Perspectives in Biology and Medicine

RONALD A. FISHER—CHANCE ENCOUNTERS GEORGE V. MANN* While I never met Ronald A. Fisher, the renowned British statistician and scientist, I did hear him lecture at Harvard; and by a series of coincidences, I have encountered his family in strange places. Fisher died in Australia in 1962. We have had time enough to appreciate the importance of his work and to ponder what unusual conjunction of circumstances led to such a genius. Fisher was born into a prosperous family of London merchants in 1890. For three generations, his people had lived well and could afford to move to Hampstead Heath or to distant lands. His uncle, Alfred Heath, died after becoming first sheriff then the judge in Rawlings, Wyoming. There was no presentiment in his middle-class forebears that a mathematical genius would arise from the family. But the first requirement of genius was met—a conjunction of genetic attributes. Consistent with his well-placed origins, Fisher was educated at Harrow, and Cambridge. There he was found to have exceptional abilities, and these were fostered. Thus the second requirement for genius was met, a disciplined schooling and leisure to read and learn and think. While those favorable circumstances rested on the backs of 100 million colonial peons, the system did produce genius. The third condition of Fisher's genius was an intellectual opportunity, and the one he seized was the conflict in 1910 between genetics and biometry. William Bateson and Karl Pearson were feuding endlessly over the tactics for interpreting and applying to human affairs the hypotheses of Mendel and Darwin. Fisher saw that the solution would come from applying mathematical methods to biological events. In the words of his biographer daughter, Joan Fisher Box, "He laid the foundations , coined the language, and developed the methodology of modern biometry" [I]. Fisher was recruited in 1919 to the Rothamsted Experimental Station 25 miles north of London. There he developed his methods of variance ?Department of Biochemistry, School of Medicine, Vanderbilt University, Nashville, Tennessee 37232.© 1982 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved 0031-5982/82/2502-027l$01.00 316 I George V. Mann · RonaldA. Fisher analysis while sorting out the systematic records ofcrop yields produced in the field called Broadbalk which had been laid out in comparable plots by Lawes and Gilbert in the 1850s. Fisher was also refining the mathematics of Gossett's (Student) ¿-test, and in 1935 he published his classic, The Design of Experiments [2], which has profoundly influenced experimental method. The Fishers lost their second child Katie as an infant. The couple were to produce eight children, two boys and six girls. The household, first at Harpenden and then at Cambridge, was a mixture of mouse colonies, apiary, goats, pigs, snails, and miscellaneous genetic trials which the professor was constantly carrying on with the children's assistance. Fisher was a widely read, inquisitive, impetuous, demanding, myopic genius. He fascinated and dismayed his family and associates, often in rapid succession. When the first woman hadjoined the staff at Rothamsted in 1906, the Old Boys there decided that an afternoon tea was necessary for this feminine addition. A four o'clock tea became an institution. One afternoon not long after Fisher arrived, he drew a cup of tea for Dr. Muriel Bristol, an algologist on the staff. She declined, saying that she preferred tea with the milk added to the cup first. Fisher scoffed at this, saying, "Oh, surely that is nonsense, you cannot tell the difference." But Bristol insisted she could, and the staff urged Fisher to conduct a trial. He designed a little experiment, helped by Dr. William A. Roach, an agricultural chemist on the staff. The test showed the lady could indeed taste the difference between tea with milk added first and tea with milk added last. The test led Fisher to begin developing systematic methods for the design of clinical trials, culminating in 1935 in his book. In 1965, while serving on the Human Ecology Study Section of the U.S. Department of Health, Education, and Welfare, we were asked to review an application from South Africa. This was a proposal by Dr. Elizabeth Rose of East London who wished to determine...