Moving the target.

As President Reagan fulfilled his campaign promise of freeing industry from the restraints imposed by environmentalists, cancer scares arose in another area. Natural products such as apples were thought to contain dangerous amounts of cancer causing agents but it was later discovered that extracting certain components for laboratory testing gave a disproportionate result. Concern over the connection between smoking and lung cancer increased, but neither the U.S., Britain nor France were inclined to attack the tobacco industry which contributed so much to their countries' revenues. In Australia a campaign to encourage the use of sun creams to protect against skin cancer succeeded because it had no political dimension. In Britain in 1988 the campaign against the nuclear industry began, triggered by the number of childhood leukaemia cases in the vicinity of the Sellafield nuclear reactor. In the U.S. an alternative treatment using anti-neo-plastins caused great controversy. Prof. David Lane (now University of Dundee) discovered a genetic mutation common to many forms of cancer. This gave a new direction to cancer research. He describes how his - and Britain's - success was snatched by U.S. geneticists.