William L. Brown

William L. Brown was an American plant geneticist, born 16 July 1913 and died 8 March 1991, who spent nearly his entire forty-year career at Pioneer Hi-Bred International, one of the world's largest hybrid seed corn companies, rising to serve as its president, chairman and chief executive. He earned a doctorate from Washington University in St. Louis in 1941 and went on to develop major breeding programs in maize, sorghum, soybeans and wheat, work the National Academies later credited with making significant and lasting contributions to increasing and stabilizing food production worldwide; he also served on the Rockefeller Foundation's advisory committee on maize. He was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 1980 and named a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 1989, and he received the American Society of Agronomy's Agronomic Service Award in 1979, the Missouri Botanical Garden's Henry Shaw Medal in 1986, and the Crop Science Society of America's Genetics and Plant Breeding Award for Industry, also in 1986.