MEDIA RELEASE - 26 September 2005
CSIRO statisticians confirm: It’s been 75 years!
This week CSIRO celebrates 75 years since its first foray into
statistics - a branch of mathematics that revolutionised agricultural
science and promises new insights to biotechnology.
CSIRO’s first statistician, Frances Elizabeth ‘Betty’ Allan, was a
gifted mathematician who trained in England with the pioneers of modern
statistics.
She was appointed on 29 September 1930 to apply statistical methods to
agricultural research at the then-CSIR Division of Plant Industry in
Canberra.
Dr Murray Cameron, Chief of CSIRO Mathematical and Information Sciences
said that CSIRO owed Betty Allan an enormous debt.
“Her statistical work pushed CSIR’s agricultural science to new heights
- training scientists, designing reliable experiments and extracting
important information,” Dr Cameron said.
“Her work helped Australia’s farming industry which, at the time, was
the powerhouse of the nation.”
Ms Allan’s projects included control of oriental peach moths and
blowflies, work on plant diseases and noxious weeds, and studies of the
effects of supplements on sheep.
Her research found new ways to compensate for missing data in
agricultural field trials, for example if rabbits ate the plants in one of
the experimental plots.
The techniques Ms Allan used are now commonplace in agriculture and the
leading edge for both statistics and agriculture is biotechnology.
Dr Cameron said biotechnology was a challenging area for data analysis.
“New statistical approaches and powerful computers allow us to do
things like find the few genes among tens of thousands that could make
farmed salmon resistant to disease”, he said.
A far cry from today’s technology, Betty Allan’s number crunching in
the 1930s was done by mechanical calculators and people were employed as
‘computers’ to operate them.
CSIRO has made a special website about the anniversary at
www.cmis.csiro.au/stats75
and is paying tribute to Betty Allan’s legacy at a dinner in Canberra on
September 27.
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Images are available to accompany this media release.
More information:
Dr Murray Cameron, CSIRO Mathematical and Information Sciences +61 2
9325 3203, 0419 217 324 murray.cameron@csiro.au
Media Assistance:
Andrea Mettenmeyer, CSIRO Mathematical and Information Sciences 02 6216
7157, 0415 199 434 andrea.mettenmeyer@csiro.au
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