Commentary on Professor Austin Bradford Hill's Alfred Watson Memorial Lecture.

As availability of health care data for research opens up new frontiers in medical statistics, keeping a focus on the science behind the data is more important than ever to promote sound research and protect the validity of research results. Though the electronic databases currently amassed for research far exceed in scale and scope the observational research Professor Hill likely conceived of, his guidance to statisticians to ground our work in the biological and medical processes behind the data remains salient across the decades.