A Reporter on the Heart Beat
Back in ’72, when Fischer was challenging Spassky and the Sun-Times city room went chess crazy, we sat down with Thomas J. Moore one night and licked him four games straight. So Moore bought some chess books and boned up on the openings. Over the next six months, during which we played him almost every day after deadline in the Sun-Times cafeteria, we were lucky to cop one game a week.
On the other hand, Moore does not shy from credit when it’s due.
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Pound’s now at the Wall Street Journal. Moore stayed at the Sun-Times for a while, doing some interesting investigative work based on interpreting government computer readouts–“I think I do blaze new trails,” he told us–then joined Knight-Ridder in Washington.
Heart Failure began when Moore found a government computer tape “in which some work had already been done in analyzing mortality rates at hospitals across the country. It had figures on everything from prostate removal to open-heart surgery.”
In 1985, Moore writes, the federal government launched a massive campaign to lower the nation’s cholesterol levels even though the drugs to accomplish this were hazardous, there was no firm correlation between reduced cholesterol and extended life, and among women of most ages and the elderly of both sexes high cholesterol levels and heart attacks had never even been linked statistically.
Such as?
We asked Moore if he wouldn’t mind spelling that, and then asked him what he intends to do next. “The next book is going to be on longevity,” he replied. “I’m going to explore why we have made such excellent progress in expanding human longevity. I think the answer is surprising. It’s certainly not medical care.”
