N. W. Simmonds

Dr Norman Willison Simmonds FRSE FIB FLS (5 December 1922–24 January 2002) was a 20th-century British botanist. He was a world authority on the cultivation of bananas. He was the first non-American to be awarded the Bronx-based Society for Economic Botany's Distinguished Economic Botanist Award.[1]

Life

He was born in Bedford on 5 December 1922 the son of a civil servant. He was educated at Whitgift School. He won a scholarship to study natural sciences at the University of Cambridge, and then won a further scholarship to study at the Imperial College of Tropical Agriculture on the island of Trinidad. In 1945 the college invited him to begin lecturing in botany. He was later Senior Cytogeneticist at the Banana Research Section on the island. During this time he collected bana samples in East Africa in 1948 and further samples in Asia and Malaysia in 1954/5.[1]

He left Trinidad in 1959 to take on a role at the Plant Breeding Station at Pentlandfield near Edinburgh. There he rose to be Director.

The University of Cambridge awarded him with a doctorate (DSc) in 1966.

In 1970 he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh. His proposers were Sir David Lowe, Sir Stephen John Watson, Hugh Paterson Donald and Noel Farnie Robertson.[2]

In 1975 he was made an Honorary Professor of the University of Edinburgh

He died in Edinburgh on 24 January 2002.

Publications
  • Taxonomy and Origins of the Cultivated Banana (1955)
  • Bananas (1959)
  • Variability in Crop Plants (1962)
  • Evolution of Bananas (1962)
  • Principles of Crop Improvement (1979); 2nd edition with coauthor J. Smartt (1999)[3]
  • Plant Breeding: The State of the Art (1983)
  • Early Scottish Angling Literature (1997)

The standard author abbreviation N.W.Simmonds is used to indicate this person as the author when citing a botanical name.[4]

References
  1. "Norman Simmonds". The banana knowledge platform of the ProMusa network. Retrieved 2019-06-02.
  2. Biographical Index of Former Fellows of the Royal Society of Edinburgh 1783–2002 (PDF). The Royal Society of Edinburgh. July 2006. ISBN 0 902 198 84 X. Archived from the original (PDF) on 2016-03-04. Retrieved 2018-06-27.
  3. Clement, Charles R. (October 2000). "Review of Principles of Crop Improvement, 2nd ed., by N. W. Simmonds and J. Smartt". BioScience. 50 (10): 912–914. doi:10.1641/0006-3568(2000)050[0912:CSOSAP]2.0.CO;2.
  4. IPNI.  N.W.Simmonds.
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