THE TOBACCO INSTITUTE, INC.

1776 K STREET, NORTHWEST
WASHINGTON, D.C. 20006

296-8434

MARVIN A. KASTENBAUM, Pu. D.

DIRECTOR OF STATISTICS February 17 , LOTL

Prof. Joshua Lederberg
Stanford School of Medicine
Stanford, California 94305

Dear Dr. Lederberg:

During my visit to the Center for Advanced Study in the
Behavioral Sciences last Wednesday, the group I was with
waved greetings toward you as you lunched on the open patio.
I wish now that I had taken the opportunity to introduce
myself. This was the second chance I missed, the first
having been the Summer before last when I taught a course
in the Department of Statistics on the Stanford campus.

At that time Dr. Alex Hollaender suggested that I try to
Meet you.

I feel obliged to write to you now after reading your very
interesting article on "Cure Cancer" in the Washington Post
on February 14. In my present position with The Tobacco
Institute I was especially interested in your views concern-
ing the relationship of smoking and lung cancer. In fact
my visit to the Center for Advanced Study last week was

at the invitation of Drs. Kruskal and Savage who were
anxious to discuss this same subject with me.

My opinion, while admittedly unpopular, is not one which I
would attribute to "psychosocial stupidity". I rather look
with a great deal of skepticism upon what is alleged to be
the "overwhelming evidence" to which you and others contin-
ually refer. One cannot question the fact that a massive
bibliography on this subject exists. That the contents of
this bibliography represent unimpeachable evidence in either
the scientific or the legal sense is debatable. Just as my
statistical training taught me to differentiate between
association and causation, so my mathematical training has
permitted me to separate conjecture from proof.
Prof. Joshua Lederberg
February 17, 1971
Page 2

Several years ago while spending a Summer at Cold Spring
Harbor I was privileged to reproduce one of your experiments
(Transduction in E-coli) in a laboratory course I was taking
there. That experience did not convert me into a biologist,
but it did make me a better statistician. For it taught me,
more than anything else, the meaning of "elegance" in the
design and performance of experiments. As a result, I can
now judge the preponderance of experiments that have been
performed in the area of smoking and health as neither
elegant nor conclusive. I expressed my general views of
laboratory experiments performed in the area of inhalation
carcinogenesis at a Gatlinburg symposium many months before
I joined The Tobacco Institute. A reprint of this paper is
enclosed with copies of some of my other recent work.

Finally, I feel that neither the scientific community nor

the general lay public are usefully served by coarse extrap-

olations of unconfirmable point estimates. For instance, it

would be extremely difficult to document the statement that,

"More than two million citizens who have had cancer would not
be alive today had they been left untreated". This too is a

subject on which honest men might disagree.

Sincerely yours,

Mone. Q. Ceiba

Marvin A. Kastenbaum

Enclosures