Salsburg, D. 2001.
``
The Lady Tasting Tea
-- How statistics revolutionized science
in the twentieth century''.
Owl Book.
Chapter 18. Does Smoking Cause Cancer?
Publication bias
This was one of Fisher's accusations. He claimed that
the initial work by Hill and Doll had been censored.
He tried for years to have the authors release detailed
data to back up their conclusions. They had only
published summaries, but Fisher suggested that these
summaries had hidden inconsistencies that were actually
in the data. He pointed out that, in the first Hill and
Doll study, the authors had asked if the patients who
smoked inhalted when they smoked. When the data are
organized in terms of ``inhalers'' and ``noninhalters,''
the noninhalters are the ones with an excess of lung
cancer. The inhalers appear to have less lung cancer.
Hill and Doll Claimed that this was probably due to a
failure on the part of the respondents to understand the
question. Fisher scoffed at this and asked whi they
didn't publicize the real conclusions of their study:
that smoking was bad for you, but if you had to smoke,
it was better to inhale than not to inhale.
