CHEMISTRY

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-CSIRO 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 CSIRO'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 its Web site and is paying tribute to Betty Allan's legacy at a dinner in Canberra on September 27.