Eva Sansome

British mycologist (1906–2001)

Eva Sansome, nee Richardson (1906-2001) was a British mycologist.[1]

Life

Eva Richardson was born on 9 September 1906, possibly in New Zealand. She gained a DSc. from Manchester University, and in 1928 was appointed a fellow of the Linnean Society. In 1929 she married fellow botanist F. W. Sansome.[2][3]

Sansome lectured in horticulture at the University of Manchester and the University of Ghana.[2]

During the war she collaborated with Alexander Hollaender, Milislav Demerec and a young Esther M. Zimmer at the United States Public Health Service (Bethesda, Maryland), publishing in the very early field of x-ray- and UV-induced mutations.[4] In the late 1950s she was registered at University College Ibadan, though on placement to Long Island Biological Laboratories.[5] She researched meiosis in the oogonium. She studied the antheridium of Pythium debaryanum,[2] showing in a 1963 paper that the mycelium of Pythium debaryanum was diploid, rather than (as previously believed) haploid. Subsequent work established that both oospores and myceliuum are diploid in several Peronosporales genera.[6]

A Reader in the Department of Botany at Ahmadu Bello University in the mid-1960s, she and her husband supported eliminating the Igbo from Northern Nigeria at the time of the 1966 anti-Igbo pogrom.[7] She was awarded an OBE in the 1968 New Year Honours.[citation needed]

She collaborated with Clive Brasier.[8] After her husband's death in 1981, Sansome moved to live with her son's family in Warwickshire. After a series of strokes, she died on 11 February 2001.[1]

Works

  • Segmental interchange in Pisum sativum. Newcastle upon Tyne: University of Durham, 1941.
  • 'Maintenance of heterozygosity in a homothallic species of the Neurospora tetrasperma type', Nature 157 (1946):484.

References

  1. ^ a b Brasier, Clive (2007). "Eva Sansome". In Ristiano, Jean Beagle (ed.). Pioneering Women in Plant Pathology. American Phytopathological Society. pp. 129–.
  2. ^ a b c Commire, Anne; Klezmer, Deborah, eds. (2006). "Sansome, Eva (1906-?)". Dictionary of Women Worldwide: 25,000 Women Through the Ages.
  3. ^ "Eva Sansome".
  4. ^ Hollaender, A., Sansome E. R., Zimmer, E., Demerec, M., April 1945, "Quantitative Irradiation Experiments with Neurospora crassa. II. Ultraviolet Irradiation", American Journal of Botany 32(4):226–235; see http://www.estherlederberg.com/Papers.html
  5. ^ International Educational Exchange and Related Exchange-of-persons ctivities for Ghana, Region of Trans Volta Togoland, French Togoland and Nigeria. 1959. p. 107.
  6. ^ Garrett, S. D. (1981). Soil Fungi and Soil Fertility: An Introduction to Soil Mycology (2nd ed.). Pergamon Press. p. 68. ISBN 9781483182278.
  7. ^ Korieh, Chima J., ed. (2012). The Nigeria-Biafra War: Genocide and the Politics of Memory. Amherst, New York: Cambria Press. ISBN 9781621968238.
  8. ^ Bailey, Bryan A.; Ali, Shahin S.; Akrofi, Andrews Y.; Meinhardt, Lyndel W. (2016). "Phytophthora megakarya, a Causal Agent of Black Pod Rot in Africa". In Bailey, Bryan A.; Meinhardt, Lyndel W. (eds.). Cacao Diseases: A History of Old Enemies and New Encounters. Springer. p. 269.