Redcliffe N. Salaman

Redcliffe Nathan Salaman (12 September 1874 – 12 June 1955) was a British botanist and potato breeder. His landmark work was the 1949 book on the History and Social influence of the Potato.

Salaman was born in Kensington, London on 12 September 1874 and was the ninth of fifteen children born to his parents Sarah Soloman and Myer Salaman who was a wealthy merchant who traded in ostrich feathers at the height of the plume trade.

Salaman was married twice, first to Nina Ruth Davis in 1901 with whom he had six children including a cancer researcher, a doctor, the engineer Raphael Salaman, the artist Ruth Collet and the singer Esther Salaman. Nina died in 1925 and in 1926 Salaman met and married Gertrude who survived him.

Salaman was educated at St Paul's School, London initially studying classics but due to the dull teaching methods he switched to studying science and later became head boy of the Science Side of the school. He obtained a scholarship at Trinity Hall, Cambridge in 1893 and graduated with a first class degree in Natural Sciences in 1896 having studied physiology, zoology and chemistry. He was tutored and advised by the physiologist W. H. Gaskell who later became a good friend of Salaman. He moved to the London Hospital in 1896 to study medicine and remained there until he qualified in 1900.

In 1903 Salaman was appointed Director of the Pathological Institute at the London Hospital but in 1904 he developed tuberculosis and had to stop practising medicine and spend six months in a Swiss sanitorium. It took him over two years to fully recover from the illness, changing the course of his entire life. He purchased a house in Barley, Hertfordshire and because he could not return to practising medicine began experimenting in the emerging science of genetics under the guidance of his friend William Bateson. After several failed experiments with a range of animals, Salaman decided to experiment with potatoes after seeking advice from his gardener. Later in his career, commenting on his decision to study potatoes Salaman noted that he had "embarked on an enterprise which, after forty years, leaves more questions unsolved than were thought at that time to exist. Whether it was mere luck, or whether the potato and I were destined for life partnership, I do not know, but from that moment my course was set, and I became ever more involved in problems associated directly or indirectly with a plant with which I had no particular affinity, gustatory or romantic".

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