Tobacco Case Study

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In 1943, two researchers at the University of Jena, Eberhard Schairer and Eric Schöniger, would confirm Muller’s findings. Muller would famously be remembered for stating, “Tobacco was an important cause of lung cancer”(32).
In 1922, Angel Honorio Roffo began investigating the etiology of lung cancer. Roffo, an Argentinian scientist working from his lab in Buenos Aires, was the first to use experimental animal studies to investigate tobacco’s role in cancer. At the time of Roffo’s research, many in the scientific community felt that if tobacco caused cancer it would be due to a simple constituent in the tobacco, for example nicotine. By 1940, Roffo believed that tobacco’s etiological role in cancer was best explained by the production of a complex plume of …show more content…

Medical historians often consider the evidence for and against the tobacco hypothesis in terms of what was known prior to 1950. Although there was a rather robust body of medical literature against tobacco prior to 1950, it was not until Ernest Wynder and Evarts Graham published their now famous case-control study, Tobacco Smoking as a Possible Etiologic Factor in Bronchiogenic Carcinoma, that the western historians took note. Wynder and Graham’s case-control study compared over 600 cases of bronchogenic cancer to 780 cancer free controls. The results of this study found a very significant association between cancer cases and tobacco smoking. Wynder and Graham concluded that it appeared the incidence of lung cancer was due to some exogenous factor(s), which should include tobacco smoke(36). It is worth mentioning that Evarts Graham was a highly respected thoracic surgeon and cigarette smoker, who initially did not believe tobacco smoke was causally related to lung cancer. In a bit of tragic irony, Graham died of lung cancer in 1957 following his conversion to the tobacco hypothesis, which was based upon his aforementioned case-control

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