page 30
The need for relatively large numbers of patients in order
to gauge the effectiveness of treatment is readily appreciated when you
consider the following hypothetical example.
Suppose a clinic treats 400
patients a year, that there are five principal types of cancer, and each may
be classified in four stages.
in each specific”group.
On the average, there would be 20 patients
If you wished to change the treatment, you copuld
have 10 in the new group and 10 in the standard one. If you expect’“am survival to be
improved
from
5 owtit of 10 (50%) to 7 of 10 (70%),it would be difficult to
establish. Obviously, much larger numbers of patients and good statistical analysis
would be required.
Berge:
Next question was, you said that you had been brought to Harvard
by Shields Warren, and I was wongdering if you could talk a little bit about him.
Kohn:
Shields Warren was chief Pathologist at the Deaconess and Professor
ed
of Pathology at the Harvard Medical School. He became interest, in
; %
pathology
A
y
mfimradiation mmmk/in the late thirties owing to his interest in cancer.
In 1939 he bacme
an officer in the Navy's medical department, and circa 1942,
with Dunlap, Gates and Friedman, wrote a series of papers summarizing what was
known about radiation pathology.He was in the first team to visgit Nagasaki and
Hiroshima after the bombing, and I believe he was the primary instigator of what
THE Atomic Bomb Casualty Commission.
later tunred into the
MMI MVMEMNMMMMNOMM. When the AEC was established
in 1947, he became the first director qg@i=the—Divhwmes of the Division of Biology &
~“N
Medigfce, a post which heheld until they could find a permanent appointee.
uv
Dr. Warren had establish, is own Cancer Research Institute at the
New England Deaconess Hospital, and looking back upon it now, I suppose he wanted