Day 030 - 03 Oct 94 - Page 10
1 evidence given in the witness box by my experts. The
2 material parts of their evidence, somewhat expanded in the
3 witness box, are all contained in the experts' reports
4 which were served on the Defendants at the latest in
5 January of this year. That is the first thing.
6
7 As your Lordship knows and as we lawyers know, what
8 happens when you get an expert report from the other side
9 is that you take it directly to your own expert. Both
10 Professor Wheelock and Dr. Arnott gave very detailed
11 reports with lots of references. You take that material
12 to your own expert and you say: "What do you make of
13 this? What do you say about this?" If your own expert
14 has something to add to what he has already said, then
15 with the leave of the court you can serve a supplementary
16 expert witness statement. That did not happen; it should
17 have happened.
18
19 The second thing I say is this: Professor Crawford has,
20 I think, something like 22 references, 17 of which I have
21 never seen before -- many of them, I think, are his own
22 work. I also draw attention, because your Lordship has
23 not seen it, so it may be -- this is just an example --
24 the sort of thing which Dr. Arnott should have had the
25 opportunity of dealing with, and it may be an important
26 question. On page 8 of Professor Crawford's statement, in
27 the middle of the page, there is a heading, "Part 4,
28 Parallels between Cancer and Heart Disease. Is there a
29 common denominator?" This is a question which he has not
30 previously addressed. I would ask your Lordship to read
31 this. At the bottom of page 8, starting at line 44 and
32 going over the page to line 8, a rather -----
33
34 MR. JUSTICE BELL: Let me just read it.
35
36 MR. RAMPTON: Yes, my Lord.
37
38 MR. JUSTICE BELL: Yes.
39
40 MR. RAMPTON: That is a fairly startling assertion. Certainly
41 it is not something which we have ever considered before
42 because we did not know it might be asserted. If it were
43 right, it would appear that Professor Crawford is claiming
44 to have discovered, at any rate, some aspect of the
45 dietary pathogenesis of cancer. That is something plainly
46 which goes a lot further than any of the material your
47 Lordship has had so far in this court, including all the
48 references to Dr. Arnott's evidence and his report; it is
49 plainly something which needs the most earnest
50 consideration before ever your Lordship could make a
51 proper decision upon the issues in this case. It is
52 certainly not something which I feel confident to deal
53 with, as it were, at short notice.
54
55 MR. JUSTICE BELL: I had not read of it anywhere else in the
56 papers.
57
58 MR. RAMPTON: No, nor had I. It came late last night as
59 something of a surprise. It looks to me to be highly
60 controversial, but I have to find out about that. It is
