From 1974 to 1988, I worked for the State of California, both as Chief of the

California Tumor Registry (CTR) and principal investigator of one of the

cancer-data collecting programs of the National Cancer Institute’s Surveillance,

Epidemiology, and End Results (SEER) Program. During that time, I received

periodic requests for data from physicians, hospitals, or other local organizations,

as well as questions or information from members of the medical community.

The area for which we had complete cancer-incidence [1] data, dating back to

1972, included the five counties of the San Francisco-Oakland Metropolitan

Statistical Area (SFO SMSA).