I visited the Harvard School of Public Health, talked with several of the faculty members and was convinced that they, too, felt that change was required, but I didn't really go into detail to find out how deep the change nor its nature in the view of... of the people to whom I spoke. I accepted the position, however, because it did seem in keeping with my eagerness to bring more quantitative analytic science into the health field, to focus more on the community needs for healthcare, to address a whole range of environmental problems that were relevant to human health, and to address problems concerned with the health of impoverished people around the world.

Herb Sherman and Barney Reifen, the two engineers who had joined me at the School of Public... at the Beth Israel Hospital, expressed their eagerness to work with me at the School of Public Health and the three of us arrived on July 1st of 1972. We spent that summer in meetings with members of the faculty. We invited each department head and his or her colleagues to meet with us to describe what went on in their departments, and to tell us of their aspirations for those departments. It seemed clearer to me at the end of those discussions than at the beginning that public health was, in fact, not a discipline but a series of problems and problems that required for their amelioration the input from people from a variety of disciplines. It also seemed to me, from my conversations with colleagues in other parts of the university, that there was widespread interest in those problems and that it would take little effort to recruit people from the other areas to address some of the problems that were on the agenda of the school.