Salsburg, D. 2001.
``
The Lady Tasting Tea
-- How statistics revolutionized science
in the twentieth century''.
Owl Book.
Chapter 8. The dose that kills
(continuation)
Bliss in Soviet Lenningrad during
the Stalin terrors
Bliss contacted R.A. Fihser, who had just taken a
new position in London. Fisher offered to put him up
and give him some laboratory facilities, but he did not
have a job for him and could not pay the American
entomologist. Bliss went to England anyway. He lived
with Fisher and his family for a few months. Together,
he and Fisher refined the methodology of probit analysis.
Fisher found some errors in his mathematics and suggested
modifications that made the resulting statistics more
efficient. Bliss published a new paper, making use of
Fisher's suggestions, and Fisher incorporated the
necessary tables in a new edition of the book of
statistical tables he had written in conjunction with
Frank Yates.
After less than a year in England, Fisher found Bliss
a job. It was at the Leningrad Plant Institute in the
Soviet Union. Imagine tall, thin, Midwestern, middle-
American, apolitical Chester Bliss, who was never able
to learn a second language, crossing Europe by train
with a small suitcase containing his only clothes, and
arriving at the station in Leningrad just as the ruthless
Soviet dicatator, Salin, was beginning his bloody purges
of both major and minor goverment officials.
Soon after Bliss arrived, the boss of the man who had
hired him was called to Moscow -- and was never seen
again. A month later, the man who had hired Bliss was
called to Moscow -- and ``committed suicide'' on the way
back. The man in charge of the laboratory next to Bliss's
left hastily one day and escaped Russia by sneaking
across the Latvian border.