Richard Doll, the scientist who first established a link between smoking and lung cancer, died on Sunday aged 92.

Oxford University said the epidemiologist died at the city's John Radcliffe Hospital in the city after a short illness. Richard worked at the hospital's Imperial Cancer Research Centre.

John Hood, vice-chancellor of Oxford University, said the professor's work had saved millions of lives. "His pioneering epidemiological work on the link between smoking and cancer, cardiovascular disease and many other disorders, has led to the dramatic cut in smoking rates over the past 50 years.

"But Richard will also be remembered as an inspiration and mentor to generations of scientists, a community in which he loved to spend his time long into what for most of us would have been retirement."

Doll's work alongside Austin Bradford Hill during the late 1940s and early 1950s, in which they linked the rise in lung cancer to smoking, shocked the medical establishment and came to be seen as his seminal work. It was the start of a lifetime's research examining tobacco.

In 1954 around 80 per cent of British adults smoked. That figure is now 26 per cent.

Source: China Daily