- Lived:
- 4 November 1897, Tellicherry (Thalassery), Kerala – 7 February 1984, Madras (Chennai); the life happened everywhere in between — Madras, Michigan, Trivandrum, Coimbatore, wartime London, an English garden, Allahabad, Jammu, and a field laboratory outside Madras where she worked until the end
- Field:
- botany — cytogenetics, the science of chromosomes; plant breeding; and, in her last act, conservation
- The Big Idea:
- Every plant carries its ancestry written in the number and behaviour of its chromosomes. Learn to count and read them and you can breed a sweeter sugarcane, catalogue every crop on earth — and prove that an unlogged rainforest is a genetic library too valuable to drown.
- In their words:
- "My work is what will survive." (her lifelong conviction, as her grandniece, the writer Geeta Doctor, recalled it)
- If you remember one thing:
- A woman whom Indian institutions kept at the edge of their tables — for her caste, and for her sex — counted the chromosomes of the world's cultivated plants, helped make Indian sugarcane sweet, and at eighty-two put her microscope to work in the fight that saved the Silent Valley rainforest. She died with that fight essentially won.