when my pal

Professor Sir Richard Doll17:50

Seems more than I can hold.

Professor Sir Richard Doll17:53

My love for you.

Professor Sir Richard Doll17:56

When you lose my mind, I'm one again.

Professor Sir Richard Doll18:01

My back is like

Professor Sir Richard Doll18:04

Is your name on?

Professor Sir Richard Doll18:08

Yeah.

Presenter18:10

Marlena Dietrichor's singing Lily Marlene recorded at the Queen's Theatre in nineteen sixty four.

Presenter18:16

And memories of the war for you, Sir Richard Doll. You'd have been, what, about twenty seven at the outbreak of war, and you were called up and sent, first of all, I think, to France. And so, therefore, in may nineteen forty you were part of that great retreat to Dunkirk, strafed from the air and shelled from the ground on occasions. It must have been terrifying, was it?

Presenter18:37

It it was frightening, yes, but uh one was concerned with what you did and how you were going to get away when you were on the beach, so you didn't have much time to be uh to be frightened. And besides, I I I was an officer, I had a few men attached to me. We'd got separated from the unit as a whole, and I had to decide what to be done, and fortunately we took the right decision. Instead of going out onto the pier, which didn't attract me being shoaled all the time, I said let's wander along the beach and see if we can find some small boats taken to take us off. What did you come home in then? Who what picked you up? I came home in uh a paddle steamer, I think it was.

Professor Sir Richard Doll19:16

Are you

Presenter19:20

But uh of course you had first of all to get into a little rowboat to go out and then we went on to this paddle steamer. But you had something very special tucked in your jacket, I think.

Professor Sir Richard Doll19:27

But you

Presenter19:30

I did, yes. Something unusual for a soldier. I had a small kitten in my battle dress. About three days before when uh we were sheltering behind a building being shelled, there was a miserable little kitten that was meowing in such a sad way and I'm very fond of cats, personally, I just was so sorry for it. I picked this kitten up and I put it inside my battle dress. And for the last uh three or four days of of uh our retreat I had this kitten with me all the time. And uh I got it back to England, but um sadly I had to give it up after we landed. But they took it off you? They did, yes. Well, not nice, was it? It wasn't nice. It was one of the most tragic moments of my life. But there it was. That was the l that was the rule.

Professor Sir Richard Doll20:14

There

Presenter20:23

Now tell me why did you? Because you'd had all of that experience. You know, you you

Presenter20:28

Been a sort of hands-on doctor, as it were, during the course of the war. You qualified just before the war. Why did you therefore suddenly, immediately after the war, decide that you weren't going to be a any kind of clinical practitioner at all, like your father, like the other students around you? You turned to statistics instead, to epidemiology. Why? Well, the alternative was to become a general physician, but to do that you had to get on the staff of one of the major hospitals. And I found it so unpleasant the way people were sucking up to their seniors to try to get appointments. It was the old boy network, really. It's that rebellious streak again, isn't it? Maybe it was, yes. Anyway, I thought I'd like to strike out on my own, and I was fortunate enough to have my attention drawn to the possibility of doing some research with Sir Francis Avery Jones. I took that, and it turned out to be an epidemiological study of the causes of peptic ulcer. And whilst doing that, I met Professor Bradford Hill, who's Professor of Statistics at the School of Hygiene, and he offered me the chance of working with him on studying the causes of lung cancer, and I never looked back. Absolutely. It was a complete fit, really, being a mathematician, so statistics appealed and all that. You were absolutely the right man in the right place, weren't you? Well, it was the right job for me, there was no doubt about it.

Professor Sir Richard Doll21:08

Adelia Street

Professor Sir Richard Doll21:10

Baby.

Presenter21:56

Tell me about your next record.

Presenter21:58

It's going to be a a fairly dull life, I'm afraid, on the Desert Island. I would like to laugh occasionally and I'd like to have

Presenter22:07

One of the records of The Glums.

Speaker 222:11

Something was troubling her. Oh, she was a gigato.

Professor Sir Richard Doll22:21

How round.

Professor Sir Richard Doll22:23

Bring your dear face close to mine and look at me.

Speaker 322:29

Right your highway.

Presenter22:32

Now, dearest heart, I want you to tell me something.

