Address of the President Lord Adrian, O.M., at the Anniversary Meeting, 30 November 1955

The Copley Medal is awarded to Sir Ronald Fisher, F. R. S. The rise of quantitative biology, which has been so noteworthy a feature of this century and especially of the past thirty years or so, has been due above all to the work of R. A. Fisher. The variability of living things posed problems and raised difficulties in the interpretation of experimental and observational data which made necessary something beyond the methods of the physical sciences. They required in fact a new approach to inductive inference, and one which would provide means of drawing conclusions of assessable reliability from variable material often available only in small samples. It is to Fisher’s combination of mathematical skill and biological insight that we owe the developments, both theoretical and practical, which have done so much towards solving this problem and so making biologists of virtually every kind quantitative in their experiments, their analysis, and, most important of all, their thought. Faced with the agronomical problems of Rothamsted, whose staff he joined in 1919, Fisher began the remarkable series of statistical investigations which gave us the techniques described in Statistical methods , the tabular matter of Statistical tables (published with F. Yates) for facilitating their use, and the philosophy of Design of experiments by which they may be understood, appreciated and extended. The outcome has not merely stood the test of time in those branches of biology with which he was immediately concerned, but has had an ever-widening influence which now extends even beyond the borders of biology itself. And in building the new biometry, Fisher has given especially to the younger biologists a confidence and quantitative outlook whose full effects we have still to see.