摘要：
As compared with many scientific disciplines, biostatistics is a quite relatively new applied science and has a very bright future in career. The main purpose of this talk is to introduce students the useful and important roles biostatistics plays in scientific research. This talk will include many real examples, including AIDS investigations in early phases when the cause of HIV was not recognized or understood, the major concern based on a surveillance system to monitor epidemics due to the time lag of case reporting, the limitations in using surveillance data to study the effectiveness of safety belt usage in automobile crashes, the limitation of commonly-used indirectly- and directly-adjusted rates in targeting hot areas, the quantification of influenza impacts over years, the small area estimation problem, the basic concept of confounding variables, the interim analysis and the bias of noncompliance in randomized clinical trials.