WITH hindsight, it is obvious. Smoking causes cancer, saturated fat is bad for your heart and some forms of asbestos will harm your lungs. But years ago these links were not obvious at all. In fact, Richard Doll, who in 1950 discovered that smoking causes lung cancer, was initially convinced that cars – not tobacco – were responsible for the enormous rise in cases of the disease.
At the heart of all these findings is the study of statistics, pulling out buried trends from a mass of data. This is obviously crucial in medicine – for example, answering questions about a treatment’s…
