Hugh Iltis (April 7, 1925 – December 19, 2016) was a professor of botany and director of the herbarium at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. While he is most noted as a scientist for his role in the discovery of perennial teosinte (Zea diploperennis), a wild diploid relative of modern maize (Zea mays), he is also remembered as an outspoken environmental conservationist.
Life and work He was born Hugo Hellmut Iltis to Anni (née Liebscher) and Hugo Iltis, a botanist and geneticist who was a life sciences teacher at the German-language secondary school of Brünn (Brno). His father was also the first biographer of Gregor Mendel and a vocal opponent of Nazi "racial science". In the fall of 1938, the Iltis family was granted visas to enter the United States thanks to the intercession of the Emergency Committee in Aid of Displaced Foreign Scholars, along with affidavits of endorsement from Albert Einstein and Franz Boas. In January 1939, when Hitler's military was preparing the invasion of Czechoslovakia, thirteen-year-old Hugo escaped with his mother and his older brother Wilfred on a harrowing train ride that traversed Nazi Germany to France. He recalled that during a midnight stop at the Stuttgart station, Gestapo officers combed the train, removing ten passengers; the Iltises survived because the boys pretended to be asleep while their mother bluffed that she was the wife of a French diplomat. In Cherbourg, they were joined by Hugo Iltis and boarded the passenger ship RMS Aquitania for the Atlantic crossing. They settled in Fredericksburg, Virginia, where the senior Hugo Iltis was soon appointed to a professorship in biology at Mary Washington College and the younger Hugo Americanized his name to Hugh Iltis. Iltis' undergraduate enrollment at the University of Tennessee was interrupted by service in the U.S. Army from 1944 to 1946, initially as a medic. Because of his native proficiency in German, he was transferred to an intelligence unit. After World War II, Iltis was stationed in Germany, where he participated in the interrogation of captive Wehrmacht and SS officers, including Heinrich Himmler, and processed documents to prosecute Nazi war crimes at Nuremberg. Iltis returned to the University of Tennessee, where he studied botany under Aaron J. Sharp. He carried out graduate studies at Washington University in St. Louis, where he received his Ph.D. in 1952 under the direction of Edgar Anderson. He was primarily trained in plant systematics and taxonomy, with a focus on the caper family (Capparaceae) and the spider-flower family (Cleomaceae). His first academic appointment was at the University of Arkansas from 1952 to 1955, and here he completed a study of the Capparaceae of Nevada. Later works formed a series, "Studies in the Capparaceae", which includes 24 publications, including newly described species and genera. An associated series of papers describes his research in the Cleomaceae. (At the time when he did his studies, the Cleomaceae was included in the Capparaceae.) In 1955, Iltis relocated to the Botany Department of the University of Wisconsin–Madison, where in addition to directing the herbarium he regularly taught plant geography, taxonomy, and grass systematics. He arranged to purchase much of the Catholic University of America herbarium when it was deaccessioned. By the time of his retirement in 1993, he had directed 37 candidates pursuing graduate degrees, and he and his students had collected thousands of specimens throughout the Upper Midwest to document distributions of plant species, leading to the publication of the Atlas of the Wisconsin Prairie and Savanna Flora (2000) coauthored with Herbarium Curator Theodore Cochrane. Anecdotes abounded concerning his colorful, often imperious manner. One colleague poked fun at Iltis by taping on his office door a cartoon that showed a boss dictating to a secretary and concluding, "Type that up, make ten thousand copies, and send them to all the important people in the world."[1] At the end of a public lecture, when an audience member asked flippantly, "What good is nature?" Iltis shot back, "What good are you?" Yet students flocked to his course on "Man's Need for Nature", and he was generous with his knowledge and his counsel. He cultivated strong ties with Latin American botanists, often hosting them for extended stays at his home located within the University of Wisconsin–Madison Arboretum. An avid naturalist, Iltis conducted numerous expeditions to Mexico and Central and South America to search for new discoveries. High in the Altiplano of southern Peru in 1962, he noticed a tiny flower that had not yet been classified by taxonomists. A full fifty years later, he and Harvey Ballard finally named it Viola lilliputana, and it was selected as one of the top ten new species of the year by the International Institute for Species Exploration. Iltis' work was of economic importance, because he identified new sources of genetic variability that have been used by horticultural breeders. On the same 1962 expedition to Peru, he spotted a wild tomato that he recorded as No. 832. He collected specimens for several herbaria, and sent samples and seeds to various specialists in the field. This plant turned out to be a new species of tomato with much higher sugar and solids content than domestically grown tomatoes. As a source for hybridization with domestic tomatoes, it has been used both to improve the flavor of tomatoes and to boost solids content.
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