Frances Meehan Latterell

Frances Meehan Latterell (December 21, 1920 – November 5, 2008) was an American plant pathologist whose research in the late 1940s opened a major new area of inquiry into the physiological basis of plant disease. She was the senior author on a classic 1947 paper showing that the toxin victorin, produced by the pathogenic fungus Helminthosporium victoriae, caused symptoms of Victoria blight of oats, a new disease first described by Latterell and her major professor in 1946. This discovery of a host-specific toxin, as victorin was later named, gave scores of subsequent researchers new model systems for studying plant disease.

Life Latterell, a native of Kansas City, Missouri, an accomplished child pianist, received her BA degree from the University of Kansas City and MS and PhD degrees from Iowa State University. During her career as research plant pathologist, US army biological laboratories, Fort Detrick, Maryland and plant pathologist, US Department of Agriculture, Agricultural Research Service, Frederick, Maryland, she conducted extensive research on cereal diseases, including gray leaf spot of corn and rice blast. In recognition of her long and active membership in the Potomac Division of the American Phytopathological Society, Latterell was given the Division's Distinguished Service Award in 1987.

After retirement in 1996 she and her husband, Dr. Richard Latterell, an environmentalist and biology professor emeritus at Shepherd University, were active in animal welfare and environmental causes including water pollution and lead arsenate pollution in housing developments built on former apple orchards in Jefferson County, West Virginia, where they lived in an 18th-century farmhouse nearby Moler's Crossroads. They were participants in local zoning and political campaigns. From 2005 to 2007 R. Latterell and other citizens were the targets of a SLAPP suit for two million dollars in damages, seeking to punish them for their citizen activism. R. Latterell and the two other defendants were granted summary judgment in April, 2007 by the Circuit Court of Berkeley County, West Virginia in a decision upholding the defendants' First Amendment right to utilize administrative proceedings. Vegetarian, atheist, and childless, in 2005 the Latterells put their farm under a perpetual conservation easement under the auspices of the West Virginia Farmland Protection Act, a statute whose passage the Latterells actively supported.

Francis Meehan Latterell died of cancer on November 5, 2008.

The Ruth Allen Award has been given since 1966 by the American Phytopathological Society. It honors individuals who have made an outstanding, innovative research contribution that has changed, or has the potential to change, the direction of research in any field of plant pathology. She also received the National Science Foundation Lifetime Achievement Award.

The fungus' asexual stage was called Helminthosporium victoriae when Latterell and Luke published their work. Since then it has been renamed Bipolaris victoriae. Its sexual stage (teleomorph) is called Cochliobolus victoriae.

Latterell's classic paper was "Differential Phytotoxicity of Metabolic By-Products of Helminthosporium victoriae" published in Science, v. 104, pp. 413–414, September 19, 1947.