Fields botany and agricultural science Institutions Central Experimental Farm Alma mater Acadia University
Radcliffe College | ||
Mary MacArthur, Ph.D., was a Canadian scientist who performed research on the principles of the successful dehydration and freezing of fresh foods. She performed this research while employed by the federal government of Canada’s Department of Agriculture at the Central Experimental Farm in Ottawa, Ontario. In 1952 she was the first woman to be named as Fellow of the Agricultural Institute of Canada (FAIC) for her contributions to Canadian agriculture.
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Biography
Mary MacArthur was born in Glasgow, Scotland. She came to Canada as a child and her family settled in Pugwash, Nova Scotia. She became interested in botany at an early age.
She obtained her B.Sc. from Acadia University, Nova Scotia in 1933 and her Ph.D. at Radcliffe College (affiliated with Harvard University) in 1937.
Career
After graduation, Dr. MacArthur was an Assistant Professor of Botany at a woman's college in Elmira, New York, from 1937-38. In 1938 she accepted a position as an Agricultural Scientist, Horticulture Division, at the Central Experimental Farm in Ottawa, Canada. Her early specialty was plant histology and cytology. She became well known for her leadership of Canadian research into dehydration, which included fundamental research on methods for determining the inactivation of enzymes in plant tissues prior to dehydration. She had a large dehydration tunnel built in Ottawa, Ontario in 1942, in which several hundred experiments were carried out. Before the end of the Second World War she published a paper on the freezing of commercially packaged asparagus, strawberries and corn. She is credited with identifying that vegetables needed blanching to inactivate enzymes before dehydration. She worked jointly with scientists at Kentville, Nova Scotia who provided her with the dehydrated vegetables for further analysis in Ottawa, Ontario. This was an important activity during the war years as many fruits and vegetables had to be dehydrated and shipped to Europe for the war effort.
Honours and awards
In 1952, Mary MacArthur was the first woman to become a member of the Agricultural Institute of Canada