NCI's Gail Retires
Dr. Mitchell H. Gail, senior investigator and former director of the Biostatistics Branch (BB) of NIH’s National Cancer Institute (NCI) Division of Cancer Epidemiology and Genetics (DCEG), retired from NIH in August after more than 56 years of service.
Gail made seminal contributions to the development of statistical methods and their application to epidemiology and clinical medicine, particularly those for risk prediction, genetic epidemiology, and the design, execution and analysis of cancer treatment and prevention trials.
Most notably, he developed the NCI Breast Cancer Risk Assessment Tool (BCRAT), widely known as the Gail Model, the first to estimate a woman’s five-year and lifetime risk of developing invasive breast cancer using individual risk factors. An average of 50,000 users access the tool each month. BCRAT is widely used in counseling women across the country on their risk of breast cancer and to determine optimal screening intervals. It has been adapted and translated for populations around the world.
In the early days of the AIDS epidemic, Gail and Dr. Ronald Brookmeyer, a visitor from the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health in Baltimore, used “back-calculation” to estimate the size of the epidemic. Their conclusions provided critical insights into the future public health implications of HIV and AIDS and informed the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on the evolution of the crisis.
Throughout his career, Gail supported DCEG studies on cancer etiology. For the Shandong Intervention Trial, he and colleagues collaborated with the Beijing Institute of Cancer Research in China to explore the potential of three treatments to reduce gastric cancer incidence in a region with very high rates. They tested a two-week treatment for Helicobacter pylori or seven years’ treatment with either garlic or vitamin E, vitamin C, and selenium supplementation. Surprisingly, all three reduced gastric cancer incidence and mortality, though the benefits of both supplementation interventions were only confirmed after 22 years of follow-up.
Gail has authored more than 400 scientific publications and several books, including AIDS Epidemiology: A Quantitative Approach co-authored with Brookmeyer, which summarized methods for surveillance of HIV and clinical management, and Absolute Risk: Methods and Applications in Clinical Management and Public Health, with BB Senior Investigator Dr. Ruth Pfeiffer.
Gail mentored dozens of fellows and junior faculty and has been honored with numerous achievement awards. He is a fellow and former president of the American Statistical Association, a fellow of the AAAS, and an elected member of the American Society for Clinical Investigation, and the National Academy of Medicine of the National Academy of Sciences. He received an M.D. from Harvard Medical School and a Ph.D. in statistics from George Washington University. In 1969, he joined NCI as part of the Public Health Service, from which he retired in 1999 with the rank of captain.