Dorfman's Group Testing

The estimable Xi'an's OG https://xianblog.wordpress.com/2020/04/09/dorfmans-group-testing/has recently pointed out that the group testing idea that has been recently put forward for Covid-19 appears as Problem IX.9.26 in Feller attributed to the late Robert Dorfman.  This problem is notable for being one of the easier problems in Feller, suitable for a serious undergraduate course and particularly apt in the present circumstances.  Dorfman's application was testing GI's for syphilis before sending them abroad into WWII.  Since I have already besmirched the reputation of Dorfman in a previous post https://davoidofmeaning.blogspot.com/search?q=dorfman it seems only fair that I recant a bit and acknowledge that this group testing idea was really quite clever and practically quite important.  I won't spoil the problem by revealing the answer, but I'll provide a snapshot of it here for those unlucky enough not to have a copy of Feller handy.  (Mine has been inherited by a terrific ex grad student who was kind enough to send me a scan.)

Dawn of the δ-method

Several years ago my colleague Steve Portnoy wrote a letter to the editor of the American Statistician
in response to an article that they had published called Who invented the δ-method?  The article
claimed priority for Robert Dorfman on the basis of an article appearing in 1938 called "A Note
on the δ-method for Finding Variance Formulae" published in the Biometric Bulletin.  Portnoy
pointed out that Joe Doob had written about the δ-method in a 1935 Annals paper titled,  "On the
limiting distribution of certain statistics" referring to it as the "well-known δ-method" and citing
prior work by T.L. Kelley and Sewell Wright, and noting rather modestly that his Theorem 1
"shows an interpretation which can be given to the results obtained by this method."  It seems
plausible that Doob's is the first formal justification for the method, and it is puzzling to put it
euphemistically  that Dorfman made no mention of Doob's article.  Perhaps this oversight can be
forgiven as a juvenile mistake since the Dorfman paper was written shortly after he finished his
undergraduate studies at Columbia, while working at the Worcester State Hospital, pictured above.
This august institution was reputed to be the first asylum for the insane in New England, and also happened to be the publisher of the Biometric Bulletin.  Dorfman later went on to earn a Phd at Berkeley, and taught at Harvard where hecoauthored an influential book about linear programming with Paul Samuelson and Robert Solow.