Statistics, as the science of numbers, records, and classifications without further explanations and annoying causal chains, had been closely intertwined with genetics from an early stage. Eugenics (and therefore genetics, as a descendant of eugenics) would be unthinkable without the distributions, statistical curves, and averages of Galton. A good question is also how the concept of a gene could even stand without statistics. What meaning would a diagnosis of the sort “if you have this mutation in the such gene, then you may develop disease A; but you may not” have? When this “may” is accompanied by a probability number, how much more convincing does it automatically become?
Apart from genetics, statistics also played a significant role in the birth of the other pole of the bioinformatics paradigm, that of informatics. Long before Turing, von Neumann, and the need for computational power by capitalist countries during and after World War II, there was Babbage at the beginning of the 19th century. Babbage is known for his famous computing machines, which, however, never actually functioned in practice. This step was taken by the Swedish inventor P.G. Scheutz, who in 1843 managed to develop a fully operational model. Scheutz’s machine, after making the rounds at exhibitions of the time, was eventually purchased by both the American and British governments. The purpose of this machine was to calculate tables of numbers with high accuracy. Many numbers. That could concern entire populations.
Facing such a sight, William Farr, an epidemiologist and employee of the British Registry Office, a fervent supporter of using statistics to record the British population, could not remain unmoved. He had a mechanic of his steal the plans of the Scheutz machine so that he could have one for his own purposes. The next step in the history of computers is more well-known. It was Hollerith in the U.S.A. who used machines with punched cards, again for recording purposes: for the American census of 1890. The speed with which Hollerith’s machines managed to finish processing all the statistical data of the census proved impressive. Hollerith’s company would later evolve into the well-known IBM…