ABSTRACT
One of the pleasures of working as an applied statistician is the awareness it brings of the wide diversity of scientific fields to which our profession contributes critical concepts and methods. My own awareness was enhanced by accepting the invitation from the editors of JASA to serve as guest editor for this section of vignettes celebrating the significant contributions made by statisticians to the life and medical sciences in the 20th century. The goal of the project was not an encyclopedic catalog of all the major developments, but rather a sampling of some of the most interesting work. Of the 12 vignettes, 10 focus on particular areas of application: environmetrics, wildlife populations, animal breeding, human fertility, toxicology, medical diagnosis, clinical trials, environmental epidemiology, statistical genetics, and molecular biology. The two vignettes that begin the series focus more on methods that have had, or promise to have, impact across a range of subject matter areas: survival analysis and causal analysis.
