Jones, Lewis Ralph

Lewis Ralph Jones, (born Dec. 5, 1864, Brandon, Wis., U.S.—died March 31, 1945, Orlando, Fla.), U.S. botanist and agricultural biologist, one of the first and most distinguished of American plant pathologists.

Jones studied botany at the University of Michigan (Ph.D., 1889) and afterward left for the University of Vermont to become research botanist at the Agricultural Experiment Station, where he made his first major contribution to plant pathology. He successfully used the French-made Bordeaux mixture fungicide in the prevention and control of potato blight and pear and apple scab. He also studied the problems of bacterial soft rot of vegetables and found that the action of Bacillus carotovorus initiated rotting by destroying a section of the cell wall of the host plant. His was the first thorough investigation of the mechanism of bacterial disease infection in plants and earned him a second Ph.D. (Michigan, 1904) and a worldwide reputation as an accomplished plant pathologist.

In 1909 Jones became professor of botany at the University of Wisconsin, where he developed a department of plant pathology. At Wisconsin he again gained recognition by developing a variety of cabbage resistant to yellows, a cabbage disease.