[1] His and Evarts Ambrose Graham's joint publication of "Tobacco Smoking as a Possible Etiologic Factor in Bronchiogenic Carcinoma: A Study of 684 Proved Cases" appeared in the Journal of the American Medical Association.
During World War II, he attained citizenship and joined the U.S. Army, where, as a German-speaker, he was assigned to a psychological warfare unit to monitor German newscasts.
[4][5] Wynder began collaborating with his coauthor on the article, Evarts Ambrose Graham, as a medical student at Washington University in St. Louis in 1947.
The previous summer he had conducted epidemiological studies of smoking behavior among 146 lung cancer patients in New York City.
Departing from a tradition of using anecdotal evidence (e.g., clinical interviews) to develop explanations of disease causation, Wynder and Graham applied rudimentary statistical methods to their study.
Most importantly, with regard to an ability to demonstrate causation, Wynder and Graham also studied a control group of cancer-free individuals in hospitals.
"The production of tumors in lab animals offered a powerful indicator that something in cigarette smoke could account for the epidemiological findings," writes Allan M. Brandt, a historian of medicine.