ABSTRACT
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).
