), was a New Zealand Obstetrician and Gynaecologist who led the National Women's Hospital Cervical Cancer Unit as Professor through the 1960s and 1970s and became notorious for conducting an alleged unethical experiment that was the subject of the Cartwright Inquiry.

[2] Whilst becoming the senior consultant in D team it is an exaggeration to say that he saw "nearly every woman who came to the hospital with invasive cancer and many of those with the earlier or precursor stages", as was claimed around the time of the Inquiry.

[6] Journalist Sandra Coney (1987) states that "He wanted to save women from mutilating surgery and to do so he had to prove what at first he had suspected and eventually came to believe: that CIS was a harmless disease which hardly, if ever, progressed to invasive cancer.".

Green retired in 1982, although still actively engaged in academic debate [7] to criticism from Skegg in 1985,[8] but by the time of the Cartwright Inquiry in 1987, he was quite frail, ending up in hospital with pneumonia after several days of questioning.

[9][10] Green was the doctor at the centre of the Cartwright Inquiry, a commission set up to examine claims that he had been experimenting on patients without their consent between 1966 and 1987 (supposedly continuing after his retirement in 1982).

"[6] A subsequent history by Linda Bryder found that Green's views, far from emanating from a personal belief, arose from his wide reading of the international literature which was questioning aggressive approaches to abnormal cells of the cervix or what was then called Carcinoma in situ.

According to Judith Macdonald, a researcher at the University of Waikato, Green was strongly opposed to abortion,[11] and that this influenced his views on management of abnormal cells of the cervix.

[13] (The full phrase "an unfortunate experiment at National Women's Hospital" first appeared the year before in the New Zealand Medical Journal, in a letter from Professor David Skegg.

This study claimed that his patients were at substantially greater risk of cancer and were subjected to numerous extra tests that were intended to observe rather than treat their conditions.

[15][16] This publication along with the publication in 2009 of a history of the Cartwright Inquiry sparked an extensive debate in the New Zealand Medical Journal in 2010, including 39 letters to the editor and three editorials, one by the author of the history, Professor Linda Bryder, who argued that the 2010 retrospective study did not, as alleged, settle the debates about what happened at National Women's Hospital, and nor did it 'prove' that 'treatment of curative intent' had been withheld at the hospital.

Both Bryder (according to Bunkle) and Chalmers (according to Skegg) have seen this inquiry as an attack on the legacy of Green instead of a world-leading report that changed the way patient rights were handled at a national level in New Zealand.