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Harvard Medical School - Mount Auburn Hospital Harvard Medical School at Mount Auburn Hospital January 16, 1980. DEPARTMENT OF MEDICINE GARY L. HUBER, M,D.,,DIRECTOR Smoking and Health Research Program Lee E. Stanford, Esq. Shook, Hardy & Bacon Mercantile Bank Tower 1101 Walnut'Street Kansas City, Missouri 4106 . Dear Lee, Mount Auburn Hosp:'tal 330 Mount Auburn Street ;- Camb,idge, Massachusetts-02138' 617-661-1158 I have talked to you on several occasions about our holding an NIH- Enclosed for your interest is the official announcement by Claude Lenfant, sponsored workshop on quantitative 1'ung morphology this coming spring. Director of the NHLBI Division of Lung Diseases. tobacco and health research program, a priority objective was~ to bring quanti- tation to every aspect of our scient3fic effort, for'we felt that much of the controversy on many of the smoking and health issues was generated, i;n part, by qualitative or descriptive approaches. Furthermore, we wanted our contributions to be reproducable and to be as much above criticism as possible. The best way to achieve these goals was to provide precise "numerical answers" in place of the much too frequently employed "opinions" offered byothers in the past. opportunity. When we first became interested in developing an industry-supported for they are indirectly responsible for our having this unique and very special I think some special comments are in order to our industry sponsors, In the-area of describing tissues structurally, this is:znost difficult. I have never been able to resolve, for example, the Oscar Auerbachis of the worl6standi,ng up and pointing to one of their tissue slides and saying, "This is the way it is because I saw it that way !" Our problems were solved by the disciplines of morphometry and sterology. StereoZogy, is~a word used to describe a technique whereby the internal composition of a structure is determined by an analysis of the surface of the structure. It was developed in 1847 in Europe by the'geologists, and used to estimate mineral content of rock deposits by,evaluating not the whole rock_ but just a surface sample. About a century later, a Swiss, by the name of Weibel, applied the same principles to the structure of the lung. He initially used the word morphometry to mean quantitative morphology. Now, both terms imply quantitation of structure, with stereology usually applied to three- dimensional analyses and morphometry to two-dimensional projections. W ~ When we were funded by the industry, we employed jti'eibeli as a consultant, C!1 and with his help developed the best quantitative morphology laboratory in 0

Lee E. Stanford, Esq. January 16, 1980 - Page 2 this country. The technology employs a lot of statistical analyses and, for the most part, is computerized. Paul Davies was recruited from Switzerland ,specifically to develop this component of our research. Without the industry's help, we could never have developed the equipment resources or the manpower to undertake this kind of research. . The NIH-sponsored workshop is designed to provide an opportunity for other scientists to develop a working knowledge in this area, and to then replace qualitative descriptions with quantitative data in their research efforts. That should help us all! .Please extend to the industry grantors our appreciation for making all of this possible. GLH:mtc Enclosures Sincexely; Gary L. Huber, M.D., Director Smoking and Health Research Program