Robert Delafield Rands
American agronomist and mycologist (1890-1970)
Robert Delafield Rands (1890–1970) was an American agronomist and mycologist. He served as chief director of Agriculture Office of Rubber Plant Investigations in the United States Department of Agriculture.
Biography
Rands was born in 1890. His Ph.D. thesis at the University of Wisconsin was in the field of plant pathology.
In research in Indonesia, he showed that "brown bast" in Hevea species was a result of phloem necrosis due to tapping of the trees for latex.
Rands met Minnie Frost, then a graduate student at the University of Chicago, in a field trip to the Rocky Mountains of Colorado. A year later they married in Frost's home town of Louisville, Kentucky on December 25, 1914. Minnie Frost Rands wrote a book about her experiences in the places the couple traveled to.
After returning to the United States, Rands worked for the United States Department of Agriculture into diseases of sugar cane, and then at the beginning of World War II returned to study of rubber plants. He later became head of Rubber Investigations Office.
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This entry incorporates text from “Robert Delafield Rands” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.