Lawrence Garfinkel, 88, a statistician who overcame his lack of a doctoral degree and training in oncology to become one of the driving forces in demonstrating that smoking causes lung cancer, died of cardiovascular disease Jan. 21 in Seattle.

Mr. Garfinkel oversaw the training of thousands of volunteers for the American Cancer Society and helped conduct two of the largest epidemiological studies, enrolling more than 2.2 million men and women. Those studies, along with the British Doctors' Study, played key roles in formulating the landmark 1964 surgeon general's report on smoking and health.

"Few individuals have contributed as much to our present-day knowledge about the disease consequences of smoking," said Dr. Richard D. Klausner, then head of the National Cancer Institute, in 1989 upon Mr. Garfinkel's retirement from the society.

Before 1930, lung cancer was a rare disease never encountered by most physicians. But World War I had turned many American men into smokers, and the aftermath began to become apparent in the 1940s. By 1950, four separate retrospective studies had linked smoking to the disease.

In 1951, British researchers enrolled 40,000 physicians in a study that lasted more than 40 years. At the same time, the cancer society's Dr. E. Cuyler Hammond and Dr. Daniel Horn enrolled 187,783 white men in nine states in a similar study.

Mr. Garfinkel, who had joined the society as a statistician in 1947, was directly responsible for the fieldwork in the study, training thousands of volunteers who collected the data. The two studies clearly showed that lung cancer was a direct result of smoking, but many refused to accept the findings.