Harry Harlan

Harry Vaughn Harlan (February 19, 1882 – November 6, 1944) was an American botanist, agronomist, and plant breeder who worked on barley at the US Department of Agriculture (USDA). He is notable for his international seed-collecting expeditions in search of barley cultivars for use the USDA's crop breeding programs.

Early life

Born in London Mills, Illinois, H.V. Harlan was the son of Plato F. Harlan and Elizabeth Susan Phillippi. He came from a non-religious Quaker family.

University study and career In his own words, he entered the Kansas State College of Agriculture as the "crudest of country youths" and graduated in 1904. From 1904 to 1908, he worked in the Philippines organizing a school of agriculture. He then performed two years of graduate study at Kansas State College before being hired by Mark Carleton at the U.S. Department of Agriculture. At the USDA, he worked under Carleton and David Fairchild. He was assigned to work on barley, despite having no prior-experience with the crop. He collected barley in (modern day) England, France, Italy, Croatia, Serbia, Hungary, Romania, the Czech Republic, Austria, Germany, the Netherlands, Belgium, and Spain. He concluded that barleys in the Danube region had been largely untouched by modern plant breeding, and that they resembled barley as it had looked when it first came to the region thousands of years prior. Of barley cultivation in Eastern Europe, Harlan wrote: "What little we did see confirms the verdict of history and of our collections, namely that Europe never grew more than a limited number of type, and these had originated elsewhere." This populationa form of experimental evolutionhas provided several insights in evolutionary biology and plant breeding.

Personal life

He married Augusta Goodrich Griffing on November 15, 1905.

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