American botanist. Archer worked for the US Department of Agriculture and spent many years investigating economic plants in Central and South America. He was as well known for his fiery temperament and taste for chilli dishes as his fierce intelligence.

William Andrew Archer, known to his friends as Andy, was born in Torreon, Mexico, though he grew up in Brazito, New Mexico. His mother raised cattle and chickens to put him through preparatory school, after which he studied at the University of Michigan, receiving his PhD in 1925. It was a somewhat testing process for him, working under a precise and demanding professor. In his studies, Archer was first interested in entomology, before plant pathology and mycology became his primary concerns (his PhD specialism was in the latter). Meanwhile he built up competency in Portuguese and Spanish.

Before going into botanical work, Archer served in the New Mexico Infantry and at an American Expeditionary Forces Base Hospital in France during World War One. He was unemployed in the early years of the Depression, eventually gaining work at a brewery in Washington, D.C. His botany career was mostly spent working for the US Government, in the Department of Agriculture’s Division of Plant Exploration and Introduction in Beltsville, Maryland, and at the US National Arboretum. Archer was also stationed at the Brazilian Research Institute in Belem as a botanist for the Office of Foreign Agriculture and contributed to a flora of Nevada.

Working as head botanist and plant pathologist at the Escuela de Agricultura in Medellín, Colombia, from 1929 to 1931, Archer set up a botanical laboratory, garden and herbarium, all the while embarking on many collecting trips in the Colombian jungle (amassing over 2,000 numbers). He also taught botany and carried out research into coffee diseases. In the following years he continued collecting in other parts of the continent, both for himself and the US Department of Agriculture, who tasked him with looking for rotenone and other economic plants in British Guiana (Guyana), Suriname, Venezuela and Colombia; for tobacco seed in Mexico and Central America (1935-1936) and for Arachis (peanuts) in Brazil, Paraguay, Argentina and Uruguay (1936-1937).

From 1937-1942 Archer organised and directed the Nevada Indian Medicine Project, collecting data on drugs used by Native Americans and analysing them for pharmaceutical properties. The project identified Lithospermum ruderale as a contraceptive, helping in the development of the birth control pill. He returned to work in the Amazon basin in 1942 (at the Instituto Agronomico do Norte, Belem, Pará) and at the beginning of the 1950s travelled to Ethiopia to investigate the country’s crops. Alongside this work he was simultaneously Custodian (1938-1947) and Curator (1947-1964) at the US National Arboretum Herbarium.

While Archer was undoubtedly a diligent plant collector and explorer, his interests ranging from ethnobotany and economic botany to taxonomy and plant pathology, he was renowned for having a difficult temperament and finding life rather a struggle. He is described by his friend and fellow botanist Donovan Correll as "one of the most individualistic botanists ever to grace the profession … Andy was much too sensitive and the victim of an emotional instability … shouldered with a pride that left him somewhat unbending …" He experienced a very brief and traumatic marriage in his fifties, his wife dying from a brain tumour in the year after they separated. Though he was said to have attained a simulance of peace and quiet after his official retirement in 1964, after which he worked archiving at the Smithsonian herbarium, "he was still capable of producing masterful outrages over the antics of those individuals, in and out of our profession, whom he considered to be nincompoops," says Donovan.

Archer left his estate to the Smithsonian Department of Botany. The legacy is named in honour of his mother, the Catherine Beauregard Memorial Fund.

Sources:
D.S. Correll, 1974, "William Andrew Archer, November 7, 1894 - May 7, 1973", Taxon, 23(5/6): 755-758
O. Reifschneider, 1964, Biographies of Nevada Botanists: 135.