Prologue: In 1 980, the U.S. Public Health Service set out 226 health goals for 1990 that crossed public/private-sector lines as well as intragovernmental boundaries. “There was no precedent for a decade-long health initiative, especially one conceived as a national strategy rather than as a federal or even departmental long-term plan” writes J ames O. Mason, assistant secretary for health. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS ), in this article. Critics, however, faulted the 1990 objectives for problems with measurability and lack of good baseline data. In the spring of 1990, Sen. Jeff Bingaman (D-NM) held two hearings on such critiques. New health objectives for the year 2000 that will be released in September 1990 will reflect both the lessons learned over the previous decade and suggestions gathered from over 7,000 people in a three-year consensus development effort. In this article, Mason describes the process and strategies behind setting the year 2000 goals. Mason, in his position of assistant secretary of health for just over one year, has emerged as an outspoken critic of the tobacco industry, following the lead of HHS Secretary Louis W. Sullivan. At the Seventh World Conference on Tobacco and Health in Australia this April, Mason said he was “appalled at the cynical marketing techniques of the tobacco companies.” He added: “It is unconscionable for the mighty transnational tobacco companies — and three of the major ones are in the United States — to be peddling their poison abroad, particularly because their main targets are less-developed nations” —a statement at odds with the U.S. Trade Representative's current efforts to open Third World markets to U.S. tobacco companies. Mason previously served as director of the Centers for Disease Control and administrator of the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry. He received a medical degree from the University of Utah and a doctorate in public health from the Harvard School of Public Health. Mason has also served on the faculty at the University of Utah College of Medicine.