George Lamm

Quotes

Then in ’74 I joined WHO in Copenhagen. I became the successor of Zbynek Pisa who then went up at the time to Geneva to replace Fejfar … I really wonder why I got it… There was a meeting sometime in late ’73, some kind of Eastern European meeting in Bucharest and he [Pisa] told me his great joy that the Russian chap who was the head of the chronic disease unit in Copenhagen told him I will be the successor of Pisa. And then three months I got a phone call from Pisa telling me I had been selected as his successor. I don’t know why.

So when I joined WHO it was already in the… the Myocardial Infarction Register Study which was already completed. But Zbynek was absolutely not interested anymore in writing up the report. He was too busy in Geneva establishing his new job and in a way, I had to push him and in a way write up and help to organize this whole report, which finally appeared with a delay of six years – I think it was published in ’77 or ’76.

When I joined there were two studies running. One was a factory trial of Geoffrey Rose. The other which was halfway running, halfway limping, the so-called Community Control. That was the continuation of the Kaunus-Rotterdam study. It was called the Community Control of Heart Disease, which was poorly standardized and was a mixture between the North Karelia Project and the kind of health promotion approach by governments… But it was, again, a kind of unstandardized, voluntary action and it has been completely killed in ’79 when this new Russian chap arrived in Copenhagen. I’m blanking on his name. He was a Russian fascist and he put his hand on this community control of cardiovascular diseases in pilot areas, which was the title of the whole study and there were 11 or 12 pilot areas, small areas in Europe. And he said, “This is a stupidity. It should be in pilot countries, not in pilot areas.” And he tried to organize mainly the so-called Eastern Block countries. And due to the Russian pressure, everybody said, “Yes, we will come along.” And in that moment the whole study was killed because neither the pilot areas were doing anything nor the governments, of course, apart from paying lip service… There was such a point of discussion and criticism from many participants including myself, that the fellow that was in charge and I were already on the verge of leaving WHO because in March ’81 I became 60 and my successor, another Russian, was already in Copenhagen… And that was the end of the whole Community Control Program. I will show you the paper… It’s not worthwhile to read it because it’s all bla bla. But if you go through it you will see that even Pekka Puska couldn’t make much out of it. Everybody was doing a different thing. Everybody was reporting in a different manner so it was… (10)

ERICA

And in Heidelberg as a WHO consultant, I started the ERICA Project by trying to collate all the existing cardiovascular epidemiology information from Europe and we had quite a few reports from the ERICA Project. The analysis was mainly done by Alessandro [Menotti] in Rome and we were doing mainly the data preparation and cleaning, but analysis was done by Alessandro’s group. And we had produced two rather good, I think still, good reports. One was a cross-section, a description of the whole study. We collected the studies conducted between 1960 and 1970 from all centers which had a good standardized approach to CVD epidemiology. And we established the so-called ERICA risk factors for multiple risk. We have taken six-year coronary mortality because that was the follow-up period which covered the majority of the studies. And in the second report we compared the eastern-western European experience.

Then we were on the verge to do more in-depth analyses. That’s when I got in collision with “X” who suddenly, because he was nearing retirement age and the university was not very much satisfied with him, started to claim that he invented the whole ERICA Study and that he was the boss of the whole thing… A power play. So, I decided that it’s enough for me. [ed. Following which Lamm returned to Budapest.] (12)

Insights into Eastern European intrigues

Yes, and this is partly due to the individual. But to a major part it is due to the system. One of the horror stories now… Last week in Hungary there is a famous, middle-aged Hungarian novelist who wrote an excellent novel. He is the descendant of a very famous traditional Hungarian aristocrat family – an Esterhazy. And he was writing a kind of historical novel through the last 200 years about the family and melding in his own life with his father’s. Of course, during the communist time the father was in exile and they had been pushed out from Budapest. For seven years they had to live in the countryside working like farmers and the novel is about the sad story of the Hungarian aristocrat who had been persecuted by the community.

Now last week appeared the second book, which is called Revised Edition. Because at the time when he was finishing his book he went to the so-called Stasi office which is keeping all the old records of the secret service in Hungary and he asked for the file of his father because he was interested in who was spying on the family. And it turned out that his father was for 25 years a built-in agent of the secret service reporting regularly… It was a shock, of course to learn such a thing about your father. But he had the intellectual courage to write it up again as a second or revised edition, which appeared last week.

I think it simply shows that under a system like we had under the communists, you cannot be sure of anybody and nobody can judge anybody because most probably he has been blackmailed to do this. And you don’t know about what kind of pressure was put on “X” to report on “Z.” (21)