Norman Breslow, an architect of modern biostatistics.

Since the early 1970’s, Norman Breslow has made enormous contributions to statistical theory and its applications in epidemiology, and he was a founding member and principal statistician of the Wilms Tumor Study Group, which is credited with great improvements in the treatment and understanding of this disease. Applications of the biostatistical methods that Norm developed have been concentrated on two of the most important areas of biomedical science where statistical thinking is fundamental, clinical trials and chronic disease epidemiology. In these two areas, much of the applied statistical work over the past three decades is based on the conceptual framework of which he was a principal architect. Biostatistics is a pluripotential discipline with a multitude of possible career avenues.Many biostatisticians loosen their ties with the core discipline to become, for example, epidemiologists, or to manage clinical trial data centers or move into population genetics, to name just some of the options. This Norm never did. Although he became deeply involved in a range of biomedical applications, in particular his extremely productive commitment over the decades to theWilms Tumor StudyGroup, described in the later article byGiulioD’Angio,