Frank N. Meyer

Frank Nicholas Meyer was a Dutch-born American botanist and agricultural explorer employed by the United States Department of Agriculture, remembered above all for the plant that bears his name, the Meyer lemon. Born Frans Nicolaas Meijer in Amsterdam in 1875, he emigrated to the United States in 1901 and became a naturalized citizen in 1908. Between 1905 and 1918 he undertook four major USDA-sponsored expeditions across China, Mongolia, Manchuria, Korea and Siberia, introducing roughly 2,500 plant specimens to American agriculture and horticulture, including drought resistant sorghum and alfalfa varieties, numerous citrus types, and forty two soybean cultivars, among them the first oil bearing variety used industrially in the United States. He discovered the dwarf lemon variety later named in his honor during his first Asian expedition but did not live to see its commercial success, dying under mysterious circumstances in June 1918 after disappearing from a riverboat on the Yangtze River near Shanghai.