Speaker 322:38

We had filchards for tea.

Presenter22:41

The Glums and Thief at Work with Dick Bentley as Ron Glum, June Whitfield of course as F and Jimmy Edwards as Mr. Glum at the beginning there.

Presenter22:49

You're best known, Sir Richard, for the smoking and lung cancer work, but you've done so much more. Besides, influenced as an individual scientist so many other areas, it was your work that established the link between asbestos and cancer, and you've worked on radiation.

Presenter23:04

The effects of living near electric power cables and so on. Wh which of these fields is it possible to say has given you most professional satisfaction?

Presenter23:13

Early work on radiation was really very pleasing because this was back in the nineteen fifties. It was just after they'd had the explosion of the first hydrogen bomb, and there was fallout throughout the world, and I think governments suddenly realized that they had no idea what effect this might be having. It was thought that it would have a very small genetic effect.

Presenter23:38

But it hadn't been thought that low doses would do any damage to individuals.

Presenter23:43

But suddenly they realized that they hadn't got the evidence for that.

Presenter23:47

And so

Presenter23:49

Our government asked the Medical Research Council to try to advise them on

Presenter23:54

What the relationship was between dose of radiation and the risk of developing cancer. And the Medical Research Council asked my colleague Michael Korkbrown and myself to try and design a study to answer that question. What we did was to uh collect information about fifteen thousand people that had had

Professor Sir Richard Doll24:06

And

Presenter24:16

a radiotherapy treatment for a form of arthritis. So they had had some pretty big doses, but the dose had varied greatly from one patient to another.

Presenter24:26

And then we followed them all up and saw how many of them developed leukemia and related the risk of leukemia to the Dose of radiation in the marrow. So it was a complex study. And what is the conclusion there? And the conclusion we came to was that.

Professor Sir Richard Doll24:37

And what is

Professor Sir Richard Doll24:39

Yeah.

Presenter24:41

The risk was proportional to the dose and that there was no completely safe level below which no effect would be produced. Before that, people I think it had been thought that only if there were visible signs of burning of the skin or whatever could skin cancer be caused and so on.

Speaker 324:58

Is that right?

Presenter25:03

And it was quite a shock to conclude that um smaller doses could have an effect as well. And of course that was subsequently seen uh in here in the survivors, Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Record number six.

Presenter25:19

First ballet I ever went to was Petrushka, and this just opened my eyes to some new art form. It's a memory that I I treasure and I I think of that ballet every time I hear this music, so please can I have Stravinsky's Petrushka.

Presenter26:36

The beginning of Stravinsky's Petrushka, played by the Vienna Philharmonic, conducted by Lauren Marzell. You spent a lifetime, Professor, being professionally impartial, maintaining your objectivity, so as obviously not to undermine your academic standing. But can I invite you now in in in this your

Presenter26:53

The second half of your eighth decade to give us some pieces of your mind.

Presenter26:56

What about this? Should we not worry about our teenage children smoking? Should we be safe in the knowledge that if they stop before they're thirty-five like you, they'll be okay?

Presenter27:06

Well, I do have perhaps rather different views to some of my friends in public health on this. I don't think you're going to be able to stop children smoking when young adults, their role models are smoking. The more you tell them not to smoke, the more they'll want to do it. And it's rather revealing that in the whole of this work time that we've been interested in the effects of smoking, the tobacco industry has said, oh, we must discourage children from smoking. It's quite wrong for children to smoke. They shouldn't smoke till they're grown up. Which of course is the one thing that makes them want to smoke. So my view is, as far as smoking is concerned, find out what the tobacco industry supports and don't do it. Find out what they object to and do it.

Presenter27:59

Don't make an awful fuss about young children smoking, but do make sure that when they come to some age of discretion they give up. You do reserve your strongest opinions for the tobacco industry, don't you, actually? Initially, they were really quite responsible, because you had to bear in mind at that time it was a ordinary industry and you had ordinary responsible people in charge of the industry, and they were as shocked as anybody else at the suggestion that their industry was doing a lot of harm. Nowadays the people at the top of the industry are people that have gone into it knowing that it was a hazardous thing to do. And my own view is that we need a tobacco industry. I wouldn't ban tobacco. I think that'd just lead to more crime.

