The Guardian

By Sarah Boseley

8 December 2006

Vinyl chloride is used in the manufacture of plastics. In 1984, Sir Richard was approached by the London-based medical adviser of ICI chemicals, Brian Bennett, who wanted to know whether he would agree to carry out a review of the safety of vinyl chlorides which, Mr Bennett said, the American industry would be happy to pay for.

Sir Richard agreed, but wanted a guarantee that his report would be published - whatever it said. He added that he would like the fee paid to a charity he would nominate. That turned out to be Green College, Oxford, which he helped found as a graduate teaching institution for medical and allied disciplines. Sir Richard was its first warden.

The fee was set at £15,000 plus expenses and split between the Chemical Manufacturers Association (CMA) and two of the biggest manufacturers, ICI and Dow Chemicals. Monsanto, also a manufacturer of vinyl chloride, had been paying Sir Richard a consultancy fee since 1979 and was still giving him money at the time.

But none of his funding from Monsanto was declared in the article that was eventually published in 1988 as Effects of Exposure to Vinyl Chloride in the Scandinavian Journal of Work, Environment and Health.

The review came to the conclusion that there was no significant extra carcinogenicity associated with the manufacture of vinyl chloride other than in the liver - a fact that was already known. This contradicted a review by the World Health Organisation's International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC), which in 1979 had listed vinyl chloride as a human carcinogen, affecting not only the liver but also the brain, lungs and lymphatic system.

Sir Richard's review was used by the industry to defend the safety of the chemical by the manufacturers' trade association for more than a decade. In 2001, the American Chemical Association, as the CMA was renamed, said: "The world's leading researchers have studied vinyl chloride and brain cancer and concluded that the evidence does not support a link between brain cancer and exposure to vinyl chloride."

The review also led to the US Environmental Protection Agency taking the view that only liver cancer could be linked to vinyl chloride.

There have been a number of cases in the US where workers who contracted other sorts of cancer after exposure to vinyl chloride have tried to sue. During one of these brought against Dow Chemicals and also Solutia - a company spun off from Monsanto to run its chemical business in 1997 - by the widow of a man who died of a brain tumour, Sir Richard was cross-examined about the lack of any mention of the industry funding he had received in his review.

Documents show that Sir Richard told lawyers during a hearing behind closed doors in London that he had asked Mr Bennett whether he should disclose the £15,000 payment and Mr Bennett had said there was no need. Sir Richard was paid by Solutia for his attendance as an expert witness.