E.K. Janaki Ammal standing in snow. The picture was taken during her time at the John Innes Horticultural Institute, London. Photo: John Innes Archives/Wikimedia Commons
The following is an excerpt from Chromosome Woman, Nomad Scientist: E. K. Janaki Ammal, A Life 1897-1984, a new biography of Ammal, available from November 3.
Today, November 4, is Ammal’s 125th birth anniversary. According to the author, Savithri Preetha Nair, the book is “the first in-depth and analytical biography of an Asian woman scientist”. The paragraphs have been broken up to ease reading on smaller screens.
“I write this in what I consider the twilight of my stay in England,” announced E.K. Janaki to H.H. Bartlett in early February 1945, in a letter written from the Jodrell Laboratory of the Kew Gardens; she summed up her life until then for him, as usual laced with a wry sense of humour. She had the ability to see the funny side of things, even in the darkest of times:
“Except for the fireworks over London- first the blitz and then the V1 and V2 [the German retaliatory V-weapons] my days have not been “bright” by any means. After mending my broken elbow in Edinburgh in that fateful year the war began I moved on to John Innes—where I was given an assistantship in the cytology department under Dr Darlington[footnote]This is C.D. Darlington, an influential geneticist.[/footnote]. I managed to publish some of my work on intergeneric hybrids of sugarcane made in India—but even that was poor because I did not have my slides or all my data. I was glad to find some new data on the cytology of Nicandra physalodes—and lastly, I was able to complete a book on chromosome numbers in cultivated plants—with Dr Darlington.”
In her characteristic style, also reflective of her close relationship with him, she asked Bartlett: “Must I turn my steps eastwards without once more seeing you—my master? Answer.”
On 18 May 1945, Britain and the Western allies celebrated victory over Hitler’s army. The war was regarded as over in Europe but the nation’s food problem remained a major issue. In Britain, Clement Attlee of Labour had replaced Winston Churchill as Prime Minister; in America, Harry S. Truman had taken the place of the deceased Franklin D. Roosevelt; and in August, Hiroshima and Nagasaki had been ruthlessly bombed. This was the first time ever that a nuclear weapon had been used in mass destruction… In a world marred by the atomic bombing, Darlington and Janaki’s Chromosome Atlas of Cultivated Plants was published – a benign product of the war.
As for the Chromosome Atlas, it was a project of assimilation, compilation and synthesis as well as addition, of new data and ideas, and one of immense implications for evolutionary biology. Highlighting the general principles that could be employed in improving plants, the Atlas worked as a reference manual for plant-breeders and cytogeneticists equally, with its arrangement of species according to chromosome numbers, that shined new light on systematics, both large and small scale, between families and within species, and on the classification of genera, within and between.
Savithrti Preetha Nair
Routledge 2023
What was until then merely cursory and disjointed had been arranged by the authors in the form of an atlas (systematic and geographical) based on “the most precise and comprehensive knowledge of the conditions of breeding behaviour in the plants that matter.” Reaffirming the bearing of chromosomal studies on the theory of origin of cultivated plants (that is, putting classification back on a genetic basis), Darlington and Janaki’s Chromosome Atlas was unmistakably inspired by Nikolai Vavilov’s plant geography approach. It was Janaki’s stint at the John Innes (April 1940-December 1943) during the difficult war years that had culminated in the Chromosome Atlas.
“To the tripod of systematics: form, distribution and breeding, we have merely added a fourth foot [namely, chromosome count) and we must rest with all four feet on the solid earth,” the authors warned. It was a dictionary or an encyclopaedia of all known chromosome numbers of flowering plants, including some 8,000 species, an index of their uses in agriculture, horticulture and industry and another of their natural distribution.
