Marvin Zelen

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).

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.

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.

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

Visiting faculty member:

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.

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.

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.

Zelen’s colleague and successor (as Department Chair), biostatistics professor Nan Laird, recalled that “those first few years of integrating twelve new faculty members from Buffalo with half as many from Harvard were part of Marvin’s grand plan to make Harvard the nation's leading biostatistics department — which it is and has been for quite some time.

It was an enormously exciting time when we were united in working towards a common goal.

Marvin’s genius was that he got all of us involved, then stepped back and gave us all the credit.”

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."

Zelen was noted for his developing some of the statistical methods and study designs still used in clinical cancer trials, in which experimental drugs are tested for toxicity, effectiveness, and proper dosage.

He introduced measures to ensure that data gathered from human trials would be as free as possible of errors and biases—measures that are now standard practice.

Zelen helped transform clinical trial research into a well-managed and statistically sophisticated branch of medical science.

His work in this area led to significant medical advances, such as improved treatments for several different forms of cancer.

His research also focused on improved early detection of cancer; on modeling the progression of cancer and its response to treatment; and on using statistical models to help determine optimal screening strategies for various common cancers, especially breast cancer.

Ironically, he died after a prolonged battle with cancer.

One of those experimental design models for randomized clinical trials is known as Zelen's design or Zelen's randomized consent design, in which patients are randomized to either the treatment or to the control group before they give their informed consent.

Because the group to which any given patient is assigned is known at the time of consenting, the study patient's consent can be sought conditionally.

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.

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.

Zelen was known for developing the statistical methods and study designs that are used in clinical cancer trials, in which experimental drugs are tested for toxicity, effectiveness, and proper dosage.

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.

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.