Redcliffe Salaman

Redcliffe Nathan Salaman (12 September 1874 – 12 June 1955) was a British physician, biologist who pioneered the breeding of blight-free potatoes, Jewish nationalist, race scientist and key figure in the Anglo-Jewish community in the 20th century.

He obtained a scholarship at Trinity Hall, Cambridge in 1893 and graduated with a first class degree in Natural Sciences in 1896, having studied physiology, zoology and chemistry.

[9] In 1903, Salaman was appointed Director of the Pathological Institute at the London Hospital, but in 1904 he developed tuberculosis and had to stop practising medicine and spend six months in a Swiss sanitorium.

He purchased a house in Barley, Hertfordshire and, because he could not return to practising medicine, began experimenting in the emerging science of genetics under the guidance of his friend William Bateson.

Later in his career, commenting on his decision to study potatoes, Salaman noted that he had "embarked on an enterprise which, after forty years, leaves more questions unsolved than were thought at that time to exist.

Whether it was mere luck, or whether the potato and I were destined for life partnership, I do not know, but from that moment my course was set, and I became ever more involved in problems associated directly or indirectly with a plant with which I had no particular affinity, gustatory or romantic".

Salaman started to cross S. demissum with domesticated varieties of potato in 1911 to produce high yielding lines that were also resistant to late blight.

By 1914, he had successfully created hybrids and in 1926 he remarked that he had produced varieties with "reasonably good economic characteristics which, no matter what their maturity, appeared to be immune to late blight.

[3] In The Propitious Esculent, John Reader called Salaman's discovery "an important breakthrough, offering real promise ... that it was possible to breed blight-resistant potato varieties".

[4] His research on potatoes was disrupted by the outbreak of the First World War, during which Salaman joined the Royal Army Medical Corps and served in Palestine.

[11] A review of the first edition in the British Journal of Sociology noted that it was an "unusual and vastly interesting book which took nine years to write, and a life-time to prepare" combining genetics, history and archaeology.

[25][26] In 1933, he was a founding member of the Academic Assistance Council, which helped scientists fleeing the Nazi regime, and in 1945 was chairman of the Jewish Committee for Relief Abroad as it worked to rehabilitate survivors of the extermination camps.

[25] On 23 October 1901, Salaman married Hebrew scholar Nina Ruth Davis, whom he had met four months earlier at the New West End Synagogue.