Presenter28:44

But I would ban any attempt at promoting it, and I think people are, in fact, trying to promote the sales of tobacco, particularly in developing countries. And I think the promotion of tobacco i is is thoroughly evil, and I'm prepared to say so. And so you blame successive governments for that, because they've never quite ruled it all out, have they motor racing or cricket or whatever it is?

Professor Sir Richard Doll28:56

Yeah.

Professor Sir Richard Doll29:02

Motor.

Presenter29:05

I I have indeed seriously criticised uh governments for doing doing it. I'm not don't think for a moment that if you ban promotion and advertising that that'll make a great difference to the amount that people smoke. But I do know that young people say, Oh, it can't be all that dangerous or the government would never allow it to be advertised so widely. And if you're in a room and somebody lights up a cigarette, what do you do? Do you sort of pounce on them and say you shouldn't be doing that and start wagging your finger or do you No, the effect uh of other people smoking uh in my presence is so small it doesn't worry me.

Professor Sir Richard Doll29:40

Uh

Presenter29:44

Record number seven.

Presenter29:46

Now I'd like some good classical music that was exciting, so let me have some of Hummel's trumpet concerto.

Presenter30:47

Winton Marsalis playing the beginning of the third movement of Hummel's trumpet concerto with the English Chamber Orchestra conducted by Raymond Lepard. I wonder what the chances, Sir Richard, are statistically of someone completely unprepared being able to survive on a desert island. I mean, all things being equal, if there's water and some kind of food and a bit of shelter, I suppose quite high.

Presenter31:09

I would have thought so, as long as they didn't go mad.

Presenter31:12

Well, I suppose that's that's the point, isn't it? It all comes down to character in the end, isn't it? Yes, I think so. But I think I'd survive. You know, you obviously have quite a bleak vision of this desert island. Is that because you'd be alone?

Professor Sir Richard Doll31:13

They talk

Presenter31:22

Yes, yes.

Professor Sir Richard Doll31:23

Yes.

Presenter31:24

I I'm not really good at uh entertaining myself unless I've got some work to do and uh I wouldn't have any work to do there. But you you have plenty of that all of the ti you just don't stop. Do you work for the Imperial Cancer Research Fund now and and and on you go every day of your life? Yes, because it's so interesting. I can't think of anything more interesting to do. And I've got such good colleagues, it's uh a good life. So you'd miss the work on your desert island, and I'm sure you'd miss your family, you'd miss your wife, wouldn't you?

Presenter31:54

Enormously, yes, uh she has meant a great deal to me over the past fifty one years and uh but I know I can't take her with me, so it's no good complaining about that.

Professor Sir Richard Doll31:54

And no

Presenter32:07

Tell me about your last record.

Presenter32:09

Have to have some Beethoven.

Presenter32:12

And it's difficult to choose what Beethoven, because it's it's all such wonderful music, but the Beethoven Ninth Symphony I think would be my choice.

Presenter33:21

Part of the fourth movement of Beethoven's Ninth, the Choral Symphony, played by the Orchestra of the Eighteenth Century, conducted by Franz Brueggen. If you could only take one of those eight records, Professor, which one would you take? Well, it would have to be Gershrin's Rhapsody in Blue, because that's been with me all my adult life, and it's just something I'd hate to be without. What about your book?

Presenter33:44

Well, this is a real problem. One of the great novels is obviously one would like to have, but you can't just read one or two pages of it. You get through it so quickly and you can't read it, reread it every week. So I'm going to take with me uh the Oxford Textbook of Medicine, because that'll take me years to finish, and I might actually learn something from it. I don't suppose I'd remember much, but that's what I'm going to take.

Speaker 233:58

Region

Presenter34:12

What about your luxury?

Presenter34:15

Well

Presenter34:16

I want something which will last me, and so I'm going to take a down pillow and have a comfortable night's sleep.

Presenter34:24

Professor Sir Richard Doll, thank you very much indeed for letting us hear your desert island discs.

Professor Sir Richard Doll34:35

You've been listening to a podcast from the Desert Islandists archive. For more podcasts, please visit bbc.co.uk slash radio four.