Lawrence Ogilvie
British botanist
Died when: 81 years 286 days (981 months)Star Sign: Cancer
Lawrence Ogilvie (5 July 1898 – 16 April 1980) was a Scottish plant pathologist.From 1923, in his first job and aged only 25, when agriculture was Bermuda's major industry, Ogilvie identified the virus that had devastated the islands' high-value, lily-bulb crops in 204 bulb fields for 30 years.
By introducing agricultural controls, he re-established the valuable export shipments to the US, increasing them to seven-fold the volume of earlier "virus" years.
He was established as a successful young scientist when he had a 3-inch column describing his work published by the world's premier scientific-journal Nature.
Bermuda's exporting its three vegetable crops a year to the USA gave plant-pathologist Ogilvie much experience of vegetable diseases, such that on return to Britain, five years later, he became the UK expert on the diseases of commercially-grown vegetables and wheat from the 1930s to the 1960s.
This knowledge was vital for Britain in World War II with severe food shortages and rationing.In total he wrote over 130 articles about plant diseases in journals of learned societies.
Lawrence was born in Rosehearty, a fishing village on the north coast of Aberdeenshire, Scotland, on 5 July 1898.His father, the Reverend William Paton Ogilvie, was the minister of the Presbyterian church there.
He attended Aberdeen Grammar School and took his BSc and MA at the University of Aberdeen in 1921 as the Fullerton Research Scholar with special distinction in Botany and Zoology.
He was also awarded the Collie Prize for the most distinguished student in Botany.In Aberdeen, he lectured on the Alpine flora of China.
At Emmanuel College, Cambridge University he studied plant pathology and was awarded an MSc in 1923 for his work on tree slime fluxes, particularly willow, elm, horse chestnut, and apple trees.
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