John W.
Tukey’s Multiple Contributions to Statistics at Merck
Joseph F.
Heyse
Professor
Tukey began consulting with Merck, Sharp and Dohme in 1953 at the time of the
merger between Merck, a New Jersey based chemical company, and the Philadelphia
based pharmaceutical company Sharp
& Dohme. Prior to the 1953 merger
John was a consultant to Merck in the area of manufacturing . He remained a
statistical consultant to the biostatistics community at Merck Research
Laboratories until his death in 2000.
Throughout those years John made major contributions to the statistical
aspects of all major research disciplines.
This includes the statistical methods for safety assessment, clinical
trials, laboratory quality control, health economics, clinical adverse experience
evaluation, as well as the most current research in gene expression and
microarray data. His work led to the
establishment of Merck standards and in many cases industry standards for
approaching trend testing and dose selection in dose response studies,
multiplicity adjustments for safety assessment, evaluating clinical trial data
in the presence of clinic by treatment interaction, and statistical methods for
animal carcinogenicity studies. This
talk will summarize John’s work on multiplicity procedures for
biopharmaceutical applications and will include personal reminiscences of our
consulting sessions.