In 2006, the English media broke the story that Sir Richard Doll had for many years been retained on a secret consultancy by Monsanto. Doll's colleagues rushed to his defense, arguing that the story was an unjustified smear on a great man whose work had saved millions of lives. However, Doll's conflicts of interest in his occupational health epidemiology are shown to sit uneasily alongside his more independent smoking/lung cancer studies.