Chemical Research on Plant Growth

Nicholas-Théodore de Saussure , a Swiss plant physiologist and plant chemist, was the last of the early pioneers of photosynthesis research. This initial period of research is generally considered to have begun with Jan van Helmont in the early seventeenth century and Stephen Hales in the first part of the eighteenth, then to have become more intense with Joseph Priestley, Jan Ingen-Housz, and Jean Senebier during the Scientific Revolution of the mid-to-late eighteenth century. Nicholas-Théodore's father, the famous Swiss geologist, meteorologist, and Alpine explorer Horace-Bénédict de Saussure, had been an early convert to the new chemical theories pioneered by Antoine Lavoisier in the late eighteenth century. Nicholas-Théodore, younger than his predecessors, had the full advantage of this new approach, which stressed quantitative chemical methods. Applying these methods to plants, Nicholas-Théodore de Saussure performed experiments that led him to major insights into plant nutrition. His most important contributions were the demonstration that water is a component of plant dry matter; that plants obtain their carbon from the carbon dioxide of the air, not from carbonic acid dissolved in the soil water, as most of his contemporaries believed; and that mineral elements and nitrogen from the soil are essential to plant growth. Further, he demonstrated the central fact of plant respiration (the absorption of oxygen and emission of carbon dioxide); and photosynthesis (the decomposition of carbon dioxide and evolution of oxygen in the light). In Recherches Chimiques sur la Végétation, de Saussure synthesized his own research findings with those of his predecessors, producing a pioneering work on plant nutrition.

Translator: Jane F. Hill received an undergraduate degree in English from Carleton College, Northfield, Minnesota, USA, in 1968, and earned a master's degree in biology and a doctorate in botany from The George Washington University, Washington, D.C., USA, in 1976 and 1980, respectively. Before entering graduate school, she worked as a writer and editor for the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) Soil Conservation Service, where she developed an interest in plant growth, agronomy, and soil science. As a graduate student, she worked in dendroclimatology research at the U.S.Department of the Interior, U.S. Geological Survery, Reston, Va., and later was a volunteer collaborator at plant research laboratories at the USDA Beltsville Agricultural Research Center, Beltsville, MD, USA. She has written extensively on a variety of subjects involving many aspects of botany and biology, including encyclopedia essays on pioneering photosynthesis research and other 18 ^th and 19 ^th century history-of-science topics. She wrote a chapter on the early photosynthesis pioneers for Volume 34 in the series Advances in Photosynthesis and Respiration (J.J. Eaton-Rye, B.C.Tripathy, and T.D. Sharkey, eds.; Govindjee and Sharkey, series eds., 2012, Springer).

In addition, Dr. Hill has co-authored a 500-page book on structure, function, and development of woody plants (J.A. Romberger, Z. Hejnowicz, and J.F. Hill 1993, Springer-Verlag; re-issued 2004, Blackburn Press). Also, she has published original research papers on dendroclimatology and wood structure in the American Journal of Botany.