Botany => Chromosome Atlas of Cultivated Plants

Janaki Ammal was an Indian botanist who worked on plant breeding, cytogenetics and phytogeography. Her most notable work involved studies on sugarcane and the eggplant (brinjal). She also worked on the cytogenetics of a range of plants and co-authored the Chromosome Atlas of Cultivated Plants (1945) with C.D. Darlington.

Janaki Ammal was born in Kerala, India in 1897. Although her sisters all entered arranged marriages, Janaki chose a life of scholarship and study over matrimony, an uncommon move for a woman.

Following her primary schooling she obtained a bachelor’s degree and an honors degree in botany from Presidency College in Madras. In 1924, she moved to the University of Michigan in the US, earning a master’s degree in botany in 1926 through the Barbour Scholarship. She was arguably the first woman to obtain a PhD in botany in the U.S. (1931) and remains one of the few Asian women to be conferred a Honoris Causa by her alma mater, the University of Michigan.

On her return to India, she became Professor of Botany at the Maharaja’s College of Science in Trivandrum.

In 1939, she attended the 7th International Congress of Genetics, Edinburgh, UK, and was forced to stay on due to World War II. She then spent the next six years at the John Innes Centre as an assistant cytologist to C.D. Darlington. Together they published a Chromosome Atlas of Cultivated Plants in 1945.

The Royal Horticulture Society, UK, invited Janaki Ammal to work as an assistant cytologist at their laboratory at the Wisley Garden in Surrey, England. To this day, in the society’s campus at Wisley there are magnolia shrubs she planted and among them is a variety with small white flowers named after her: Magnolia kobus ‘Janaki Ammal’.

Following her retirement, Ammal continued to publish the original findings of her research focusing special attention on medicinal plants and ethnobotany. In the Madras University Field Laboratory where she lived and worked she developed a garden of medicinal plants.

She died in 1984 at age 86 in Madras, India.

In 2000, a retrospective said: “In an age when most women didn’t make it past high school, it seemed impossible for an Indian woman to obtain a PhD at one of America’s finest public universities and also make seminal contributions to her field”