Rowland Harry Biffen (1874-1949): Agricultural botanist; wheat breeder; member of John Innes Governing Council, 1909-21. FRS 1914. Kt 1925.

Biffen was born in Cheltenham, the son of a school headmaster. He was educated at Cheltenham Grammar School (1883-93) and Emmanuel College, Cambridge which he entered as an Exhibitioner in 1893. He obtained a Double First in the Natural Sciences Tripos in 1896 and was awarded a studentship in botany at Gonville and Caius College in recognition of his outstanding exam results. Between 1897 and 1898 Biffen undertook an expedition to Brazil, Mexico and the West Indies to study rubber. The expedition fired his interest in plantation agriculture. However, Biffen was unable to find an opening in ‘economic botany’ and on his return to Cambridge accepted a Demonstratorship to study mycology with Harry Marshall Ward (1854-1906). Ward, Professor of Botany and now a leader in British mycological circles, had been employed to investigate coffee rust disease in Ceylon (Sri Lanka) in the early 1880s. His influence can be seen in Biffen’s choice of cereal rusts as a research topic when Biffen joined the new Department of Agriculture at Cambridge as Lecturer in Botany in 1899. Bateson’s championing of Mendel’s work in 1900 was to prove a turning point in Biffen’s career.

Biffen was an early recruit to Mendelian genetics and became part of Bateson’s Cambridge circle. Like many of his fellow workers Biffen believed that Mendelism would transform plant breeding from a ‘game of chance’ to an exact science. He began to collect and grow cereal varieties from all over the world for the study of variation and hybridisation. The work resulted in a short paper in the Proceedings of the Cambridge Philosophical Society in 1903; ‘raising improved varieties from the point of view of the farmer and miller, and also to ascertain to what extent Mendel’s laws of inheritance hold for the distinctive characteristics of wheat’. The following year Biffen’s cereal work was to be included as part of Bateson’s 1904 Report to the Royal Society’s Evolution Committee. However, the Report had a difficult passage and Biffen instead published it in the first volume of the Journal of Agricultural Science, which he had helped to found, in 1905. This paper, which argued that morphology of ear, leaf and stem, grain colour and baking quality were all Mendelian characters, secured Biffen’s reputation.

The achievement to which Bateson attached the greatest importance was Biffen’s apparent proof that susceptibility to yellow rust (Puccinia glumarum) was a simple, single-factor Mendelian dominant, and the prospect that this work opened up of uniting plant genetics with plant pathology. A chair in Agricultural Botany was created for Biffen in 1908 which he held until his retirement in 1936. Biffen’s interests were not in theoretical genetics but in the production of new varieties of plants. By 1910 his first triumph, a new rust-resistant wheat variety called ‘Little Joss’ was on the market and for the next forty years was widely grown in Britain. Contemporaries viewed ‘Little Joss’ as a landmark of modern plant breeding and the interest it created stimulated the Board of Agriculture to establish a Plant Breeding Institute as part of the Cambridge University School of Agriculture, with Biffen as its first Director, in 1912.  The new Institute concentrated on improvements to wheat grain quality, and worked within Biffen’s paradigm of combining the genetics and physiology of crops. Biffen continued his association with Bateson after Bateson’s move from Cambridge, as a fellow member of the Genetical Society and as a member of JIHI’s Governing Council.

[Illustrations: include the presentation bowl publicity; ear of wheat photo; poss ‘wheat wizard’ headlines; info. on the Biffen sculpture and poster?]

LINKS:

For biographical details:
http://royalsociety.org/DServe/dserve.exe?dsqIni=Dserve.ini&dsqApp=Archive&dsqCmd=Show.tcl&dsqDb=Persons&dsqPos=0&dsqSearch

For a modern perspective on Biffen’s work on rust resistance:
http://www.biotech-monitor.nl/3302.htm

See also:

F. L. Engledow, ‘Rowland Harry Biffen, 1874-1949, Obituary Notices of Fellows of the Royal Society, 7 (1950): 9-25.

E. J. Russell, A history of agricultural science in Great Britain (London: George Allen, 1966).

The Plant Breeding Institute: 75 years, 1912-1987 (Cambridge: PBI, 1987)
Paolo Palladino, ‘Between Craft and Science: Plant Breeding, Mendelian Genetics, and British Universities, 1900-1920’, Technology and Culture, 34, 2 (1993): 300-323