IMAGE COURTESY OF THE SEATTLE MUNICIPAL ARCHIVES
Paul Meier, the statistician who revolutionized clinical trials in the United States, died last Sunday (August 7) from complications following a stroke, according to the New York Times. He was 87-years-old.
In the mid-1950s, Meier championed randomization in clinical trials, arguing that the way in which researchers assigned treatments to whichever participants they thought would benefit most was likely skewing results. Sir Richard Peto, an Oxford University epidemiologist and contemporary of Meier's, told the Times that, more than any other US statistician, Meier was "the one who influenced US drug regulatory agencies, and hence clinical researchers throughout the US and other countries, to insist on the central importance of randomized evidence."
In 1958, Meier and collaborator Edward Kaplan, a researcher at the University of California ...
