Helen MacDonald

So I put it out to you.

What do you think, Duncan and Carl?

Have you ever said that to a patient, Carl?

And in fact, they suggest that the additional reduction is totally unmeasurable.

And this paper has been quite well picked up on Twitter and I think it was on Twitter I read one of the comments or a suggestion which I thought was quite helpful was that wouldn't it be interesting if test results came with that biological variation kind of marked around them so as you're plotting or looking at people's test results to see how they've changed over time to try and be able to see if that change is clearly meaningful or potentially just

I left behind in that table all the results, which I never dwell on in detail.

I'll take over.

Well actually I'll pause on the conflicts of interest for a moment because something that interests me possibly even more than conflicts of interest is I love interviewing authors and I've interviewed lots of authors over the years about their research and I have often found that the most interesting question you ask them and it's sometimes Duncan it's when you're up in the little studio setting things up and I say things like oh this is very informal

Why don't you just tell me, why did you do this in the first place?

And I think it's such a fascinating question.

And you so rarely find the answer to that question in the background of any research paper.

And I like this paper, not just because it's about conflicts of interest, but because I think it's a really fascinating story.

And the paper's senior author, who's a professor of dermatology, called Eleni Linos,

told Duncan a bit about her story.

So back in 2012, she published a systematic review and meta-analysis which pooled evidence and showed that sunbeds and UV exposure was linked to melanoma and other non-melanoma skin cancer's

And it seemed to sort of go out there and be reasonably uncontroversial.

Yeah, it's not particularly surprising.

But several years later, she got a critical response to her paper online, which made her go back and double check the science and check that, you know, everything was in order, which it was.

And she started thinking about why this happened.

And I think we should listen to Eleni talk about her puzzlement about this response to her paper.