One of them was George Box, a young sergeant from Gravesend who had left school aged 16 in 1936 to work as an assistant to a chemist in a sewage plant. This background brought him to Porton Down, where the army was studying the effects of poisons such as mustard gas. Sergeant Box knew enough to tell his superiors that they needed a statistician—and that he had once tried to read a book by someone...