British botanist and plant breeder with expertise in bananas and potatoes. Norman Willison Simmonds was born in Bedford, England, with a non-identical twin brother, Ralph. His father was a civil servant while his mother came from a respected Scottish farming family, the Willisons. He attended the Whitgift School, Croydon, and Downing College, Cambridge, where he read natural sciences. He was especially inspired by his botany lecturer D.G. Catcheside, then reading plant cytogenetics.
Simmonds was a diligent student and was rewarded with a Colonial Agricultural Scholarship, which took him to the Imperial College of Tropical Agriculture in Trinidad; the first step towards his role as senior geneticist on the Banana Research Scheme. In the 1940s and 1950s, while working on breeding the fruits, Simmonds also made several collecting trips to East Africa (1948), Malaysia, Thailand and north India (1954-1955), which prompted his early ideas on conservation and genetic resources. Out of this experience came his two books, Bananas (1959), which became the standard monograph on the plants, and his 1962 volume on the evolution of the bananas, re-issued twice.
At this time he returned to Britain, taking up the head role at the Potato Genetics Department, John Innes Institute (Hertford). His fellow banana researcher in Trinidad, K.S. Dodds, was the director. Here he developed the concept of genetic base broadening, a fundamental strategy in obtaining disease resistance in potatoes.
In 1965 Simmonds moved to Pentlandfield near Edinburgh as director of the Scottish Plant Breeding Station (now the Scottish Crop Research Institute), where he remained until 1982. He received his doctorate in 1966. Alongside the demanding work at Pentlandfield he collaborated with botany staff at Edinburgh University and produced a new textbook on plant breeding, Principles of Crop Improvement (1979, updated in 1999 with J. Smartt), for which efforts he was recognised with an honorary professorship.
He travelled widely on behalf of the International Board for Plant Genetic Resources and the Food and Agriculture Organisation, and in addition to seeking new potato germplasm made contributions to sugar cane cultivation in the West Indies and was consulted by the Rubber Research Institute, Malaysia. In both sugar and rubber production his theory of base broadening was directly put into practice. Widely respected, Simmonds was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh in 1970 and in 1991 was the first non-American to be given the Distinguished Economic Botanist Award by the American Society of Economic Botany. Simmonds also wrote on trout fishing, one of his favourite hobbies. His wife, Christa Simmonds, died in 2000.
