Background
Dorn was born on July 30, 1906 near Ithaca, New York. He was the son of Fred E. Dorn and Minnie Elizabeth Miller, prosperous dairy farmers.
government official statistician
Dorn was born on July 30, 1906 near Ithaca, New York. He was the son of Fred E. Dorn and Minnie Elizabeth Miller, prosperous dairy farmers.
After completing high school in Ithaca, Dorn worked on the family farm for two years before entering Cornell University. He majored in rural sociology, receiving the B. S. in 1929 and the M. S. in 1930. He developed an interest in statistics during his graduate studies at the University of Wisconsin. While on a rural sociology fellowship in 1931-1932, he studied with Warren S. Thompson, director of the Scripps Foundation for Research in Population Problems at Miami University in Ohio. He received the Ph. D. in sociology from the University of Wisconsin in 1933. A Social Science Research Council fellowship followed in 1933-1934 for studies on the application of recently developed statistical techniques to social data under Egon S. Pearson of the Galton Laboratory at University College, London.
Upon his return to the United States in 1934, Dorn was appointed a research analyst in the Federal Emergency Relief Administration of the Works Progress Administration. In 1936 he served as a staff member on the Committee on Population Problems of the National Resources Committee, and began his lifelong career as a statistician with the U. S. Public Health Service. Dorn was assigned to the National Institutes of Health to initiate application of statistical methods to their research, and became especially involved in problems of demography, epidemiology, mortality, and vital statistics.
From 1943 to 1946, Dorn served as a lieutenant coloneland director of the Medical Statistics Division of the Office of the Surgeon General of the U. S. Army, for which work he was awarded the Legion of Merit. After the war he returned to the National Institutes of Health, where he played an important role in the growth and staffing of a program in medical statistics. As chief of the Biometrics Research Branch of the National Heart Institute, Dorn was considered the "de facto if not de jure Chief Statistician of the National Institutes of Health. " Although he did not consider himself a mathematical statistician, he was interested in the application of new methodology. He sought revision of reporting practices of the International Statistical Classification of the World Health Organization to include multiple causes of death.
In 1938 and 1948 he conducted surveys in ten major cities, and with Sidney J. Cutler published the results in Morbidity from Cancer in the United States, Parts I and II (1955, 1959). In 1954, Dorn surveyed approximately 250, 000 World War I veterans to determine the relationship between smoking and health. In his findings, "Tobacco Consumption and Mortality from Cancer and Other Diseases, " presented to the Seventh International Cancer Congress (1958), he found a significant link between early mortality from lung cancer and other cardiorespiratory diseases and a high rate of tobacco consumption.
Dorn's study of veterans was a major piece of evidence leading to the announcement in 1959 by U. S. Surgeon General Leroy E. Burney of a significant relationship between smoking and lung cancer. The Dorn study was also relied upon extensively in the 1964 Report of the Surgeon General's Advisory Committee on Smoking and Health. Initially this correlation of smoking and lung cancer provoked a storm of controversy and rebuttal from the tobacco industryand segments of the medical community, but subsequent studies proved the link to be valid. In 1959, Dorn was designated the Cutter Lecturer in Preventive Medicine at Harvard University, in recognition of his outstanding epidemiological research. As general secretaryof the International Union against Cancer from 1953 on, he was involved in its expansion and in coordination of international studies. Dorn published extensively on demography, and in the January 1962 issue of Science he presented an invited essay, "World Population Growth: An International Dilemma. "
He died on May 9, 1963, in Washington, D. C.
Dorn was influential in the development of international programs of health and population statistics as an American representative to the conferences on revision of the International Lists of Diseases, Injuries and Causes, as a member of the World Health Organization Expert Committee on Health Statistics, and as a member of the U. S. National Committee on Vital and Health Statistics. He was also a member of the scientific advisory council of the American Cancer Society, the Joint U. S. -U. K. Board on Cardio-Respiratory Diseases, the Population Association, the American Eugenics Society, and the American Society for Human Genetics.
A hard and steady worker, Dorn possessed a keen sense of humor and skill as a raconteur.
Dorn married Celia Camine on June 25, 1932; they had two daughters.
