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BEN # 170
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No. 170 July 23, 1997
aceska@freenet.victoria.bc.ca Victoria, B.C.
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Dr. A. Ceska, P.O.Box 8546, Victoria, B.C. Canada V8W 3S2
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KATHERINE ESAU (1898-1997)
Dr. Katherine Esau died at the age of 99 on June 4 at her home
in Santa Barbara, California. An obituary can be found in the
June 18, 1997 issue of the New York Times. Dr. Ray Evert will be
writing a biographical note for an upcoming issue of the Plant
Science Bulletin. She will be remembered by countless students
as the author of Plant Anatomy (1953, 1965) and Anatomy of Seed
Plants (1960, 1977), which are among the most influential
textbooks in structural botany the second half of this century.
[In fact, I used the latter when I taught plant anatomy this
last spring!]
Katherine Esau was born on April 3, 1898, in the City of
Yekaterinoslav in the Ukraine (Dnepropetrovsk in the USSR) -- an
agricultural city created by Catherine the Great and populated
largely by German Mennonite settlers (including Dr. Esau's
great-grandfather Aron Esau). She began college studies at the
Golitsin Women's Agricultural College in Moscow, but the Revolu-
tion interrupted her schooling at the end of her first year.
World War I slowed the Revolution but at its end, her father was
removed from his post by the "revolutionary" government and the
family fled to Berlin a day before her father was named an
"enemy of the country."
Dr. Esau's college education continued at the Berlin
Landwirtschaftliche Hochschule (Agricultural College of Berlin)
and at Hohenheim, near Stuttgart, culminating with some addi-
tional studies in plant breeding with the famous geneticist
Erwin Baur. She went to a model seed breeding station for wheat
in Northern Germany and from there to America in mid-October
1922, settling in Reedley, CA. Dr. Esau was hired by the Spreck-
els Sugar Company at Spreckels near Salinas, CA to develop a
sugarbeet resistant to the curly-top disease. The chairman of
the Botany Division at University of California-Davis, Dr. W. W.
Robbins, and the chairman of the Truck Crops Division, Dr. H. A.
Jones, visited Spreckels to learn about curly-top disease re-
search. Upon inquiring, she was accepted to continue her
graduate work at Davis using sugarbeet stocks from Spreckels.
Professor T.H. Goodspeed, the Nicotiana cytologist in the Botany
Department at Berkeley, was chosen as her adviser since Davis
did not have a graduate program at the time. Dr. Esau decided to
conduct an anatomical study of the effect of the curly-top virus
upon the plant after leafhoppers were banned to permit the
development of other sugarbeet research. Dr. Esau was awarded
the Ph.D. in botany in December 1931.
Upon graduation, Dr. Robbins offered Dr. Esau the position of
Instructor in Botany and Junior Botanist in the Experiment
Station of the College of Agriculture. Dr. Esau was assigned to
teach Plant Anatomy, Systematic Botany, Morphology of Crop
Plants, and Microtechnique. Dr. Esau served 6 years - the maxi-
mum number - in each rank until the attainment of the full
professorship in 1949, when she reached the age of 51.
Dr. Esau's research emphasized exploring the so-called phloem-
limited viruses. In the early 1960s, Dr. Esau became one of the
first plant electron microscopists, and greatly contributed to
the understanding of virus-plant host relations. She has pub-
lished books and numerous articles in this area of research.
She conducted much of this work in a building intended to serve
as a garage at UC-Davis - a building that housed the Botany
Department in part, during her four years as a graduate student
at Davis. She still occupied this area when she was named to the
National Academy of Sciences in 1957. She moved to her first
proper laboratory, in Robbins Hall, in 1960. Dr. Esau moved to
Santa Barbara in 1963 to continue her collaborative research on
the phloem with Dr. Vernon Cheadle. In 1989, she was awarded the
National Medal of Science by President George Bush.
An address summarizing her interesting life was given by Dr. Ray
Evert in 1985. A revised version published first in the Plant
Science Bulletin is available at the Botanical Society of
America site at URL: http://www.botany.org/bsa/esau.html
Scott D. Russell
Department of Botany & Microbiology
& Noble Electron Microscopy Lab
University of Oklahoma,
Norman, OK 73019-0245 USA
e-mail: srussell@ou.edu
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