Dr. Karl F. Finney [p. 3-4]
Karl Frederick Finney died peaceably on Saturday, 10 February, 2001. An internationally famed cereal chemist, he retired on 30 April, 1983, after a career spanning more than 45 years of active service with the USDA. After retiring, he continued until recently to work with many throughout the world as a designated collaborator with the USDA-ARS, Grain Market Research Laboratory, Manhattan, KS. He was born in Salina, KS and spent his early years there, graduating from Kansas Wesleyan University with an AB degree magna cum laude in 1935. After receiving his B.S. and M.S. degrees from Kansas State University in 1936 and 1937, respectively, both from the Department of Grain Science and Industry, he received an appointment with the United States Department of Agriculture, Agriculture Research Service at which time he developed the Hard Winter Wheat Quality Laboratory. Except for a 3-year period in the 1940s as chemist in the Soft Wheat Quality Laboratory, Wooster, OH, his association with the Hard Winter Wheat Quality Laboratory was continuous until his retirement as Head of the laboratory and as Research Leader of the Grain Quality and End-Use Properties Unit of the Grain Marketing Research Laboratory, Manhattan, KS.
His entry into the field of cereal chemistry marked the start of successful research leading to the development of an optimized bread-making test, a sine qua non in research on and in cultivar evaluation of bread wheats. The test, utilizing optimal balance of ingredients and techniques for full expression of bread-making potential of flour, is in use in many cereal laboratories. He developed the modern techniques of flour fractionation and reconstitution and so that reconstituted flours could be baked into bread identical to that from the parent flour. The techniques, together with a micro bread-making test requiring only 10 g of flour, have been applied to a series of far-reaching findings that related flour components to functional (bread-making) properties and on the effects of environment and cultural methods on bread quality. His research results have been published in more than 230 articles, including 15 published after his retirement in 1983. Most of those articles are published in Cereal Chemistry, Agronomy Journal, Crop Science, and Baker's Digest. He is author or coauthor of chapters in six scientific books.
Professor Finney worked closely over the years with all hard winter wheat breeders in the Great Plains region, and it is great and enduring credit to him and his laboratory that not a single tested and released cultivar has been lacking in milling and baking quality. The uniformly high milling and bread-making qualities of hard red winter wheat have been a major factor in the general acceptance of the wheat by domestic processors as well as by exporters who have come to assume that all Great Plains HRWWs have good quality. Karl's suggestions and quality evaluations were of major importance in the development by Ken and Betty Goertzen of Plainsman V, a genetically high-protein wheat with superb quality. In 1988, Kansas State released a wheat cultivar was named Karl in his honor.
He has given papers in India, Japan, Spain, Canada, and Mexico, and in 1983 was honored when he presented the inaugural address at the initiation of a graduate cereals program at the University of Sonora, Hermosillo, Mexico. Late in 1984 he was a guest of the Wheat Board of South Africa, where he lectured and consulted on wheat quality and research for about three months.
He has continued to be visited annually by numerous guests, foreign and domestic, who consulted him about wheat quality, and he has been major professor and/or an advisor and member of the supervisory committee to many graduate students who received the M.S. and Ph.D. degrees at Kansas State University.
Professor Finney was a member of Sigma Xi, Phi Kappa Phi, Gamma Sigma Delta, and Alpha Zeta honor societies, a Fellow in the AAAS, and member of ACS, AACC, and ASA. He received the Wheat Award in 1982, the Steve Vesecky Award in 1986 from the Wheat Advisory Council for outstanding contribution to the improvement and promotion of hard winter wheat quality in the Great Plains area, and in 1983 the Merit Award from the Kansas Wheat Commission. In 1983 he received an award at the Fall Cereal Conference for outstanding accomplishments as a USDA cereal chemist in Kansas and the winter wheat region since 1938 and in deep appreciation for his guidance and council to wheat research workers in elevating the bread quality of winter wheats to the best in the world. He received the Alumni Award of merit from the Kansas State University Chapter of Gamma Sigma Delta and the Thomas Burr Osborne medal, the highest honor conferred by the American Association of Cereal Chemists, as well as the single most significant award in the field of cereal chemistry. In 1991 he received the Distinguished Service Award from Kansas Wesleyan University. Professor Karl F. Finney is listed in World Who's Who in Science, American Men and Women of Science, and Who's Who in the Midwest. He was varsity tennis coach for 20 years as an extracurricular activity while serving on the graduate faculty of Kansas State University. Since his retirement in 1983, Karl was associated with the Grain Quality and End-Use Properties Unit at the U.S. Grain Marketing Research Laboratory as a collaborator and consultant.
Karl F. Finney was preceded in death by his son, Michael F. Finney on 1 August, 1999, and by his wife Gertrude A. Latham Finney on 15 August, 1999. He is survived by two sons, Patrick of Wooster, Ohio, and Kelly of Manhattan, Kansas, and five grandchildren.