Paul Christoph Mangelsdorf

Paul Christoph Mangelsdorf (1899 to 1989) was an American botanist and agronomist known for his work on the origins of maize, and professor of economic botany at Harvard University from 1940 to 1967. Born at Atchison, Kansas, to a Prussian immigrant who ran a seed and greenhouse business, he took his bachelor's degree at Kansas State Agricultural College in 1921 and his doctorate at Harvard in 1925 under Edward Murray East, working meanwhile at the Connecticut Agricultural Experiment Station. From 1927 he was a researcher at the Texas Agricultural Experiment Station, where he became interested in the genetic origins of maize. At Harvard he directed the Botanical Museum and chaired the Institute for Research in Experimental and Applied Botany. With D. F. Jones he developed and patented a method to improve hybrid corn production, and as a consultant to the Rockefeller Foundation from 1941 he took part in the work that became the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center. His tripartite theory of maize origin was later discredited in favour of teosinte as its ancestor.