Nikolai Nikolaevich Ivanov

Born Oct. 25 (Nov. 6), 1884, in Gatchina, in present-day Leningrad Oblast; died Dec. 3, 1940, in Leningrad. Soviet biochemist.

Ivanov graduated from the University of St. Petersburg in 1909. In 1929 he became a professor in the subdepartment of microbiology of that university. He organized the department of biochemistry at the All-Union Institute of Horticulture. He initiated and became editor in chief of the multivolume Biochemistry of Cultivated Plants (1936–48). Together with his coworkers he gathered a large amount of material on the biochemistry of various plant groups. He introduced biochemical methods to plant breeding, making possible the selection and introduction to practical use of a number of valuable crops (alkaloid-free lupine, low-coumarin sweet clover). A number of his works dealt with urea metabolism in fungi and new plant sources of vitamins.