Major M. Goodman

Major Mereland Goodman (1938 to 2026) was an American maize geneticist and plant breeder at North Carolina State University, elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 1986. Born in Des Moines, Iowa, and raised in Johnston, he worked on Pioneer Hi-Bred field crews while in high school, took a bachelor's degree in mathematics at Iowa State University in 1960, and a master's degree in genetics in 1963 and a PhD in genetics and statistics in 1965 at North Carolina State University. After a National Science Foundation postdoctoral fellowship at the Escola Superior de Agricultura in Piracicaba, Brazil, classifying maize accessions into traditional variety groups, he returned to North Carolina State in 1967, became professor in 1976 and moved to the Department of Crop Science in 1983. His research covered maize genetic diversity, traditional variety classification, germplasm conservation, isozyme markers and the use of tropical maize germplasm in temperate breeding programs, and his program released public inbred lines. He argued that maize germplasm collections must be preserved, regenerated, evaluated and used, and took part in the Latin American Maize Project.