I am old enough. Memory isn't always reliable but Doug Bates recounting
is what I remember and a quick search has BMDP developed in 1961 and SAS
in 1966. To my surprise, the search produced a site that offered BMDP
for sale.
On 2/18/2010 11:15 AM, Peter Dalgaard wrote:
Christopher W. Ryan wrote:
Pure Food and Drug Act: 1906
FDA: 1930s
founding of SAS: early 1970s
(from the history websites of SAS and FDA)
What did pharmaceutical companies use for data analysis before there
was SAS? And was there much angst over the change to SAS from
whatever was in use before?
Or was there not such emphasis on and need for thorough data analysis
back then?
Well, I'm not quite old enough for this, but the story I heard is that
before SAS was the desktop calculator, essentially. Statistics had
correspondingly enormous focus on balanced designs, allowing
computation to be reduced to means and sums of squares. This would
typically be left to consulting firms employing (human) computers to
literally do the sums. Digital computers had of course been around for
decades at the time but mostly for hard core physics. (Well, actually,
they were finding their way into accounting too.) So SAS was, I
expect, pretty uniformly a relief.
At the same time, the requirements of the FDA have been tightening; I
suppose partly due to technological feasibility, partly in response to
certain practises being recognised as dubious, like selective
publication, multiple testing, etc. And more data are required since
new drugs are rarely all that much better than older ones, while the
worries about side effects have increased.
--Chris
Christopher W. Ryan, MD
SUNY Upstate Medical University Clinical Campus at Binghamton
425 Robinson Street, Binghamton, NY 13904
cryanatbinghamtondotedu
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