Our Founder — Dr. S.H. Iqbal

AgriPure is dedicated to our father, Dr. Syed Hussain Iqbal — known to a generation of scientists simply as S.H. Iqbal. A mycologist at the University of the Punjab from 1973 to 1997, he spent his life studying the unseen foundations of living things: the microscopic fungi in soil and flowing water that keep water clean and soil alive. He passed away in December 2019. This page is how his children continue his mission.

“Life in a garden begins with the life you cannot see — in the soil, in the water. Protect those, and everything above the ground follows.”

Dr. S.H. Iqbal

A life given to the unseen

Our father studied a world no one else could see. While others measured crops and counted trees, he bent over streams and ponds to study the fungi that live in moving water — microscopic organisms called aquatic hyphomycetes, or Ingoldian fungi, after the British scientist C.T. Ingold who first revealed them in 1942. They are among the humblest living things on Earth. They are also among the most important — and almost no one knows they exist.

When a leaf falls into a stream, it does not simply vanish. These fungi colonise it and break down its toughest fibres — the lignin and cellulose that nothing else can easily digest — turning a dead leaf back into food: nutrients that feed the insects, that feed the fish, that feed the soil that feeds us. They are the first hands in nature’s recycling of life, the reason a river cleans itself and fertile ground stays fertile. He spent his life proving that the health of everything large begins with the health of something too small to see.

What he gave to that science

• He gave this hidden world to Pakistan. His 1994 study in Mycoscience — “Species diversity of freshwater hyphomycetes in some streams of Pakistan” — mapped, for the first time, these unseen decomposers in our own rivers and streams.
• He discovered life new to science. With the mycologist Ludmila Marvanová he described a new genus and species, Pleuropedium tricladioides (1973). And he named Dendrospora juncicola — placing his own work inside Dendrospora, the very genus C.T. Ingold himself created. Where Ingold planted the field, our father made it grow.
• He worked with the founders of the field. In 1973 he and the eminent British mycologist John Webster co-authored “Aquatic hyphomycete spora of the River Exe and its tributaries,” devising a method to track fungal spores through a river’s seasons that is still used today.
• He helped write a nation’s record. He co-authored Fungi of Pakistan (1997), cataloguing over 1,200 fungal species of this country.
• And the science honoured him back. In 2024, five years after he passed, researchers named a newly discovered mushroom Leucocoprinus iqbalii — after him. In biology there is no deeper tribute: a scientist’s name becomes a living thing.

How it reaches your table

It is easy to think fungi in a stream have nothing to do with the food we eat. He spent his life proving the opposite. The organisms he studied are the first link in the chain that keeps water clean and soil alive — and clean water and living soil are where all real food begins. Today, scientists use these very fungi as bioindicators: living gauges of whether a river is healthy or poisoned. Every conversation the world is now having about clean water, living soil, and food grown without harming the land — he was having, at the microscope, forty years ago.

That is why AgriPure carries his name at its root. The word pure was his life’s subject long before it was our brand. He understood that purity is not a claim — it is a living process, and it begins with the life you cannot see.

He did not build AgriPure. But AgriPure is built from what he taught us — and this venture is our tribute to a life that gave so much to so many. We are only carrying the seed forward.

In loving memory of Dr. S.H. Iqbal (1937–2019) — teacher, scientist, father, and the ground beneath everything we build.
— His children