DEMOGRAPHIC DESTINIES Interviews with Presidents of the Population Association of America Interviews Referencing Lowell J. Reed PAA President in 1942-45 This series of interviews with Past PAA Presidents was initiated by Anders Lunde (PAA Historian, 1973 to 1982) And continued by Jean van der Tak (PAA Historian, 1982 to 1994) And then by John R. Weeks (PAA Historian, 1994 to present) With the collaboration of the following members of the PAA History Committee: David Heer (2004 to 2007), Paul Demeny (2004 to 2012), Dennis Hodgson (2004 to present), Deborah McFarlane (2004 to 2018), Karen Hardee (2010 to present), Emily Merchant (2016 to present), and Win Brown (2018 to present) LOWELL J. REED We do not have an interview with Lowell Reed, who was the eighth PAA President (1942-45), serving for three years since there were neither PAA meetings nor elections during World War II. However, as Andy Lunde and Jean van der Tak (VDT) were interviewing other past presidents, they regularly asked questions about those early presidents whom they had been unable to interview. Below are the excerpted comments about Lowell Reed. CAREER HIGHLIGHTS Lowell J. Reed was born in 1886 in Berlin, New Hampshire. He graduated from the University of Maine in 1907 with a degree in electrical engineering. He then went on to the University of Pennsylvania, where he received his Ph.D. in mathematics in 1915. He taught for two years at the University of Maine, and then served as the Chief of the Bureau of Tabulation and Statistics of the War Trade Board during World War I. In 1918, after the end of the war (albeit during the Flu Pandemic of 1918), he became an Associate Professor of Biometry and Vital Statistics (which was subsequently called biostatistics--a term that he seems to have invented) at The Johns Hopkins University School of Hygiene and Public Health (now the Bloomberg School of Public Health). He became full professor in 1925, and in 1937 was named Dean of the School of Public Health. From 1947 to 1953 he was Vice President of the University, in charge of medical activities. He retired in 1953, only to be immediately recalled to duty as President of The Johns Hopkins University from 1953 to 1956. In 1956 he retired to his farm in Berlin, New Hampshire, where he died in 1966. From Andy Lunde's interview with Frank Notestein in 1973: LUNDE: And Lowell Reed [PAA President 1942-45]? NOTESTEIN: Lowell and Maggie Merrill, his assistant [and one of his doctoral students], were the best teachers I've ever come across. They have scattered around the world people who are making life tables. You remember we all had to worry about separation factors in life tables? Well, they'd all been indoctrinated with separation factors. [Raymond] Pearl was a dynamic and important person; terribly flashy. He was arrogant and domineering, but when you got him going, he was one of these people you would just forgive. You would not hold him to the normal canon of behavior. Few people working closely with him were strong enough not to be made into Mr. Meek. Reed, who came from Maine, was a New Englander who was quite strong. Whereas Pearl was going off on laws of population growth, Reed was always interested in mathematical innovation. Pearl was the bouncer; Reed was the person who set things up. Despite his errors, he probably advanced the field more than most of the rest of us who [make pedestrian projections]. The field has often been pushed by the man who makes the dream and the wrong generalizations. Reed chaired the Advisory Council of the Milbank Fund for years. A wise man always. A very good teacher; an imaginative man. Feet on the ground. A darn good statistician who did a lot for the period. From Andy Lunde's interview with Conrad Taeuber in 1973: LUNDE: What do you recall of the major figures in PAA during the early years? TAEUBER: Then there were Raymond Pearl and Lowell Reed. Lowell Reed [President, 1942-45] came to us through a concern with public health. He had worked with Pearl in formulating the logistic curve, which at the time was believed to provide a model for human population development. There 2 were Reed and his assistant Margaret Merrell, a very quiet person who somehow was always in the background. Reed was also a very outgoing, friendly, delightful person; very much concerned with his students, pushing his students. He served for many years as chairman of a roundtable which the Milbank Fund ran every year on a variety of issues, some of them demographic, in the health field. Reed was always the charming chairman of those meetings. From Andy Lunde's