[R] Use of R in clinical trials

[Jeff Laake]

I am old enough.  Memory isn't always reliable but Doug Bates recounting 
is what I remember and a quick search has BMDP developed in 1961 and SAS 
in 1966.  To my surprise, the search produced a site that offered BMDP 
for sale.

On 2/18/2010 11:15 AM, Peter Dalgaard wrote:
> Christopher W. Ryan wrote:
>> Pure Food and Drug Act: 1906
>> FDA: 1930s
>> founding of SAS: early 1970s
>>
>> (from the history websites of SAS and FDA)
>>
>> What did pharmaceutical companies use for data analysis before there 
>> was SAS? And was there much angst over the change to SAS from 
>> whatever was in use before?
>>
>> Or was there not such emphasis on and need for thorough data analysis 
>> back then?
>
> Well, I'm not quite old enough for this, but the story I heard is that 
> before SAS was the desktop calculator, essentially. Statistics had 
> correspondingly enormous focus on balanced designs, allowing 
> computation to be reduced to means and sums of squares. This would 
> typically be left to consulting firms employing (human) computers to 
> literally do the sums. Digital computers had of course been around for 
> decades at the time but mostly for hard core physics. (Well, actually, 
> they were finding their way into accounting too.) So SAS was, I 
> expect, pretty uniformly a relief.
>
> At the same time, the requirements of the FDA have been tightening; I 
> suppose partly due to technological feasibility, partly in response to 
> certain practises being recognised as dubious, like selective 
> publication, multiple testing, etc. And more data are required since 
> new drugs are rarely all that much better than older ones, while the 
> worries about side effects have increased.
>
>
>> --Chris
>> Christopher W. Ryan, MD
>> SUNY Upstate Medical University Clinical Campus at Binghamton
>> 425 Robinson Street, Binghamton, NY  13904
>> cryanatbinghamtondotedu
>
>
>