Press

ALBANY, N.Y. - Former State Botanist Eugene C. Ogden, who conducted pioneering research on the airborne travel of allergenic pollen, died Saturday. He was 96.

Dr. Ogden of Delmar held the position with the New York State Museum from 1952 to 1975.

"Dr. Ogden's important work paved the way for many scientists," Museum Director Dr. Cliff Siegfried said today. "He was well respected among his peers and will be deeply missed by his colleagues here at the Museum as well as by other researchers from many other institutions. The State Museum expresses its sympathy to the family of Dr. Ogden."

Dr. Ogden, a Michigan native with a Harvard Ph.D., held the position of State Botanist from 1952 to 1975, when he reached the (then) compulsory retirement age of 70. He was third in a continuous succession of only four scientists to hold that title since 1868. His principal research interests were allergenic pollen and aquatic plants.

Starting in 1957, backed by federal grants, Dr. Ogden formed a partnership with Brookhaven National Laboratory on Long Island and combined meteorology and botany to study the release and airborne travel of ragweed pollen, perhaps the major cause of airborne allergy in eastern North America. He was an inventor, devising new pollen sampling devices and mobile towers to measure airborne particles in the high Adirondacks. In the 1960s, he could be seen, with his team of technicians, sampling ragweed pollen in the middle of Broadway in downtown Saratoga Springs. He even tested the feasibility of completely eradicating ragweed (Ambrosia artemesiifolia) from Saratoga, but it wasn't possible.

His research results formed the basis of a whole field of current study by many scientific groups interested in allergens and air sampling.

In the 1940s, his work on pondweeds was the first to feature random-access identification keys for plants, an important and modern device now widely used with computers. Dr. Ogden taught at the University of Maine, Orono, and worked for the U. S. Department of Agriculture, before coming to New York.

After officially retiring, he continued studies on pondweeds, and became interested in ferns. Reviving his interest in random-access keys, he again became an innovator, producing books that included computerized plant identification programs along with current State Botanist Richard Mitchell.

"His passion for science lasted into his final days, when we would still engage in joyous, heated debates over obscure botanical details," Mitchell said.

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