The Tropical Research Center is an outpost of the Iowa State College located at Antigua, Guatemala, in tropical America. This outpost was organized for research and graduate study in agriculture and the natural sciences by The Iowa State College and approved by the State Board of Education in December, 1945. The Iowa State College believed that to improve the service which plants give to man, it would be desirable to study plants of other climates comprising areas known to be centers where nature and the primitive man cooperated to bring so many of our crops into existence. The College believed too that a station in the tropics would facilitate the solution of its problems in the natural sciences, which are basic to all technology. And lastly the Tropical Research Center was created in order that the College might broaden and liberalize the training and thereby increase the usefulness of its staff and graduate students by affording them an opportunity to work and study in the tropics where the plant, animal and human environment are very foreign to our own. All of this was made possible largely through a grant of money from a public. spirited citizen of Iowa, the late Earl E. May. The work of the Center was initiated in February, 1946, with headquarters in Antigua, Guatemala, where laboratories, offices and trial grounds have been established in sympathetic cooperation with public.spirited citizens of Guatemala engaged in private enterprise and with the Guatemalan Government.