Rowland Biffen
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Sir Rowland Harry Biffen
British geneticist and plant breeder (1894–1949)
Biffen was born in Cheltenham and, after graduating in natural sciences from Cambridge in 1896, joined a team investigating rubber production in Mexico, the West Indies, and Brazil. On his return he was appointed lecturer in botany at Cambridge and patented a method for handling rubber latex.
Biffen was inclined more toward applied than pure botany and joined the Cambridge School of Agriculture shortly after its foundation in 1899. He began conducting cereal trials in order to select improved types, and when Gregor Mendel's laws of inheritance were rediscovered in 1900, he realized immediately that they could be applied to improving plant-breeding methods. Biffen speculated that physiological as well as morphological traits would prove to be inherited in Mendelian ratios, and in 1905 demonstrated that this was true for resistance to yellow rust, a fungal disease of wheat.
Little Joss and Yeoman, two wheat varieties bred by Biffen, were unequaled for many years. In 1912 Biffen became director of the Plant Breeding Institute at Trumpington, a newly formed research center established by the government to promote Biffen's work and the application of scientific principles to plant breeding. Biffen was also professor of agricultural botany at the university from 1908 to 1931 and was instrumental in setting up the National Institute of Agricultural Botany at Cambridge. He was knighted for his services to agriculture in 1925.
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Rowland Biffen
Sir Rowland Harry Biffen FRS[1] (28 May 1874 in Cheltenham - 12 July 1949)[2] was a British botanist, mycologist, and geneticist.
He graduated from Emmanuel College, Cambridge in 1898 and initially became a university demonstrator, researching fungi under Harry Marshall Ward. He published a number of papers on mycology between 1898 and 1902 and subsequently became president of the British Mycological Society in 1905 and again in 1930.[3]
In 1908, Biffen was appointed the first professor of agricultural botany at Cambridge, a post he held till 1931. He won the Royal Society's Darwin Medal in 1920. Biffen was the first director of the John Innes Centre's Plant Breeding Institute, and was an early proponent of using genetics to improve crop plants.[4] Early in his career he traveled to the Americas to study rubber, but his primary research plant was wheat. He developed a variety called Yeomen wheat.
He was knighted in 1935. He died in Cambridge. He had married Mary Hemus in 1899.
References
- ^ Engledow, F. L. (1950). "Rowland Harry Biffen. 1874-1949". Obituary Notices of Fellows of the Royal Society 7 (19): 9–9. doi:10.1098/rsbm.1950.0002.
- ^ "List of Fellows of the Royal Society 1660 – 2007 A - J: A complete listing of all Fellows and Foreign Members since the foundation of the Society" (PDF). The Royal Society. July 2007. Archived from the original on 2007-09-27. http://web.archive.org/web/20070927215743/http://www.royalsoc.ac.uk/downloaddoc.asp?id=4275. Retrieved 2007-06-23.
- ^ Ainsworth, G.C. (1996). Brief biographies of British mycologists. Stourbridge: British Mycological Society
- ^ Parascandola, M (April 1, 2004). "Book Review Plants, patients and the historian: (re)membering in the age of genetic engineering". Medical History (Wellcome Institute of the History of Medicine) 48 (2).
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