Hans van Houwelingen and the Art of Summing up

Abstract Some personal remarks about Hans van Houwelingen's approach to biostatistics in general are followed by a discussion of his article with Koos Zwinderman and Theo Stijnen outlining a bivariate approach to meta‐analysis. It is concluded that this is more radical than many may realise in that it permits inter‐trial information to be recovered. This has some advantages but in theory opens the door to bias. It is concluded that in practice the size of this bias is likely to be small. I end with some further personal remarks to Hans.