As joint authors, Darlington and Janaki were indebted to the Department of Economic Botany at Kew for assistance and advice, but dedicated the book to their hero, the geneticist and plant explorer Vavilov, who had died in the Gulag camp of Saratov in January 1943, tragically, and ironically, of dystrophy caused by malnutrition. The Chromosome Atlas began with a discussion on Vavilov’s ‘Centres of Origin of Crop Plants’ published in 1926. Genetic plant diversity was the basis of domestication and breeding in crops of economic importance…
It was on 7 September 1940 that a period of sustained strategic bombing of the United Kingdom by Nazi Germany, referred to as the ‘Blitz,’ had begun, lasting until 11 May 1941. Food rationing had been introduced in Britain, and this would continue well after the war had ended. There were heavy aerial raids over sixteen British cities; more than 40,000 civilians killed, almost half of which occurred in the city of London, which had been bombarded for fifty-seven consecutive nights.
Only a day before the Blitz began, Janaki wrote to Miss Elva M. Forncrook, a former Director of the Martha Cook dormitory, University of Michigan (where Janaki resided between 1928-1931) that she was in the thick of the battle over Great Britain, having returned to London from Edinburgh in February 1940. She narrated to Forncrook on how she had burnt her bridges with India and was anxious to go to America to continue with her research on the Saccharum.
The letter also vividly captured for Forncrook the threat against Britain, London in particular, at this point in time, the composure of the British public in the face of adversity, besides her own disregard of danger and the ever-present death wish:
“Meanwhile I live in great danger Air raids day & night – There goes the siren. I must seek shelter. You can’t imagine what a time London is having, but we are all cheerful and getting used to bombs of all description. There is no panic – the British are a fine race – and their high sense of duty is wonderful. You must be getting all news from the radio. I am not a bit sorry I am in the thick of all this. Life isn’t worth it without a sense of danger. At home they think I am mad, and I get cables asking me to return, but I say very soon the war will spread all over the world and it is best to remain at headquarters. Besides I value my life very lightly – in fact I would be delighted if a bomb could end my life. After a certain stage one does not mind popping off – I don’t want to live too long. But I would like to live to see you and all my friends in Michigan.”
Janaki would often travel to Cambridge, with her updated list of chromosome numbers; like all places in England, Cambridge was experiencing rounds of sirens, blackouts, air-raid precautions and drastic food shortages. From the School of Agriculture there, amidst the escalating war situation, Janaki sent her New Year wishes for 1943 to brother Raghavan, scribbled on a wartime postcard:
“My dear Brother
This is to wish the E. K. Colony in Shoranur a happy and prosperous New Year. Good crops. Good Larder (no rationing) and good humour! Good everything. I am doing quite well in both mind and body with plenty of interesting work, time flies and I try not to think. So long as I know all are well and happy, I am happy too. So here’s good luck to all as I sit by the fire on a cold wintry night. There is a thick fall of snow outside and the wind is howling. My New Year resolution is to write oftener to India and I hope it will be reciprocated. I am not dead yet! So here is the best of everything to all!”
Even though war time and its hostile conditions of living seemingly exhausted Janaki, truth could not be farther from that; in actual fact, they served to heighten her productivity and help her evolve into a cytogeneticist of consequence. It was during the Blitz that Janaki had discovered a new kind of chromosome organisation called the iso-chromosome… Already during the war, she had successfully bred the tetraploid Euchlaena-Zea cross, which she dedicated to Merton[footnote]The area in London where the John Innes institute is located.[/footnote], and the colchicine-induced tetraploid Solanum melongena. It was also during these terrible times that she forwarded to the Indian Academy of Sciences a note by her friend, the eugenicist and German refugee geneticist, Ursula Philip of the School of Biometry, University College London (headed by J.B.S. Haldane), on the genetical analysis of three small populations of the Dermestes vulpinus (a species of beetle).
Savithri Preetha Nair is a historian of science and an independent scholar based in London and Kerala. Among her publications is the co-authored (with Richard Axelby) Science and the Changing Environment in India: A Guide to Sources in the India Office Records 1780–1920 (2010) and Raja Serfoji II: Science, Medicine and Enlightenment in Tanjore, 1786–1832 (2012).