Private Giving
Penn State Intercom......January 23, 2003

Hildebrandt estate establishes
library endowment with $800,000 gift

An $800,000 gift to the College of Agricultural Sciences from the estate of alumnus Albert C. Hildebrandt will help to improve the Department of Plant Pathology's library, located in Buckhout Laboratory.

A professor of plant pathology at the University of Wisconsin for 29 years, Hildebrandt was an internationally recognized authority on plant tissue culture and one of the earliest advocates of cell fusion as a means of incorporating new traits into a cell line, leading to the development of advanced research techniques that are widely used today.

The Department of Plant Pathology will use income from the Hildebrandt Endowment to make improvements to the current library, a discipline-specific body of knowledge available to all faculty, students and staff in the department. According to Leonard J. Francl, professor of plant pathology and department head, improvements include organizing the present collection, binding scientific journals and purchasing key reference books. Income also may soon provide computer services such as journal subscriptions and information retrieval.

Hildebrandt graduated from Penn State with a bachelor's degree in botany in 1939 and a master's degree in plant pathology and botany in 1941. He received his doctoral degree in plant pathology from the University of Wisconsin in 1945, and joined the faculty four years later. He retired in 1978 and died in 2001.

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