Scientist at Work - Dr. Donald A. Redelmeier - Debunking Myths of the Medical World - NYTimes.com: "While Dr. Redelmeier enjoys his patient interactions, he appears incapable of resisting the lure of a good research topic. Several years ago he compared medical school class presidents to a control group of others in the class and found that the presidents died an average 2.5 years earlier than those in the control group. The type who would run for class president, he concluded in the resulting paper, “may also be the type who fails to look after their health or is otherwise prone to early mortality.”
The idea came to him one day in a hallway at the University of Toronto’s Faculty of Medicine, where he had stopped to admire a century’s worth of class photos showing mostly white men.
“Some people might say, ‘What an old boys’ network,’ ” Dr. Redelmeier said. “But I thought, ‘My goodness, what a homogeneous population, akin to identical white mice, which thereby controls for all sorts of differences.’ ” Thus was born another Redelmeier classic.
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