Eva Sansome

Eva Richardson was born on 9 September 1906, possibly in New Zealand. She gained a DSc. from Manchester University, and in 1928 was appointed a fellow of the Linnean Society. In 1929 she married fellow botanist F. W. Sansome.[2][3]

Sansome lectured in horticulture at the University of Manchester and the University of Ghana.[2]

During the war she collaborated with Alexander Hollaender, Milislav Demerec and a young Esther M. Zimmer at the United States Public Health Service (Bethesda, Maryland), publishing in the very early field of x-ray- and UV-induced mutations.[4] In the late 1950s she was registered at University College Ibadan, though on placement to Long Island Biological Laboratories.[5] She researched meiosis in the oogonium. She studied the antheridium of Pythium debaryanum,[2] showing in a 1963 paper that the mycelium of Pythium debaryanum was diploid, rather than (as previously believed) haploid. Subsequent work established that both oospores and myceliuum are diploid in several Peronosporales genera.[6]

A Reader in the Department of Botany at Ahmadu Bello University in the mid-1960s, she and her husband supported eliminating the Igbo from Northern Nigeria at the time of the 1966 anti-Igbo pogrom.[7] She was awarded an OBE in the 1968 New Year Honours.

She collaborated with Clive Brasier.[8] After her husband's death in 1981, Sansome moved to live with her son's family in Warwickshire. After a series of strokes, she died on 11 February 2001.[1]

• Segmental interchange in Pisum sativum. Newcastle upon Tyne: University of Durham, 1941.
• 'Maintenance of heterozygosity in a homothallic species of the Neurospora tetrasperma type', Nature 157 (1946):484.