Paul Christoph Mangelsdorf

Paul Christoph Mangelsdorf (July 20, 1899 – July 22, 1989) was an American botanist and agronomist, known for his work on the origins of maize. He served as professor of economic botany at Harvard University from 1940 to 1967.

Life and education Mangelsdorf was born in Atchison, Kansas. His father, a Prussian immigrant, ran a seeds and greenhouse concern; his mother was also German. He earned his bachelor's degree from Kansas State University in 1921, when it was still Kansas State Agricultural College. Later that year, he became Donald F. Jones's assistant at the Connecticut Agricultural Experiment Station and simultaneously furthered his studies at Harvard University, attaining his doctorate in 1925 under the direction of Edward Murray East.

In 1941, Mangelsdorf became an agricultural consultant for the Rockefeller Foundation and was involved in the development of Office of Special Services that became the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center. This project would be instrumental in the Green Revolution. According to the horticultural authority Noel Kingsbury, this theory enjoyed broad support on the strength of Mangelsdorf's "undisputed... reign as the international emperor of corn." However, advances in molecular genetics discredited the tripartite model in favor of the rival position of George Beadle, which identified corn as a domesticated offspring of teosinte. With D. F. Jones, Mangelsdorf developed and patented a method to improve hybrid corn production. The proceeds from this patent fund the Paul C. Mangelsdorf Professorship in Natural Science at Harvard. He was in 1951 the president of the American Society of Naturalists, in 1955 the president of the Genetics Society of America, and in 1962 the president of the Society for Economic Botany.

Family Mangelsdorf married Helen Parker in 1923. They had two sons: Paul Christoph Jr., who worked as a physics professor at Swarthmore College for 29 years, and Clark Parker, who worked as an engineering professor at the University of Pittsburgh. A daughter of Paul Christoph Jr., Sarah C. Mangelsdorf, is a child psychologist and president of the University of Rochester since 2019.