Howard Scott Gentry papers

Howard Scott Gentry was an American botanist recognized as the world’s leading authority on agaves. Gentry was born on December 10, 1903 in Temecula, California. He completed his bachelor’s degree in vertebrate zoology from the University of California at Berkley in 1931 and received his PhD in botany from the University of Michigan in 1947.

Gentry and his family moved to a dairy and forage farm in the Imperial Valley six years after his birth. Growing up, Gentry helped his father with farm work, and by the late 1920s as a young man he entered into a produce farming partnership, R.H. Gentry and Sons, with his father and younger brother, Bruce. During his last years of undergraduate studies at Berkley, Gentry was inspired to visit the Sierra Madres of Mexico after discovering the lack of information about the area at the college’s library. He took his first trip in 1933 and would spend most of the next twenty years exploring and recording the plant life of northwestern Mexico.

From 1950 to 1971 Gentry worked for the United States Department of Agriculture exploring North and Central America, South Asia, the Middle East, parts of Africa, and the Mediterranean in search of plants that are useful to man. Over the course of his work, Gentry introduced 15,000 plants into the United States for study, with his most notable contributions consisting of the development of a cortisone precursor compound, the introduction of disease-resistant wild beans, and the development of jojoba oil, as well as the introduction of the seedless grape from Afghanistan.

In 1971 Gentry became affiliated with the Desert Botanical Garden in Phoenix conducting research as a botanist. He was elected President of the Society for Economic Botany in 1974, and by 1984 became the Research Director for the Desert Botanical Garden. After retiring in 1987, he was awarded an honorary doctorate of science from the University of Arizona, and was honored with a dedication of the H.S. Gentry Center for Botanical Resources in Mesa, Arizona. In addition, until his death in 1993, he managed the Gentry Experimental Farm in southern California for the investigation of dryland crops.

Sources cited: http://art-botanical.org/Bio_Gentry1.html