In December 1971, two years after the successful Apollo 11 moon landing, US President Richard Nixon launched a “war on cancer” with the signing of the National Cancer Act. Since that time, billions of dollars and thousands of careers have been devoted to finding ways to prevent or cure the disease. But the fight is not yet over.
Bradley Efron (pictured) was awarded the 2018 International Prize in Statistics for the creation of the “bootstrap”, a method that “transformed science’s ability to use and understand data and helped usher in the era of data analysis through computing”. But what is the bootstrap? James J. Cochran explains.
Harmful alcohol consumption is known to cause several diseases and many deaths. A study published in the Lancet this August has presented the latest figures, pertaining to the year 2016.1 The authors estimate that alcohol answers for approximately 7% of all male and 2% of all female deaths, as well as 6% of male and 2% of female disability-adjusted life year losses. Moreover, respective estimates were presented for all countries over several years. But these estimates seem to be too high.
On 19 October 2018, in a West London care home, Toby Lewis turned 100. Physically fit, if a bit frail, he looks and sounds as anyone who had not seen him for 40 years would recognise instantly. He greets you with the same polite, gentlemanly air that always masked a certain eccentricity, even anarchism, that made him such an interesting and lively companion.
Back in the 1990s, British miners were fighting for compensation for diseases linked to coal dust exposure. Epidemiology and statistics were essential to the miners’ case, so mine operators sought to cast doubt on the data – and it fell to my father, Michael Jacobsen (pictured), to argue that the research was sound.
