Jack Harlan

Jack Rodney Harlan was an American botanist, agronomist, plant collector, and campaigner for crop plant biodiversity conservation.

Born in Washington, DC, Jack Harlan was the son of Harry Harlan, a plant breeder who worked on barley at the US Department of Agriculture (USDA), and who travelled around the world on seed collecting expeditions in search of new genetic material for use the USDA's crop breeding programs. Harry Harlan was a friend of the famous Russian plant breeding expert Nikolai Vavilov, and at the age of fifteen Jack Harlan met Vavilov when the latter stayed at the Harlan house during an international conference. This meeting inspired Jack to become a plant collector himself, and plans were made for him to travel to Russia after finishing his undergraduate degree to work with Vavilov. However the trip was cancelled as a result of Vavilov's deteriorating relationship with the Soviet authorities.

Harlan earned a B.S. from George Washington University in 1938. He went on to study under the famous botanist and geneticist G. Ledyard Stebbins at the University of California, where he received a Ph.D. in genetics in 1942.

From 1942 to 1951 he worked at the U.S. Department of Agriculture, where he worked on breeding forage crops and improving the grazing quality of rangelands in Oklahoma.

In 1951 Harlan became a university lecturer and researcher, working first as a professor of agronomy at Oklahoma State University at Stillwater, Oklahoma, where he refused to sign an oath of loyalty, and later as a professor of plant genetics at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. He co-founded the Crop Evolution Laboratory there in 1966.

He moved to New Orleans, Louisiana in the 1980s and served as an adjunct professor at Tulane University. Harlan published a variety of papers in the area of crop biodiversity, and publicized his concerns that modern agricultural practices were contributing to the extinction of older, traditional varieties of crops.

Harlan died on August 26, 1998.