Marvin Zelen

During his 10 years in Buffalo, Zelen helped the Eastern Cooperative Oncology Group (ECOG) — one of several regional organizations established by the National Cancer Institute (NCI) to test experimental cancer treatments — with its studies. In an American University alumni magazine article in 2008, Zelen said those early studies were “terrible.” He said the studies were “poorly thought out; the data was wrong; they had poor quality control, not enough patients — everything you can think of that was antiscientific.” He urged biomedical researchers in charge of the studies to begin from scratch because they had learned relatively little because of study design flaws. They agreed with Zelen, and along with his longtime collaborator Paul Carbone, he established research standards and practice now used in clinical trials for many infectious diseases. During that period, Zelen formed the Statistical Laboratory at the University of Buffalo, which focused on overseeing and improving statistical aspects of large, complex drug trials. ECOG would later become one of the world's largest programs for testing and evaluating various cancer treatments.

In 2007, Zelen became the first holder of the newly named (by Harvard President Derek Bok) Lemuel Shattuck Research Professor of Statistical Science at HSPH.

Mitchell H. Gail, MD, PhD, senior investigator in the biostatistics branch of NCI's Division of Cancer Epidemiology and Genetics and president of the American Statistical Association (1995), commented:

In 1981, Zelen succeeded Frederick Mosteller as Biostatistics Chair. He continued working on the ECOG trials, helped lay the groundwork for the department's pre-eminence in AIDS clinical trials, and improved the biostatistics curriculum. As its chair, he helped propel the department to its position as a leading center for biostatistical research.

Zelen served for a decade in the 1980s (1981-1990) as chair of the Harvard School of Public Health's Department of Biostatistics, where he has been credited with transforming HSPH's biostatistics department into the best biostatistics department in the United States. He was also a member of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences at Harvard University, in the FAS Department of Statistics in Harvard Square, and voted to remain an Emeritus Professor there, also, until his death in late 2014.

Zelen also achieved another level of fame in the early 1980s when he and his late colleague (died 2009) in the biostatistics department, Stephen Lagakos, launched a study of a possible connection between a cluster of childhood leukemia cases in Woburn and the town's water supply. Known as the Harvard Health Study, the investigation showed, for the first time, a connection between Woburn's contaminated water and a variety of adverse health effects, including leukemia. The matter made headlines, wound up in court, and was chronicled in the book A Civil Action, which was later made into a movie. As the book notes, when Prof. Zelen announced the study's results in the basement of a Woburn church in February 1984, someone in the audience called out, “Thank God for Marvin Zelen,” and the crowd burst into applause.

Another of Zelen's achievements was his establishment, in 1975, of the Frontier Science and Technology Research Foundation in Boston, a nonprofit devoted to advancing the use of statistical science and practice and data management techniques in science, health care, and education. Prof. Zelen served as president, and his wife Thelma was chief administrative officer. Several of his other close friends and Harvard colleagues were also directly involved. Richard D. Gelber, professor of biostatistics of HSPH and at DFCI, and winner of the 2008 Komen Brinker Award for Scientific Distinction, noted:

Zelen was also prominent in President Richard Nixon’s “war on cancer” during the early 1970s. He was chair of a committee responsible for designing and organizing the new program. Lee-Jen Wei, HSPH biostatistics professor, called Zelen's involvement in the early war on cancer “tremendous and lasting.”

In the mid-1970s, Zelen's pioneering work in Buffalo brought him to the attention of HSPH's then-biostatistics chair, Frederick Mosteller. Zelen insisted that he would only come to Harvard if he could bring the biostatistics team which he had built in Buffalo, since he wanted to build the world's greatest biostatistics department wherever he went. Thus, in 1977, 27 faculty, researchers, and other staff members moved from Buffalo to Boston, along with their DEC-20 computer and their research projects, the ECOG trials — 150 cancer trials involving several thousand patients. Zelen's lab was established at the Dana–Farber Cancer Institute, where, simultaneously with his tenure at HSPH, he built the Dana–Farber Cancer Institute’s Department of Biostatistics and Computational Biology.

In 1962 Zelen was elected as a Fellow of the American Statistical Association.

In the early 1960s, Zelen spent two years (1961-1963) as a visiting professor at the University of Wisconsin’s Mathematics Research Center, where he first worked with cancer researchers, helping them address problems with study design. After that, for four years beginning in 1963, he led the National Cancer Institute’s applied mathematics and statistics section, where he delved further into cancer and clinical research. He spent a year in London as a Fulbright Scholar, and then he joined the biostatistics department at the State University of New York in Buffalo, now University at Buffalo.

Marvin Zelen was born and reared in New York City, where he attended and in 1944 received a diploma from Evander Childs High School. Then, as a mathematics major at City College of New York, he discovered and developed his lifelong interest in statistics and probability. In 1949, he earned his bachelor's degree in mathematics there. After earning a master's degree in mathematical statistics from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 1951, he worked for 10 years at the mathematics lab of the National Bureau of Standards in Washington, D.C. He was the only math lab employee without a doctorate, which he later earned in 1957 at American University.

Marvin Zelen (June 21, 1927 – November 15, 2014) was Professor Emeritus of Biostatistics in the Department of Biostatistics at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health (HSPH), and Lemuel Shattuck Research Professor of Statistical Science (the first recipient). During the 1980s, Zelen chaired HSPH's Department of Biostatistics. Among colleagues in the field of statistics, he was widely known as a leader who shaped the discipline of biostatistics. He "transformed clinical trial research into a statistically sophisticated branch of medical research."