“I’ve done it in animals and I don’t see why it couldn’t be done in a human. I think I’ll go ahead.”

LIFE magazine has made its picture archive public through Google Images. I’ve been searching it for interesting science photos (inspired by others).

Anyway, I liked this one:

We don’t need no stinkin’ fume hoods.

The man in the picture is Dr Evarts Graham from Washington University’s School of Medicine. Graham was a pioneering thoracic surgeon – he performed the first successful lung removal operation on a patient with lung cancer in 1933.

Graham spent the late forties on a large scale study of the effects of smoking on health. This cumulated in an influential paper in JAMA in 1950.

He was a heavy smoker but when his own research began to suggest a link between smoking and lung disease he quit.

Tragically but perhaps unsurprisingly Graham died of lung cancer in 1957.