Benjamin Minge Duggar

Benjamin Minge Duggar (September 1, 1872 – September 10, 1956) was an American plant physiologist. He was born at Gallion, Hale County, Alabama.

He studied at several Southern schools, including Alabama Polytechnic Institute (B.S., 1891), and at Harvard, Cornell (Ph.D., 1898), and in Germany, Italy, and France. As a specialist in botany, he held various positions in experiment stations and colleges until 1901, when he was appointed physiologist in the Bureau of Plant Industry, United States Department of Agriculture, for which he wrote bulletins. He was professor of botany at the University of Missouri from 1902 to 1907 and thereafter held the chair of plant physiology at Cornell. He was vice president of the Botanical Society of America in 1912 and 1914. From 1917 to 1919, he was acting professor of biological chemistry at the Washington University Medical School. Surprisingly, he is best remembered for an achievement in another discipline occurring in the late 1940s, his discovery of chlortetracycline (Aureomycin), the first of the tetracycline antibiotics, from a soil bacterium growing in allotment soil. Professor Duggar contributed many articles to botanical magazines. His publications include: