Item GS/8/9/2/27 - Photograph of scientists at the International Congress of Genetics, Stockholm including Erich Tschermak and R A Fisher.

Extent: 2 copies

Black and white photograph of scientists at the International Congress of Genetics, Stockholm. Front row, furthest right: ; 3rd from right: R A Fisher. From a photograph in the hands of Professor Keith James, Deputy Director at Kew Gardens, May 1983.

Admin History: Erich Tschermak, Edler von Seysenegg (15 November 1871 – 11 October 1962) was an Austrian agronomist who developed several new disease-resistant crops, including wheat-rye and oat hybrids. He was a son of the Moravia-born mineralogist Gustav Tschermak von Seysenegg. His maternal grandfather was the famous botanist, Eduard Fenzl, who taught Gregor Mendel botany during his student days in Vienna. He received his doctorate from the University of Halle, Germany, in 1896. Tschermak accepted a teaching position at the University of Agricultural Sciences Vienna in 1901, and became professor there five years later, in 1906. Von Tschermak is one of four men—see also Hugo de Vries, Carl Correns and William Jasper Spillman—who independently rediscovered Gregor Mendel's work on genetics. Von Tschermak published his findings in June, 1900. His works in genetics were largely influenced by his brother Armin von Tschermak-Seysenegg. Sir Ronald Aylmer Fisher (17 February 1890 – 29 July 1962), who published as R. A. Fisher, was an English statistician and biologist who used mathematics to combine Mendelian genetics and natural selection. This helped to create the new Darwinist synthesis of evolution known as the modern evolutionary synthesis. He was also a prominent eugenicist in the early part of his life. He worked at Rothamsted Research for 14 years from 1919, where he developed the analysis of variance (ANOVA) to analyse its immense data from crop experiments since the 1840s, and established his reputation there in the following years as a biostatistician. He is known as one of the three principal founders of population genetics. He outlined Fisher's principle as well as the Fisherian runaway and sexy son hypothesis theories of sexual selection. He also made important contributions to statistics, including the maximum likelihood, fiducial inference, the derivation of various sampling distributions among many others.