Botanist Heslop-Harrison’s Rare Plants Discovery is a Fake

Professor John Heslop-Harrison who claimed to have discovered rare plants was labelled as fake by his fellow peers.

Professor John Heslop-Harrison, formerly of Newcastle University, led scientific expeditions to the Isle of Rum in Scotland in the 1940s. He claimed to have found unusual Arctic alpine plants. A finding which led some to wonder if the Ice Age ever reached Scotland.

But the so-called unusual plants were actually grown in Prof Heslop- Harrison’s Gateshead greenhouse, before he replanted them in Scotland.

The scientific scandal was first uncovered by writer Karl Sabbagh in 1999 — in his book A Rum Affair: A True Story of Botanical Fraud — in which he claimed some colleagues doubted the Newcastle professor’s work and suspected foul play.

Source: Sunday Sun, Newcastle upon Tyne, England, UK