Re-visiting the Causes of Cancer

The Annual Advances in Cancer Prevention Lecture is sponsored by the Cancer Prevention Fellowship Program (CPFP) within the Division of Cancer Prevention (DCP) at NCI. It is also part of the course offerings of the annual NCI Summer Curriculum in Cancer Prevention , but is open to the entire NIH community and general public. This annual lecture addresses current challenges and/or approaches used by investigators to address gaps, advance science, and promote the application of successful strategies in the field of cancer prevention and control. Sir Richard Peto, FRS, will be presenting the 2017 annual lecture on re-visiting the causes of cancer.

Sir Richard Peto, FRS, is Professor of Medical Statistics and Epidemiology at the University of Oxford, UK, and co-director of the Clinical Trial Service Unit and Epidemiological Studies Unit (CTSU). He collaborated for decades with Richard Doll on cancer epidemiology, and in 1981 they co-authored an influential report, “The Causes of Cancer – Quantitative estimates of avoidable risks of cancer in the US today” (JNCI 66:1191). Since then, his close attention to the details of how epidemiological evidence and trial evidence is interpreted has shown that the importance of factors such as tobacco, blood pressure and cholesterol have been much underestimated: we actually know more than we thought we did about major avoidable causes of cancer and of vascular disease.

In 1989, Peto was made a Fellow of the Royal Society of London for introducing meta-analyses of randomised trials, was knighted by Queen Elizabeth in 1999 for services to epidemiology, and received in 2010 and 2011 the Cancer Research UK and the BMJ Lifetime Achievement Award.

For more information go to https://cpfp.cancer.gov/summer-curriculum/annual-advances-cancer-prevention-lectures/lectures/sir-richard-peto-frs.