Sergey Kanash

Sergey Stepanovich Kanash was born in Tashkent on 6 October 1896. In 1923 he graduated from the agricultural faculty of the Central Asian State University and the same year joined the Turkestan Breeding Station as a trainee.

He devoted his whole scientific career to cotton. He headed the station’s breeding sector, served as its deputy director for science in 1932–1941 and as its director in 1942–1958. Under his leadership the varieties 8517, 8582 and 8427, with longer fibre and a higher fibre yield, were developed, together with S-460, a high-yielding variety resistant to wilt. According to reference works, at the height of their spread 8517 covered more than 700,000 hectares and S-460 more than half a million.

Kanash was among the first in the world to justify theoretically and apply in practice distant interspecific hybridisation within the genus Gossypium. He was also among the first to outline how wild forms could be used to obtain commercial varieties resistant to wilt and gummosis, and he paid particular attention to varieties suited to mechanised processing and harvesting. He published about a hundred scientific works.

His work was recognised with the Order of Lenin in 1937, the Stalin Prize of the second degree in 1941 for breeding high-yielding cotton varieties, and the title of Honoured Worker of Science and Technology of the Uzbek SSR in 1944 and of the Tajik SSR in 1946. In 1948 he became an academician of the Lenin All-Union Academy of Agricultural Sciences, in 1952 a full member of the Academy of Sciences of the Uzbek SSR, and in 1956–1960 he headed its department of biological sciences. He sat in the Supreme Soviet of the USSR in its 2nd to 4th convocations.

From 1960 to 1965 Kanash was director of the Research Institute of Cotton Breeding and Seed Growing, and from 1965 to 1968 head of its genetics department. He died in Tashkent on 29 November 1975 and was buried in the Botkin Cemetery.