Obituary: Luc Raymond (1935 – 2018)

Luc Raymond passed away in Geneva on October 14.

A statistician close to his forties, in 1972 Dr Raymond established the Geneva Cancer Registry, of which he has been in charge until his retirement in 2001. The Geneva Registry was the first in its country and among the first in Southern Europe.

Since the planning of that initiative, Luc has been conscious of the uncommon opportunity in his hands. A small Registry in a rich city and country, with a good support from the stakeholders, the Hospital and the University, and operating in an advanced medical and oncological milieu. Those conditions were implying a limited routine workload from one side, and plenty of opportunities for epidemiological research and for cooperation with the clinicians from the other side. Luc has been smartly able to fully exploit those advantages: the Geneva Registry assured a timely production of almost perfect incidence data, with rich clinical details; promoted the use of registration data for the first case-control study on the evaluation of the impact of the Pap smear; engaged in the contribution to the first large European multicentre study on the aetiology of laryngeal and hypopharyngeal cancer.

In 1976 Luc Raymond established, with Enrico Anglesio and Albert Tuyns, the GRELL Group, a scientific cenacle devoted to supporting the training and the cooperation among the registries in Latin-speaking countries. He has been also among the founders of the Swiss Association of Cancer Registries, the NICER.

Raymond served the International Association of Cancer Registries in several roles, including representing the Association as an observer at the WHO Assembly and contributing as Editor of the VII volume of Cancer Incidence in Five Continents. Luc has been awarded the IACR Honorary Membership in 1996.

With Jacques Estève and Ellen Benhamou, Luc Raymond authored a handbook (Statistical methods in Cancer research. Vol IV. Descriptive epidemiology. IARC Sci Publ. 1994) that has been among the references in the discipline for at least a generation of epidemiologists and registrars.

One of the last international contributions of Luc Raymond has been to chair the Jury of the Enrico Anglesio Prize from 2006 to 2009.

Luc is survived by his wife Heidi, a musician, well known by the colleagues that used to meet the couple for conferences and meetings in Geneva and abroad.

Roberto Zanetti and Christine Bouchardy Magnin