Louis Blaringhem

Louis Blaringhem (1878 to 1958) was a French agronomist and botanist. Born at Locon, he studied at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris from 1899 to 1903, then worked as associate researcher in geology and botany and as an assistant in the agriculture laboratory of the Muséum d'Histoire Naturelle. He studied corn and barley varieties, analysed the wheat varieties best suited to the pasta industry, researched tobacco in search of the best way of producing nicotine, and in the summers of 1905 to 1909 studied mutations and hybrids of Oenothera under Hugo de Vries in Amsterdam. In 1909 he became chef de service at the Institut Pasteur. He was professor of agriculture at the Conservatoire national des arts et métiers from 1912 to 1922, lecturer and then professor of botany at the Sorbonne, a member of the French Academy of Sciences from 1928, and director of the Maison Franco-Japonaise in Tokyo in 1928 and 1929. He advocated Lamarckian evolution and mutationism.