Rowland Harry Biffen 1874-1949

Abstract

Genetic science owes to Biffen a contribution of central importance to its growth. His wheat breeding substantially benefited British agriculture and promoted the application of science to the art of breeding. In the teaching of agricultural botany he combined with expository power a width of knowledge that made him one of the founders of the subject in its modern form. R. H. Biffen was the eldest of the family, of two boys and three girls, of Henry John and Mary Biffen. He was born on 28 May 1874 at Cheltenham where his father was Headmaster of the Christ Church Higher Grade School. His boyhood pleasure was to roam the Cotswold countryside collecting plants, fossils and flint implements or, with equal zest, sketching its grey stone buildings. At Cheltenham Grammar School, which he attended from 1883 to 1893, chemistry was then the only science taught. In its laboratory, well equipped for the times, he was left largely to teach himself but with encouragement, always gratefully remembered, from the enthusiastic Science Master. This kind of schooling must have been well suited to his sturdily independent mind. It enabled him to enter Emmanuel College, Cambridge, at Michaelmas 1893 as an Exhibitioner. A year later he became a Scholar of his College and with a first class in both parts of the Natural Sciences Tripos he graduated in 1896. For his outstanding position in Part II of the Tripos he was at once awarded the Frank Smart Studentship in Botany at Gonville and Caius College which is devoted to the encouragement of botanical research. He became a member of this College during its tenure, as the regulations required. In those unhurried days, with no organized postgraduate preparation for a scientific career nor the trammel of research degrees, this coveted award gave grand opportunity to youthful enterprise and originality. Biffen, luckily, soon got his chance and, characteristically, seized it. Having become interested in rubber-producing plant-latexes he accepted an invitation to join a small expedition to Brazil, Mexico and the West Indies, for the study of sources of rubber. His travel journal, in keeping with his habitual economy of words and material, consisted of a very small pocket diary, now deposited in the Library of the Botany School. He set out intent on investigating coagulation of latex but his travel of several months in 1897-1898 was to awaken a wider interest.