Janaki Ammal

Janaki Ammal (1897 to 1984) was an Indian botanist who worked on plant breeding, cytogenetics and phytogeography. Born at Thalassery in Kerala, she chose a life of scholarship over the arranged marriage her sisters entered, studied at Queen Mary's College and Presidency College in Madras, and in 1924 went to the University of Michigan, earning a master's degree in botany in 1926. Her most notable work involved studies of sugarcane and the eggplant, and her research led to better cross-breeds of a sweeter sugarcane variety that contributed to India's sugarcane independence, so that she is sometimes called the woman who sweetened India's sugar cane. She also worked on the cytogenetics of many plants and with C. D. Darlington wrote the Chromosome Atlas of Cultivated Plants (1945), took an interest in the ethnobotany of Kerala's rain forests, and was awarded the Padma Shri in 1977.