NCI Cancer Researcher Robert W. Miller, 84

Robert W. Miller, 84, a leading researcher at the National Cancer Institute who investigated the causes of childhood cancer for decades, died Feb. 23 of colon cancer at his home in Bethesda.

Dr. Miller spent several years in Japan studying survivors of the 1945 U.S. atomic bomb attack on Hiroshima, which hastened the end of World War II. He learned that children exposed to radiation in their mothers' wombs had a far greater frequency of birth defects than expected.

Throughout his long career, which continued until his death, Dr. Miller linked several forms of childhood cancer to genetic and environmental causes. His studies of eye cancer, kidney tumors and forms of cancer occurring repeatedly in families helped open promising fields of research in molecular and cellular biology.

Trained as a physician and an epidemiologist, Dr. Miller could conduct both clinical examinations of patients and comprehensive studies of thousands of people in a wider population. His dual specialties allowed him to observe previously unnoticed phenomena. He enjoyed quoting the baseball sage Yogi Berra, who once said, "You can learn a lot by watching."

In the early 1980s, Dr. Miller led a study for the cancer institute in which researchers reviewed death certificates issued from 1950 to 1979. He concluded that modern medical treatments, some of which could be traced to his research, significantly reduced the likelihood of death among children with cancer.

"When you're curing childhood cancer, you're giving a person many more years of life than if you cured an elderly person," he said in 1984.

"In essence," he added, "this study indicates that there are 17,000 people who are alive today that wouldn't have been expected to survive 30 years ago."

Robert Warwick Miller was born in New York City. He received an undergraduate degree and, in 1946, a medical degree, both from the University of Pennsylvania.

Called into the Army during the Korean War, he received a fellowship in radiation biology at the University of Rochester. After initial studies at Duke and Case Western Reserve universities, he arrived in Hiroshima in November 1953 to work for the Atomic Bomb Casualty Commission, sponsored by the National Academy of Sciences.

In his 18 months in Japan, he examined hundreds of children born in the months after the atomic blast and discovered an unusually high number with small heads and severe mental retardation. He also found an increased occurrence of leukemia and cancers of the respiratory tract.

In an autobiographical essay written six years ago, Dr. Miller noted that Joe DiMaggio and Marilyn Monroe stopped at the Hiroshima research facility during their honeymoon in 1954. One of DiMaggio's teammates, Bobby Brown, was a Stanford-trained doctor who had a friend working there.

Dr. Miller came to Washington in 1955 to continue his work at the National Academy of Sciences. Two years later, he began studies toward a doctorate in public health. He then returned to Japan, staying from 1958 to 1960, and received his doctorate from the University of Michigan the next year. He then joined the National Cancer Institute.

He was chief of the epidemiology branch from 1961 to 1974 and chief of the clinical epidemiology branch from 1975 to 1994. For the past 12 years, he was scientist emeritus at the institute. He lectured at the Harvard School of Public Health from 1963 to 1970 and was a clinical professor of pediatrics at Georgetown University from 1963 to 1983.

Joseph F. Fraumeni Jr., a colleague at the National Cancer Institute, said Dr. Miller was known for his sense of humor, his storytelling and his clear, concise writing style.

When interviewing researchers for positions in Japan, Dr. Miller wrote in his essay, he found a question that would predict whether an interviewee would adapt to Japanese life: "Do you like the New Yorker magazine?" Those who did, he concluded, were good prospects.

In the late 1950s, Dr. Miller published a short "Talk of the Town" article in the New Yorker about a woman donating her body to science. He was paid $25.

Survivors include his wife of 51 years, Haruko "Holly" Miller of Bethesda.