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Redcliffe N. Salaman (12 September 1874-12 June 1955) was a British botanist.

Education

Salaman was educated at St Paul's School, London initially studying Classics but due to the dull teaching methods he switched to studying science and later became head boy of the Science Side of the school. He obtained a scholarship at Trinity Hall, Cambridge in 1893 and graduated with a first class degree in Natural Sciences in 1896 having studied Physiology, Zoology and Chemistry. He was tutored and advised by the physiologist W. H. Gaskell who later became a good friend of Salaman. He moved to the London Hospital in 1896 to study medicine and remained there until he qualified in 1904.

Career

Prior to qualifying as a doctor Salaman was Director of the Pathological Institute at the London Hospital and he held this post until 1903 when he developed tuberculosis. It took him over two years to recover from the illness, changing the course of his entire life. He purchased a house in Barley, Hertfordshire and because he could not return to practicing medicine began experimenting in genetics under the guidance of his friend William Bateson. After several failed experiments with a range of animals, Salaman decided to experiment with potatoes after seeking advice from his gardener. Later in his career, commenting on his decision to study potatoes Salaman noted that he had "embarked on an enterprise which, after forty years, leaves more questions unsolved than were thought at that time to exist. Whether it was mere luck, or whether the potato and I were destined for life partnership, I do not know, but from that moment my course was set, and I became ever more involved in problems associated directly or indirectly with a plant with which I had no particular affinity, gustatory or romantic".

Working in his private garden, he initially set out to cross two potato varieties and establish which traits were dominant and recessive in a similar manner to Gregor Mendel's work on peas, but he soon digressed into other areas. In 1908 he decided to include wild potatoes in his experiments and requested that Kew Gardens provide him with Solanum maglia. Kew's stocks had been incorrectly labelled however and Salaman was sent Solanum edinense instead. In 1909 Salaman grew forty self-fertilised crosses of S. edinense and found that seven lines were resistant to late blight (Phytophthora infestans). Convinced that resistance to late blight existed in wild species he began to study other species and found that Solanum demissum was also resistant to blight. Salaman started to cross S. demissum with domesticated varieties of potato in 1911 to produce high yielding lines that were also resistant to late blight. By 1914 he had successfully created hybrids and in 1926 he remarked that he had produced varieties with "reasonably good economic characteristics which, no matter what their maturity, appeared to be immune to late blight. Salaman was the first to discover it was possible to breed for resistance to late blight from wild potatoes and S. demissum was still used as a source of resistance in the 1950s. In The Untold History of the Potato, John Reader called Salaman's discovery "an important breakthrough, offering real promise ... that it was possible to breed blight-resistant potato varieties". In 1987 it was thought that half of the potato varieties cultivated in Europe contained genes from S. demissum.

His research on potatoes was disrupted by the outbreak of the First World War during which Salaman joined the Royal Army Medical Corps and served in Palestine.

Publications

Salaman authored The history and social influence of the potato first published in 1949 and later revised and republished under the guidance of Jack Hawkes in 1987. The historian Eric Hobsbawm referred to the work as "that magnificent monument of scholarship and humanity".

References

1. ^ Attention: This template ({{cite doi}}) is deprecated. To cite the publication identified by doi:10.1098/rsbm.1955.0017, please use {{cite journal}} (if it was published in a bona fide academic journal, otherwise {{cite report}} with |doi=10.1098/rsbm.1955.0017 instead.
2. ^ John Reader (2009). The Untold History of the Potato. Vintage. pp. 221–225. ISBN 978-0-09-947479-1.
3. ^ Attention: This template ({{cite doi}}) is deprecated. To cite the publication identified by doi:10.2307/2806972, please use {{cite journal}} (if it was published in a bona fide academic journal, otherwise {{cite report}} with |doi=10.2307/2806972 instead.
4. Paolo Palladino. "Salaman, Redcliffe Nathan (1874–1955), geneticist and Jewish activist". Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.
5. Redcliffe N. Salaman (21 November 1985). The History and Social Influence of the Potato. Cambridge University Press. pp. 688–. ISBN 978-0-521-31623-1.

• 1874 births
• 1955 deaths
• English botanists
• Alumni of Trinity Hall, Cambridge