Medicine: The Cost of Inhaling

Depth of inhaling is tied to the death rate among smokers even more closely than the amount of tobacco smoked, says the statistician who most tirelessly pursues the correlation between smoking and disease.

The American Cancer Society's Edward Cuyler Hammond was among the first to show a statistical link between smoking and lung cancer. Partly under him and partly under others, statistics have narrowed the presumed cause from smoking in general to cigarette smoking to heavy cigarette smoking. Meanwhile, statistics amplified the effects to include not merely lung cancer, but even more important (in number of deaths ), heart and circulatory diseases—plus...