Kathleen Mary Drew Baker

Early life and education

Born Kathleen Mary Drew in Leigh, Lancashire. Attended Bishop Wordsworth's School, Salisbury and won a County Major Scholarship to study botany at the University of Manchester, graduating in 1922 with first class honours and subsequently studying for an MSc, graduating in 1923.

Academic career

Drew-Baker spent most of her academic life at the cryptogamic botany department of the University of Manchester, serving as a lecturer in Botany and Researcher from 1922 to 1957. In 1925 she spent two years working at the University of California, Berkeley after winning a Commonwealth Fellowship, travelling as far as Hawaii to collect botanical samples. Kathleen married Manchester academic Henry Wright-Baker in 1928, which resulted in her dismissal by the university which had a policy of not employing married women. Drew Baker was awarded an Ashburne Hall Research Scholarship in 1922, and in later years joining the staff of the Manchester Botany Department and being awarded a research fellowship in the university's Laboratory of Cryptogamic Botany.

Research supporting commercial seaweed cultivation

Although Drew-Baker never travelled to Japan, her academic research made a lasting contribution to the development of commercial nori production in the country. Drew-Baker studied the life cycle of the red algae Porphyra umbilicalis and in an academic paper published in Nature in 1949, Drew-Baker detailed her research showing that the microscopic Conchocelis — hitherto thought of as an independent alga — was the diploid stage of the organism of which Porphyra is the macroscopic, haploid stage. Her critical discovery was that at the microscopic conchocelis stage, bivales and bivalve shells provided an essential host environment for the development of the red algae.

Drew-Baker's investigations were soon repeated by the Japanese phycologist Sokichi Segawa, who in turn provided knowledge to revolutionize Japanese nori aquaculture. Although nori had been commercially harvested in Japan since the 17th Century, it had always suffered from unpredictable harvests and had been particularly prone to damage from typhoons and pollution in coastal waters. Already by 1953, Fusao Ota and other Japanese marine biologists had developed artificial seeding techniques, building on her work. This in turn increased production and led to a significant increase in production in the Japanese seaweed industry.

Between 1924 and 1947 Drew-Baker published 47 academic papers mainly concerned with red algae. Her book A Revision of the Genera Chantransia, Rhodochorton, and Acrohaetium. With descriptions of the marine species of Rhodochorton, Naeg., Gen. Emend. on the Pacific Coast of North America was published by the University of California Press, Berkeley, in 1928. She was a co-founder of the British Phycological Society in 1952 and its first elected President.

Family

Married Professor Henry Wright-Baker of the Manchester College of Science and Technology in 1928. Two children. A member of the Society of Friends.