Year of birth: 1911

Year of death: 2000

BIOGRAPHY

Henri Tagnon earned his medical degree from the Université Libre de Bruxelles (ULB) in 1936. Following four years of internal medicine training, he moved to the United States, where he spent six years at Harvard Medical School in Boston and seven years at Cornell University and Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York. Returning to Brussels in 1953, he joined the Institut Jules Bordet, then focused on surgery and radiotherapy. There, he established the first medical oncology service, with the aim of creating a comprehensive cancer center. In 1962, he co-founded the European Group for Anticancer Chemotherapy (GECA), which later became the European Organization for Research and Treatment of Cancer (EORTC).

He was instrumental in promoting collaboration between physicians and statisticians in the design of clinical research protocols, introducing the concept of randomized trials to Europe. Maintaining his US connections, Tagnon established the EORTC Data Center in Brussels in 1974 to support the organization's research activities with infrastructure and statistical analysis. He also founded and edited the European Journal of Cancer from 1965 to 1989. He passed away in 2000.