page_title: Wanda Kirkbride Farr
section_title: Notable scientific discovery
hierarchical_section_title: Wanda Kirkbride Farr / Notable scientific discovery
caption_attribution_description: English: Wanda Margarite Kirkbride (1895-1983) was completing graduate work in chemistry at Columbia University when she met and married Clifford Harrison Farr. When Clifford died in 1928, while they were living in St. Louis, Wanda Farr carried on with her research and eventually became Director of the Cellulose Laboratories at the Boyce Thompson Institute for Plant Research in Yonkers, New York, doing pioneering work on cellulose synthesis and plastids
context_page_description: Wanda K. Farr was an American botanist known for her discovery of the mechanism by which cellulose is formed in the walls of plant cells.
context_section_description: Farr answered a question that had puzzled researchers for a hundred years. Cellulose, a primary component of cell walls, was known to be constructed from cellulose granules. These granules had appeared to microscopists prior to this time to emerge fully formed in the cell's protoplasm. By contrast, the formation of starch, which is composed of the same elements carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen, could be seen to occur in stages, in structures called plasmids inside the cell protoplasm.
  Farr discovered that cellulose-manufacturing plastids do exist in the protoplasm of the cell, but that such plastids had been invisible because they have a light refractive index similar to that of the protoplasm in which they are located. She made the plastids visible in cotton cells by mounting the cells in a new bath derived from the juices of the cotton plant rather than in water, which had been used previously.
caption: Wanda Margarite Kirkbride (1895-1983)
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