Towards the end of 1985, when I was about to retire as director of the Medico-Social Research Board, I was asked by the medical adviser of the Agricultural Institute of Ireland, Dr Alan O'Grady, if I would undertake a study on the cause of death in men in the research and technical staff at the institute, because there appeared to be a high number of deaths from cancer among them before they reached retirement age.

The national agricultural research organisation, now renamed the Agriculture and Food Development Authority, has its headquarters in Dublin and has seven major centres. The research programme carried out at the centres covers a broad spectrum of activities relevant to the agricultural industry. The director of the institute, Dr Pierce Ryan, through the personnel officers, provided me with a list of the research and technical workers who had died while still working at the institute and a breakdown of the work-force by age. I obtained copies of their death certificates and their hospital records. The work and medical histories of those who had died were also obtained from the personnel officers’ records.

There had been, in the previous twenty years, twenty-one deaths among the research and seven among the technical staff, all men; eleven of the twenty-eight deaths were from cancer. Four of the eleven cancer deaths were from primary brain cancers; three were from leukaemia, and one death was from Hodgkin's disease, a disorder related to leukaemia. There were also two deaths from abdominal cancers of unknown primary source, probably due to cancer of the pancreas, and one from cancer of the stomach. Approximately one in thirty of all cancer deaths, or one per cent of all deaths, would have been the ‘expected’ number from primary brain tumours in males in the age-group 40–64 years. Leukaemia and lymphatic cancers are relatively uncommon cancers to cause death.