Even at the time there were articles in Nature protesting this just like people do global warming today: >THE curious associations with lung cancer found in re

Even at the time there were articles in Nature protesting this just like people do global warming today: >THE curious associations with lung cancer found in relation to smoking habits do not, in the minds of some of us, lend themselves easily to the simple conclusion that the products of combustion reaching the surface of the bronchus induce, though after a long interval, the development of a cancer. This is the first sentence of the abstract "Cancer and Smoking" published in Nature in 1958, by the father of modern frequentist statistics: Ronald A. Fisher. Fisher published a fair bit on why claims that smoking caused cancer were preposterous arguing that "correlation does not equal causation". Fisher was already a very well respected figure in the statistics community and, despite being a paid researcher for tobacco companies, biographers suggest that his motives were person, he loved smoking and disliked puritanical views on how people should live. So despite being one of the greatest statisticians of all time, Fisher still failed to properly assess the risks of cigarette smoking and cancer.