Ernst Wynder
| Ernst Ludwig Wynder | |
|---|---|
| Born |
April 30, 1922 Herford, Westphalia |
| Died | July 14, 1999 (aged 77) |
| Nationality | German, American |
| Occupation | Physician, educator, health researcher |
| Known for | Linking smoking with lung cancer |
| Awards | Robert Koch Prize (Gold, 1990) Nobel Prize (1954) |
Ernst Ludwig Wynder, M.D. (April 30, 1922 – July 14, 1999) was an American epidemiology and public health researcher who studied the health effects of smoking tobacco. His 1950 coauthored publication of "Tobacco Smoking as a Possible Etiologic Factor in Bronchiogenic Carcinoma: A Study of 684 Proved Cases" appeared in the Journal of the American Medical Association. It was one of the first major scientific publications identifying smoking as a contributory cause of lung cancer.
Wynder was born in Herford, Westphalia in 1922 to Jewish parents (a cousin of Robert Weinberg). In 1938 his family escaped Nazi rule and fled to the United States, where Wynder enrolled at New York University. During World War II, he attained citizenship and joined the U.S. Army, where, as a German-speaker, he was assigned to a psychological warfare unit to monitor German newscasts. After the war, he attended medical school at Washington University in St. Louis. In 1950, he received both a bachelor of science and a medical degree. Aside from his credentials as a physician, Wynder was a researcher, educator, and activist. He devoted his career to the study and prevention of cancer and chronic disease, including the publication of hundreds of scientific papers. Through the 1950s and 1960s, he worked at Sloan-Kettering Institute for Cancer Research. In 1969, he founded the American Health Foundation. In 1972, he founded the academic journal Preventive Medicine and served as the founding editor. Wynder died from thyroid cancer on July 14, 1999.
Wynder began collaborating with his coauthor on the article, Evarts Ambrose Graham, as a medical student at Washington University in St. Louis in 1947. The previous summer he had conducted epidemiological studies of smoking behavior among 146 lung cancer patients in New York City. The project was funded by the American Cancer Society. Now, with Graham, Wynder collected extensive data on 604 patients with lung cancer at hospitals across the United States. Departing from a tradition of using anecdotal evidence (e.g., clinical interviews) to develop explanations of disease causation, Wynder and Graham applied rudimentary statistical methods to their study. They divided patients into crude categories of "moderate" or "heavy" smokers, based on retrospective interviews of each patient's smoking behavior over a twenty-year period. They also measured and controlled for important confounding factors (e.g., age, types of tobacco use, inhalation level). Most importantly, with regard to an ability to demonstrate causation, Wynder and Graham also studied a control group of cancer-free individuals in hospitals. They systematically compared the lung cancer patients to the control group.
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