In reporting the results of a survey on instruction in medical schools in the United States and Canada, published in the Journal of Medical Education in 1957 (Vol. 33, pp. 370-372), Carl Hopkins stated that biostatistics is here to stay as an essential part of the medical school curriculum (p. 370). This growing presence prompted a symposium at the 1967 annual meeting of the American Statistical Association (ASA) discussing ways to enhance the role of medical statistics in epidemiology in undergraduate medical education. One major outcome of the symposium, summarized and reported by Anita Bahn in the Journal of Medical Education in 1969 (Vol. 44, pp. 622-626), was the formation of an informal organization within the ASA Training Section (now the Section on Statistical Education) to promote communication among medical educators teaching statistics. Specific goals of the informal group were to (a) exchange ideas on content and methods of teaching, (b) collect resource problems suitable for teaching and articles from the current literature as examples of both good and poor research methods, (c) develop a roster of teachers of statistics in medical and nursing schools, and (d) organize formal meetings on topics relevant to the teaching of statistics. Bahn followed through on the recommendations of the 1967 symposium by writing to her colleagues at other medical schools and proposing an informal meeting of interested teachers of statistics at the 1969 ASA annual meeting. A group of 40 medical-school representatives subsequently met at the annual meeting and, after discussing the objectives to be met by the formation of a permanent group, voted unanimously to seek establishment of a separate subsection within the ASA Training Section. Bylaws were written, and the subsection came into official being in 1970. The subsection's spiritual and actual debt to Bahn's initial organizing efforts grew as she became the first chair of the subsection and the (albeit unofficial at that point in time) first editor of a newsletter that was to grow into an important communication tool, subsequently called the Newsletter of the Subsection on Teaching of Statistics in the Health Sciences. Paul Leaverton served as the subsection's first secretary. (A complete list of officers appears in Table 1.) Several of the initial activities of the new subsection included some that continue today. Theodore (Ted) Colton and Jan Kuzma headed a survey group to learn how, when, and by whom statistics was being taught in medical schools, Table 1. Officers for the Subsection on Teaching of Statistics in the Health Sciences