Philip R. N. Sutton (12 September 1914 – 12 March 1995) was an Australian dental researcher and statistician.
He did extensive research in the South Pacific, studying tooth abnormalities and related dietary factors.
[1][2] In 1957, while a senior research fellow in the University of Melbourne in the Department of Oral Medicine and Surgery, Sutton was asked by Sir Arthur Amies, Dean of the Faculty of Dental Science, to check the numerical data and methods published in the American trials on artificial water fluoridation.
Sutton's analysis resulted in a 72-page monograph that questioned those studies' findings, and culminated in another publication, Fluoridation: Errors and Omissions in Experimental Trials in 1960 which included the responses of the trials authors' to the original critique and Sutton's comments.
Sutton's other publications included studies on the relationship between mental stress and dental disease, the first appearing in the journal, Nature, in 1962.