Russell, Robert Scott

▪ 2000

      British botanist and mountaineer, became in 1957 the first director of the Agricultural Research Council Radiobiological Laboratory, a facility in the U.K. established to monitor and predict the consequences of nuclear fallout on food crops and human nutrition. He studied at Imperial College in England and in 1938 joined the college's expedition to the Arctic island of Jan Mayen. There, along with research on the effects of the Arctic climate on plant metabolism, he reached the summit of the previously unclimbed northeast peak of the extinct volcano Beerenberg, thereby renewing the enthusiasm for climbing that he had developed during his boyhood in New Zealand (b. Feb. 14, 1913, Penge, Eng.—d. July 29, 1999, Wantage, Eng.)

* * *