Liubimenko, Vladimir Nikolaevich

Born Jan. 4 (16), 1873, in the village of Vendelevka, in present-day Valuiki Raion, Belgorod Oblast; died Sept. 14, 1937, in Leningrad. Soviet botanist. Corresponding member of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR (AN SSSR; 1922) and academician of the Academy of Sciences of the Ukrainian SSR (1929).

Liubimenko graduated from the St. Petersburg Institute of Forestry in 1898 and from the University of St. Petersburg in 1902. From 1903 to 1908 he worked in France, from 1908 to 1913 at the Nikita Botanical Gardens, and from 1914 to 1937 at the Petrograd (Leningrad) Botanical Gardens (since 1931, the Botanical Institute of the AN SSSR). He was a professor at several higher educational institutions in Leningrad and the organizer of physiology laboratories at the Nikita Botanical Gardens and in Leningrad, Kharkov, and Kiev.

Liubimenko discovered the differences in the light thresholds of photosynthesis and in the chlorophyll content of light-loving and shade-tolerant plants. He advanced the hypothesis that the modes of plant nutrition had evolved from chemosynthesis to photosynthesis. He studied the genetic relationships between leucoplasts, chromoplasts, and chloroplasts, suggested a pattern of chlorophyll formation, and studied photoperiodic phenomena.