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History of the Botany Department
Botany has had a long and rich tradition at the University of Wisconsin. S. P. Lathrop delivered the first course in "Botany and Philosophy" to the senior class of 1854, soon after the founding of the University. In those early days, botany was taught by the "Professor of Chemistry and Natural History." Botany later evolved as part of a composite department - Agriculture and Botany - and finally as the Department of Botany in the College of Letters and Science.
The University Herbarium was started even before there was a Botany Department, when the Regents first began their meetings. In 1849, a civic-minded civil engineer and renowned scientist, Increase A. Lapham, made the first contribution by donating his own collection. This original collection, however, was destroyed in the Science Hall fire of 1884. A new herbarium was immediately started, and subsequently much enriched by contributions of Botany Department members and other interested Wisconsinites. Today the University of Wisconsin Herbarium is among the largest in the country, and is an important center for research on the systematics of temperate and tropical plants, especially of the New World.
In 1885, William Trelease had the distinction of being named the first Professor of Botany at the University of Wisconsin. Other early prominent members of the department included Arthur B. Seymour, who wrote the famous Seymour Host Index of the Fungi in North America; Charles R. Barnes, nationally recognized authority on the taxonomy of mosses; and Robert A. Harper, under whose tutelage the department expanded and a graduate program was begun.
In the first half of the 20th Century, faculty notables included Charles E. Allen, the discoverer of sex chromosomes in plants; Gilbert M. Smith, renowned for his work on freshwater algae of the United States and one of the original authors of the "Wisconsin" text; Harold W. Rickett, author of many books on American wildflowers; and George S. Bryan, noted for his silver-tongued oratory in general botany lectures. Other outstanding botanists of this period were Benjamin M. Duggar, co-discoverer of aureomycin, and Norman C. Fassett, whose Spring Flora of Wisconsin has been revised by Mrs. Olive Thomson and is still sold in most Wisconsin bookstores.
The noted ecologist John T. Curtis was active in the department from the 1930s to the 1950s. UW Botany Department leadership in ecological studies and environmental advocacy was spearheaded by John T. Curtis with publication in 1959 of his great monograph, "The Vegetation of Wisconsin," and has continued vigorously since then by the outstanding ecologists and taxonomists in the department. He was one of the originators of the continuum concept and, with Aldo Leopold and others, was instrumental in developing the UW Arboretum and its unique collection of restored plant communities.
The development, during WW II and thereafter, of strains of Penicillium yielding far higher levels of penicillin than had previously been available. These strains, developed by J. F. Stauffer and M. P. Backus through UV irradiation of fungal spores, were distributed worldwide and resulted in saving countless numbers of lives.
Folke Skoog and his students discovered a major new class of plant hormones, the cytokinins, key regulators of plant growth and development - leading to far-reaching new insights and practical applications. Professor Emeritus Eldon H. Newcomb, a noted worker on plant ultrastructure and function, is a member of the National Academy of Sciences.
Both the Biological Core Curriculum ("Biocore") and the Biotron at the UW-Madison campus resulted from the initiative and leadership provided by members of the Botany department.
Today, the Department of Botany consists of eighteen faculty members and approximately forty-five graduate students. The Department ranks, as it has for many years, among the top five departments of botany in the country, according to the American Council on Education Rating of Graduate Program Quality. The University of Wisconsin has ranked among the top ten institutes for graduate research in the country since 1910, and a recent survey placed it among the top half-dozen universities in the country.
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File last updated:
August 10, 2005 |