Education: Return Engagement

After 35 years at Johns Hopkins University, Vice President Lowell J. Reed, 67, cleaned out his desk, said goodbye all around, and last June retired to his New Hampshire farm. But last week, less than a month after President Detlev Bronk resigned to become head of the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research (TIME, July 6), the Hopkins trustees made a surprise announcement. The man they wanted for Bronk's successor: Lowell Reed.

President Reed is the nation's top biostatistician (a word he coined himself). Over the years, he has collected statistics on everything from cows to cars, once helped to plot a logistic curve by which scientists can forecast population trends of any city or country in the world. As director of the School of Hygiene and Public Health, and later as vice president, Reed also proved himself a topnotch administrator. Johns Hopkins now has until 1956 to finish its $5,000,000 building program, and to run along under a man it knows and respects. By then Reed will be 70, and ready to retire for good.