BROSS, Irwin D(udley) J(ackson) 1921-2004

OBITUARY NOTICE—

See index for CA sketch: Born November 13, 1921, in Halloway, OH; died August 29, 2004, in Cheektowaga, NY. Statistician and author. Bross was the former director of biostatistics at the Roswell Park Cancer Institute. After completing undergraduate work at the University of California at Los Angeles in 1942, he served in the U.S. Army Signal Corps during World War II. Returning home, he attended what is now North Carolina State University at Raleigh, where he earned a master's in 1948, followed the next year by a Ph.D. from the University of North Carolina. After completing his doctorate, Bross worked as a resident associate biostatistician at Johns Hopkins for three years. For the remainder of the 1950s, he was a statistic consultant in public health and preventive medicine at Cornell University, and during the late 1950s served concurrently as head of research design and analysis service at the Sloan-Kettering Institute. Moving to Buffalo, New York, in 1959, Bross joined the Roswell Park Memorial Institute as director of biostatistics, a position he would hold until his 1983 retirement. As a biostatistician, Bross was dedicated to helping protect the public health by evaluating the risks of such hazards as automobile crashes, cigarette smoking, and low-level ionizing radiation. In addition to over three hundred scientific articles on these and other subjects to medical and other professional journals, Bross wrote several books, including Scientific Strategies in Human Affairs: To Tell the Truth (1975), Crimes of Official Science: A Casebook (1988), Scientific Fraud vs. Scientific Truth (1992), and Fifty Years of Folly and Fraud in the Name of Science (1994); he also produced the six-book CD-ROM collection History of U.S. Science and Medicine in the Cold War (1996). After retiring from Roswell Park, Bross became president of his own company, Biomedical Metatechnology, a public health consulting firm.

OBITUARIES AND OTHER SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

Buffalo News, September 3, 2004, p. D4.

Los Angeles Times, September 12, 2004, p. B16.