# Sir Richard Peto

Source: https://onco.cc/people/richard-peto/  
OnCo record `richard-peto` (Person). Data CC BY-NC 4.0, attribute "Data from OnCo (onco.cc)"; commercial use needs a licence.

## TL;DR

Epidemiologist who quantified how smoking kills and invented the meta-analysis methods that established adjuvant cancer therapy.

## Summary

Richard Peto co-authored with Richard Doll the 50-year follow-up of British doctors showing smokers lose about ten years of life and that stopping at any age helps, and has quantified tobacco deaths worldwide. He founded the Early Breast Cancer Trialists' Collaborative Group and developed the statistical methods for individual-patient-data meta-analysis, and co-designed the large simple trial. He was knighted for services to epidemiology.

## Fields

- Kind: Person
- Last checked: 2026-09-10
- Tags: epidemiology; tobacco; meta-analysis
- Role: Professor of Medical Statistics and Epidemiology, University of Oxford
- Specialisms: Epidemiology; Tobacco and cancer; Meta-analysis; Large-scale trials

## Sources

- PubMed: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/?term=Peto%20R%5BAuthor%5D%20smoking%20mortality

## Connected records

- cancers: [HR-positive / HER2-negative breast cancer](https://onco.cc/cancers/breast-hr-positive/), [Non-small-cell lung cancer](https://onco.cc/cancers/nsclc/)
- institutions: [Oxford Cancer (Oxford University Hospitals and University of Oxford)](https://onco.cc/institutions/oxford-cancer/)
- key papers: [Comparisons between different polychemotherapy regimens for early breast cancer: meta-analyses of long-term outcome among 100,000 women in 123 randomised trials](https://onco.cc/key-papers/paper-ebctcg-polychemotherapy-regimens-meta-analysis-lancet-2012/), [Doll and Hill 1950: the case-control study that tied smoking to lung cancer](https://onco.cc/key-papers/paper-doll-hill-smoking-lung-cancer-bmj-1950/), [Fifty years of the British Doctors Study: smokers lose ten years of life, quitting gives most of it back](https://onco.cc/key-papers/paper-doll-peto-50-year-doctors-bmj-2004/), [Smoking, smoking cessation, and lung cancer in the UK since 1950: combination of national statistics with two case-control studies](https://onco.cc/key-papers/paper-peto-smoking-cessation-lung-cancer-uk-bmj-2000/), [The mortality of doctors in relation to their smoking habits; a preliminary report](https://onco.cc/key-papers/paper-doll-hill-mortality-of-doctors-smoking-bmj-1954/)
- roadmaps: [Triple-negative breast cancer roadmap: from a remainder defined by three negative tests to immunotherapy, antibody-drug conjugates and the residual disease problem](https://onco.cc/roadmaps/tnbc-roadmap/)

---
JSON: https://onco.cc/api/v1/entities/richard-peto.json