Life and work of an Indian botanist (1904-1966) of the 20th century

摘要

In an e-mail dated 21 November 2010, P. Balaram said ‘It would be wonderful to have a scholarly, yet personal, biography of your father’. Though it seemed odd to write a biography of one’s father, nonetheless here was an opportunity to review and learn about a discipline of botany that is assuming increasing importance for generating the nextgeneration inter-generic hybrid crops producing high-quality seeds by overcoming incompatibility barriers between parents. Having grown up in P. Maheshwari (hereafter PM) household, I had the fortune of some plant embryology rubbed onto me although I went on to specialize differently. Googling led to an article by PM himself 1 published in Nature way back in 1952. This article tells about a sensational claim made by a Russian agricultural botanist of conversion of seeds of one plant species into that of another species merely by a change in environment (temperature) 2 .