Wynder, Ernest Ludwig (32926486): Difference between revisions

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|death_place=Manhattan, New York

'''Ernest Ludwig Wynder''' (30 April 1922 – 14 July 1999), born Ernst Ludwig Wynder in Herford, Germany, was a Jewish Ritchie Boy and later an American epidemiologist and public-health researcher. With Evarts A. Graham he published the landmark 1950 ''Journal of the American Medical Association'' study that helped identify smoking as a contributory cause of lung cancer—work that shaped decades of cancer prevention research.

Ernst Ludwig Wynder was born on 30 April 1922 in Herford, Westphalia, to Jewish parents; he was a cousin of Robert Weinberg. In 1938 his family escaped Nazi Germany for the United States, where he enrolled at New York University.

Roster and enlistment records list him as Ernest L Wynder (ASN 32926486), a German-born Jewish trainee; he enlisted as a private at Newark, New Jersey, on 7 June 1943, with four years of college noted on his service record. He was at Camp Ritchie with [[:Category:Class 17|Class 17]] but did not graduate, being dropped and assigned to the 5th Mobile Radio Broadcasting Company. He became a U.S. citizen during the war, and as a German speaker served in psychological warfare, monitoring German newscasts. He appears in a wartime group photograph of Ritchie Boys with [[Habe-Bekessy, Hans (32719455)|Hans Habe]], [[Kellen, Konrad (39701828)|Konrad Kellen]], [[Heym, Stefan (32860259)|Stefan Heym]], [[Atlas, Louis (32258804)|Louis Atlas]], [[Weidenreich, Peter H. (32791342)|Peter Weidenreich]] (later Wyden), and [[Eaton, Joseph W. (32498461)|Joseph Eaton]].

After the war Wynder studied medicine at Washington University in St. Louis, receiving both a Bachelor of Science and an M.D. in 1950. In the summer of 1946 he had studied the smoking habits of 146 lung cancer patients in New York City, and from 1947, as a medical student, he worked with the thoracic surgeon Evarts A. Graham, collecting data on 604 lung cancer patients in hospitals across the country and comparing them with a cancer-free control group. Their paper, "Tobacco Smoking as a Possible Etiologic Factor in Bronchiogenic Carcinoma: A Study of 684 Proved Cases", published in the ''Journal of the American Medical Association'' on 27 May 1950, was one of the first major scientific studies to identify smoking as a contributory cause of lung cancer. Follow-up laboratory work begun with Graham in 1950 showed that cigarette tar produced cancers in 44 percent of exposed mice, and Wynder identified carcinogens such as benzopyrenes and arsenic in tobacco tar.

4448187125203174.jpg|All the men identified in the pix are "Ritchie Boys." Seated - [[Habe-Bekessy, Hans (32719455)|Hans Habe]]. Standing L-R - Unknown, [[Wynder, Ernest Ludwig (32926486)|Ernest Wynder]], [[Kellen, Konrad (39701828)|Konrad Kellen]], unknown, [[Heym, Stefan (32860259)|Stefan Heym]], [[Atlas, Louis (32258804)|Louis Atlas]], [[Weidenreich, Peter H. (32791342)|Peter Weidenreich]] (last name later changed to Wyden), unknown, [[Eaton, Joseph W. (32498461)|Joseph Eaton]]