Lawrence Garfinkel, 88; conducted smoking studies, discouraged practice
NEW YORK - Lawrence Garfinkel, an epidemiologist with the American Cancer Society who helped design landmark studies that linked smoking to lung cancer, died last Thursday in Seattle. He was 88.
The cause was cardiovascular disease, his son Martin said.
Mr. Garfinkel became a leader in cancer epidemiology despite having no formal education in the field. His degrees were in statistics: a bachelor’s from the City College of New York and a master’s from Columbia.
“He started as a statistical clerk at the Cancer Society,’’ his son said. “It was a temporary job, and he stayed for 43 years.’’
Hired in 1947, Mr. Garfinkel learned epidemiology on the job. His mentor was Dr. E. Cuyler Hammond, an epidemiologist and the director of the statistical research section.
Scientists had begun to suspect that smoking might cause lung cancer, but large studies were needed to find out for sure. Mr. Garfinkel helped Hammond and Dr. Daniel Horn conduct a study in the 1950s that tracked nearly 188,000 men for 44 months. Its conclusion became a milestone in epidemiology: Smokers had a marked increase in lung cancer risk.
The grim evidence began to turn the medical profession against tobacco and inspired public health campaigns against smoking. The tobacco industry fought back.
The epidemiologists had just begun to work. Mr. Garfinkel and Hammond started an even bigger project in 1959, the Cancer Prevention Study I, which enrolled a million men and women.
A study begun in 1982, by Mr. Garfinkel and Dr. Steven D. Stellman, had 1.2 million participants.
“Those studies have been extraordinarily valuable, in that they were a major impetus for tobacco control in the United States,’’ said Dr. Michael Thun, vice president of epidemiology and surveillance research at the Cancer Society.