1917 to 1919, Pearl was the Chief of the Statistical Division of the United States Food Administration. In 1918, Pearl developed a department of laboratory statistics when he was recruited by Johns Hopkins University to be the Professor of Biometry and Vital Statistics. In 1920 he was elected as a Fellow of the American Statistical Association, which he also served as president. Wilson's attack In 1929, Pearl's friend William Morton Wheeler was about to retire as the Dean of the Bussey Institution at Harvard University. At this time, there were plans to alter the current biological departments and create a field of human biology at Harvard. Due to his connections at Harvard, Pearl was mentioned as a possible candidate to succeed Wheeler and had many supporters there. However, Edwin Bidwell Wilson, a Harvard mathematician, was a critic of Pearl and did not believe he was fit for this position. Wilson believed that great detail and attention should be used when dealing with the math of biological data and thought that Pearl had been messy with his handling and reasoning of math in the field of biology. Wilson's first issue with Pearl was his study of population growth in the 1920s. Pearl stated that he discovered the law of population that represented an S-shaped curve of growth, but Wilson thought that his data was insufficient and did not support this assertion. Despite his criticism of Pearl, in 1925, Wilson reached out to Pearl for help on his cancer research. Pearl was unaware of Wilson's criticism of him at the time. He did not help Wilson because he thought that he did not have a sufficient understanding of the biological and medical fields, which further ignited Wilson's distaste of Pearl. In 1929, Pearl conducted research on the correlation between tuberculosis and cancer and published a paper that claimed that there is a negative correlation. This research had mistakes in its data analysis, so Wilson saw this study as an opportunity to attack Pearl and prevent him from becoming the new dean. Wilson denounced Pearl's use of mathematics in the cancer study to different departments at Harvard and published about it as well. His efforts paid off as the Board of Overseers at Harvard rejected Pearl's nomination by a vote of ten to nine. Pearl continued his scientific pursuits at Hopkins until his death. Eugenics, medicine, and politics Pearl was a eugenicist who