Comments on the Reanalysis Project

As original investigators of the Harvard Six Cities Study (Dockery et al., 1993) and the American Cancer Society (ACS) Study (Pope et al., 1995), we entered into the Heath Effects Institute (HEI) Reanalysis Project (Krewski et al., 2000) with considerable trepidation. This project was a direct response to letters we received from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) stating that “EPA would encourage reasonable accommodations within the scientific and governmental community that would permit interested scientists and agencies to understand fully the basis for your work” (letters from Mary Nichols to Douglas Dockery and Arden Pope, 31 January 1997). We agreed to the HEI project as a way to provide this understanding in a credible fashion while assuring the confidentiality of the information provided by the study participants and the rights of the original investigators. We hoped that this project would provide a model for objective, structured, open, and sound evaluation