Evans Biography

Alice Margaret Evans was a Welsh botanist and plant biologist who was best known for her study of bean plants. Born on August 12, 1927, Evans grew up in Penderyn, South Wales. She came from a family of farmers and as such was surrounded by agriculture from an early age. She studied botany at the University College of Wales, Aberystwyth and graduated with a bachelor’s degree in 1943. After graduation, she went on to study cytology at Lund University in Sweden, but in the 1950s she returned to Wales for her PhD. At the time, she was also working at the Welsh Plant Breeding Station (WPBS) and had been since 1950. During her doctoral work Evans studied agricultural crops such as forage plants often used for livestock feed. In particular, her interests lay with the genera Trifolium, a group of clovers, and Medicago, a set of flowering plants whose species include alfalfa. She used that research to shape her doctoral studies, and in 1957 she successfully defended her dissertation, “Interspecific relationships within the genera Trifolium and Medicago,” earning her PhD from the University of Wales.

Evans stayed at the WPBS until 1964, when she moved to the University of Reading and began teaching agricultural botany. She lectured there for four years before taking a position at the University of Cambridge’s School of Agriculture—now named the Department of applied Biology—as a University Lecturer. This was a valued, more prestigious position, and she remained at Cambridge until her death in 1981.

At Cambridge, Evans began to branch out into other research interests, namely into other agricultural crops. She became interested in grain legumes and was intrigued by Phaseolus vulgaris, also known as the common bean. This species includes most of the regularly consumed bean varieties, including green, French, string, and dry beans. Cambridge was already home to another researcher studying beans, Sir James Hutchinson, who was a professor at the university. Hutchinson and Evans worked together to create a program for bean species development, which she later took over and managed herself.

That work, which designed to facilitate he creation of better, stronger bean species, had a three-pronged approach. Her first goal was to create a gene bank from existing plant species. The second was to collaborate with plant breeders at other universities and in other countries to provide them with necessary supplies. The final goal was to begin actually breeding beans with the goal of creating a dwarf bean for British use.

In 1970, her work received a financial boost from Britain’s Overseas Development Administration, which funded promising projects in developing areas of the world. To assist her in this endeavor, Evans began working with Colin Leakey, a British agricultural researcher at Makerere University in Kampala, Uganda who specialized in beans. He provided Evans with Makerere’s research on the benefits of different lines of P. vulgaris that had already been studied by the university. The two were partners on the bean breeding project, and became close enough that Leakey affectionately nicknamed Evans the ‘Queen Bean’.

Unfortunately for Evans, and her bean project, the partnership was rather suddenly dissolved in 1973 due to Idi Amin’s rise to power in Uganda and the subsequent political and economic turmoil in the country. After the split, Evans attracted the attention of the International Institute of Tropical Agriculture (IITA), an organization based in Nigeria that works to provide farmers in Africa with higher-quality crops and other potential solutions for hunger. The groups studied cowpeas (Vigna unguiculate) and other species in the genus with the Grain Legume Improvement Programme, of which Evans became an integral part in 1975. That same year she became a member of the IITA’s External Review Panel, which analyzed the effectiveness of the program.

In 1976, Evans’ bean program began collaborating with the Colombian organization Centro Internacional de Agricultura Tropical (CIAT), whose campus she had visited the year before and back in 1973. The groups worked to breed plants with more seeds and increased protein content. While their work was going well, in 1980 the funding they had received from the Overseas Development Administration fell through. Without the necessary finances, Evans broke off the partnership.

As she researched her bean plants, Evans also took on various smaller projects in the later part of her life. In 1974 she flew to the University of Nairobi in Kenya to help create the Plant Breeding graduate program.  Two years later, the same year she began working with CIAT, she took on the role of chair of the crop committee for the International Board for Plant Genetic Resources in Rome. In 1976 she also returned to Africa to work at Nigeria’s Ahmadu Bello University thanks to a Royal Society Visiting Professorship. She worked with the Bean Improvement Cooperative at the time as well.

Even while she was building programs overseas, Evans did not neglect her commitments to her work at Cambridge. She was one of the lead creators of the university’s new Masters of Philosophy program, and she supervised a number of doctoral students during her career. She continued her work at Cambridge until her early death in 1981, at the age of 53.