Sir Frederic Charles Bawden (18 August 1908 – 8 February 1972) was an English plant pathologist and virologist who worked at Rothamsted Experimental Station from 1936 and served as a director from 1958 until his death. Bawden was born in North Tawton, Devonshire to George and Ellen Balment. His father was a registrar of births and deaths and moved to Okehampton where he became master of the Poor Law Institution. It was here that Bawden became interested in the cultivation of potatoes. The headmaster at Okehampton Grammar School, W. Hunter, made him interested in botany early in life. After studies there and at

Crediton Crediton is a town and civil parish in the Mid Devon district of Devon in England. It stands on the A377 Exeter to Barnstaple road at the junction with the A3072 road to Tiverton, about north west of Exeter and around from the M5 motorway ...

Grammar School, he joined

Emmanuel College, Cambridge Emmanuel College is a constituent college of the University of Cambridge. The college was founded in 1584 by Sir Walter Mildmay, Chancellor of the Exchequer to Elizabeth I. The site on which the college sits was once a priory for Dominican mon ...

. He studied cereal rusts under Frederick T. Brooks and received an MA in 1930. He worked from 1930 at the Potato Virus Research Station under Kenneth M. Smith and Radcliffe Salaman. Along with Norman W. Pirie, he worked on the crystallization of viruses. In 1936 he joined Rothamsted Experimental Station and continued to work on viruses. Bawden and Pirie demonstrated RNA as the nucleic acid of several viruses in 1936. Bawden was elected to the Royal Society in 1949 and received a medal from the Royal Agricultural Society in 1955. He was knighted in 1967. Bawden married Marjorie Elizabeth Cudmore, with whom he went to school at Okehampton and at Cambridge university, in 1934. They had two sons.

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{{DEFAULTSORT:Bawden Frederick Charles British virologists 1908 births 1972 deaths Fellows of the Royal Society