interview with Irene Taeuber in 1973: LUNDE: Irene, can you tell us a bit about the history of our organization? TAEUBER: At Hopkins, you had Lowell Reed and Raymond Pearl, again a diverse pair, whose skills complemented each other and who made Hopkins the classic center for the logistics theory of population growth and the earliest of the studies of the reproductive history of women. LUNDE: Among the people who preceded you as president, there were a number we don't know much about. Did you happen to know Lowell J. Reed [President 1942-45]? TAEUBER: Lowell Reed was one of the major statesmen of the demographic as well as the public health field. He was professor of biostatistics at Johns Hopkins. He became basically interested [in demography] with this Pearl-Reed development of the logistics curve. Pearl and Reed introduced this to demography and developed it. Lowell Reed himself, who was a New Englander, not only became dean of the School of Hygiene and Public Health at Hopkins, but finally president at Hopkins. Reed was chairman of the annual meetings of the Milbank Memorial Fund in all the years in which the Milbank Fund worked in population. He was the demographer/statistician who, almost more than anyone else, was the responsible person for that. 3 Lowell J. Reed (1886 - 1966) Author(s): Clyde V. Kiser Source: Population Index, Vol. 32, No. 3 (Jul., 1966), pp. 362-365 Published by: Office of Population Research Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/2731909 Accessed: 18-06-2020 20:05 UTC JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at https://about.jstor.org/terms Office of Population Research is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Population Index This content downloaded from 146.244.101.138 on Thu, 18 Jun 2020 20:05:31 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 362 LOWELL J. REED Lowell J. Reed, well known biometrician, 1886 - 1966 who was affiliated with the Johns Hopkins University from 1918 to 1956. successively as Associate Professor, Professor, Dean, Vice President, and Presi- dent, died April 28, 1966. Lowell Jacob Reed was born January 8, 1886, in Berlin, New Hampshire. His parents were Jason Reed and Lowella Coffin Reed. Receiving the Ph.D. degree at the University of Pennsylvania in 1915, Doctor Reed taught mathematics and physics the next two years at the University of Maine. Shortly after the entrance of the United States into war in 1917 he became Chief of the Bureau of Tabulation and Statistics of the War Trade Board. He began his career at the Johns Hopkins Uni- versity in 1918 as Associate Professor of Biostatistics. There he colla- borated with Raymond Pearl in the article "On the Rate of Growth of the Population of the United States since 1790 and its Mathematical Repre- sentation." (Pearl and Reed, 1920) Later, in his book The Biology of Population Growth, published in 1925, Pearl stated: My study of the population problem began in 1920 with an examina- of the course of the vital index (birth-death ratio, 100 births/deaths) during and following the war in the chief cities and countries. This introduction to the matter led almost immediately to a mathematical attack upon its most fundamental aspect, namely an attempt to deter- mine the law according to which the growth of population takes place. In this phase of the work my colleague, Professor Lowell J. Reed, has been associated with me from the beginning. At the outstart, as a result of applying certain biological reasoning to the problem, we hit upon an equation to describe the growth of populations, which sub- sequent work has clearly demonstrated to be a first approximation to the required law. As we were in process of publishing the first dis- cussion of the matter we found that a Belgian mathematician, P. F. Verhulst, had as early as 1838 used this same curve, which he called the 'logistic curve,' as the expression of the law of population growth. Since that time we have extensively developed and generalized the mathematical theory, and as a result are able to bring under its descriptive power many cases of actual population growth which are not amenable to the simple law first derived by Verhulst. Dr. Reed was equally unperturbed about the findings that the central core of the work on the logistic had been done 82 years previously. Writing in 1936 he described Verhulst's work and that of Pearl and Reed as follows: Writing at a much earlier time (1838), Verhulst suggested a mathe- matical form free of some of the irrational features of the straight line, the exponential curve, or the third order parabola.