PEARL, RAYMOND

born June 3, 1879, Farmington, N.H., U.S. died Nov. 17, 1940, Hershey, Pa. American zoologist, one of the founders of biometry, the application of statistics to biology and medicine. As an instructor at the University of Michigan, where he had earned a Ph.D. in zoology (1902), Pearl recognized the advantages to be gained from applying standard statistical procedures to biological problems. He served as head of the biology department at the Maine Agricultural Experimental Station (190718) and as chief of the statistical division of the U.S. Food Administration (191719). He was then invited to organize the department of medical statistics and biometry at Johns Hopkins University. Pearl founded the Quarterly Review of Biology (1926) and Human Biology (1929) and was the author of more than 700 articles and books, including Introduction to Medical Biometry and Statistics (1923), which became a prototype for such college texts.