Harold St. John

Harold St. John (July 24/25 1892 – December 12, 1991) was a professor of botany at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa from 1929 to 1958. A prolific specialist in field botany and systematics, he is credited with discovering about 500 new species of Pandanus, along with many other species, especially in the Pacific Islands.

Born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, he was educated at Harvard University, where he earned a Ph.D. in 1917. After service in Europe during World War I, he taught botany at the State College of Washington (now Washington State University) (1920–1929), where he also became the curator of its herbarium. In 1929, he joined the faculty of the University of Hawaiʻi, where he served as longtime chair of the botany department (1929–1940, 1943–1954), then as director of the university's Lyon Arboretum.[1] The St. John Plant Science Laboratory building on the Mānoa campus, which houses the botany department, is named after him.[2]

Not long after his arrival in Hawaii, he joined the Bernice P. Bishop Museum's Mangarevan Expedition of 1934, which returned with perhaps the richest collection of Polynesian plants ever made.[3] During World War II he took a leave of absence to lead a scientific team to the rainforests of Colombia in search of Cinchona trees in order to provide additional sources of the malaria drug quinine, which was in short supply. His team reported a harvest of 60,000 tons of bark. After the war he investigated the effects of radiation on vegetation in the Marshall Islands for the United States Atomic Energy Commission.[2]

He continued traveling and publishing long into retirement. He held professorships at Chatham College in his native Pittsburgh (1958–1959), at the Université de Saigon and Université de Hue in Vietnam (1959–1961), and at Cairo University (1963). He was also a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and of the Linnean Society of London.[1]