I'm currently enjoying Joan Fisher Box's biography of her dad, the statistician R.A. Fisher. It's impossible to study stats without getting to know something about him, but the full story is even more interesting. One surprise for modern readers is his activity in the field of eugenics. At this point we all shuffle nervously, because as modern liberal citizens we don't talk about that embarrassing stuff any more. Fisher talked about it a lot though. He served on a Royal Commission in the early 30s on the problem of the number of mental patients, which much exercised the government of the day. Their final report suggested a program of sterilisation (albeit voluntary). That was about as close as we got in this country to fully fledged eugenic laws. It was ignored by the government and that was that.
Reading the wikipedia article on eugenics filled in some fascinating detail. I liked the Nazi justification of their eugenic policies by the great success that many US states were already having with their own version.
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