Alice Thorner (1917 – 24 August 2005) was a Latvian-born social scientist and statistician whose main research effort seems to have been partly devoted to the role assigned to women in the Indian society.
A stay in London, partly funded by a doctoral fellowship of her husband,[3] may have been the begin of several long-lasting friendships with Indian social scientists, like P N Haksar and Trivedi who would later greet her on a yearly basis in the country she enjoyed studying [4] and played a key role in a shift towards a more left-wing view of society.
A so-called witchhunt against some scientists that did not entirely reject some ideas described in part of the writings due to a soviet agrarian economist named Alexander V. Chayanov[5] associated to a husband refusal to testify against some friends they met in London[6] lead to several grant losses and was associated to an American passport withdrawal and significantly darkened university career prospects for both.
Charles Bettelheim played a role in presenting the Thorners to the director of studies Louis Dumont[4] at the Sorbonne-based École pratique des hautes études.
A one-year period of illness due to cancer led Daniel Thorner into starting a 1974 world tour alone and his later death seems to have deeply affected Alice.