Ivan Nikolayevich Abramov was born in St Petersburg on 5 May 1884. His father, a minor railway employee, could not pay for Ivan's education so, in 1899, after finishing at the municipal school Ivan Abramov began to work in the Baltic shipyard. Being 15 years old he worked 12-14 hours daily and in the evenings visited Vasilyeostrovskoy College of the Russian Technical Society. In 1908, because of participation in a strike, he was fired from the yard. Later that year he entered the Higher Agricultural School, which was afterwards reorganized as Petrograd [St Petersburg] Agricultural Academy.

In 1910, as a student, he went for the first time to the Russian Far East as a botanist-soil scientist for the Amur expedition of the Migratory Office. On this expedition he studied how agriculture was developing on the Zeya river. The wealth of nature in the Russian Far East and the vast potential for agricultural development of the lands of Primorskiy krai impressed the young researcher so much that he determined to go to the Russian Far East for permanent work. His first works, based on material collected on the Amur river were published while he was still a student. In 1914, after graduating from the Petrograd [St Petersburg] Agricultural Academy, he went to the Russian Far East as a scientist-agronomist. He was entrusted with organizing the Birsk pilot field [now the Birobidjan Regional Agricultural Station]. At the same time he provided agronomical support for local people. In 1918, he moved to Vladivostok, where he began to work at the Primorskoye zemstvo as the province's agronomist.

His interest in protecting plants against pests developed during those years and, in 1922, he entered the Leningrad [St Petersburg] Institute of Applied Zoology & Plant Pathology, where he specialized in plant diseases under direction of its leading mycologists A.A. Yachevsky, V.G. Tranzschel and N.A. Naumov. After graduating from the Institute in 1925, Abramov returned to the Russian Far East. From that time onwards he carried out his scientific work on plant pathology, at first at the Far East Station of Plant Protection in Voroshilov Ussuriysky and, after 1935, at the Far East Institute of Agriculture in Khabarovsk.

Abramov began his plant pathology work with control of stinking smut, which affected up to 50% of wheat crops. He developed effective measures of combating this disease and ensured those methods were widely implemented. As a result of his work, in 1929 almost 90% of the wheat and oats sowed in the region was with treated seeds. As a result, infection levels of wheat by stinking smut and of oats by kernel smut decreased in the Russian Far East to a part of one percent and became the lowest in the USSR. Later Abramov studied diseases of soybean, for which the Russian Far East was the USSR's main region of cultivation. The fungi occurring on this plant in the USSR were completely unknown. As a result of his studies, Abramov produced the work Diseases of Soy Beans in the Russian Far East.

After a decade studying fungal diseases of grain and non-food crops, Abramov published his fundamental work Diseases of Agricultural Plants of the Russian Far East, which is even now in use as a manual by mycologists and agronomists of the Russian Far East. In 1942, Abramov was awarded the degree of Doctor of Agricultural Sciences without having to defend a dissertation, on the strength of all his published scientific works on agricultural plants diseases of the Russian Far East.

Although he maintained his research on recovery of wheat seeds from attack by Fusarium and Helminthosporium, Abramov also started to study potato diseases. The results of that long-term work were presented in his monograph Diseases of Potatoes of the Russian Far East, published after author's death, which was of great theoretical and practical value due to its thorough coverage of the topic. During his twenty seven-years working in plant pathology, Abramov encountered more than 300 representatives of harmful fungi in the Russian Far East, including 19 species which he described for the first time. Throughout all forty-two years of his work in the Russian Far East, Abramov remained closely connected with the farming industry, advising and helping agricultural specialists. He developed efficient measures to protect wheat and oat seeds against attacks by Fusarium and Helminthosporium, which were causing drastic crop losses.

Right to the end of his life, Abramov maintained an intense interest in his scientific work. Even during his last years, undermined by serious ill-health, he played an active part in co-ordinating scientific work in the Russian Far East. I.N. Abramov published 37 scientific works, including 25 devoted to diseases of plants. He was awarded numerous orders, medals and diplomas for his work over many years in the Russian Far East. He died on 8 April 1953.

Summarized from: Vasil'yeva, L.N.; Kholopova, Z.V. (1956). In commemoration of the Far East plant pathologist Ivan Nikolayevich Abramov (1884-1953). Botanical Journal 41 (3): 435-437.

Lists. Taxa. Kirk & Ansell form of name: Abramov.