Hugo de Vries

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Hugo de Vries
Hugo de Vries

Hugo Marie de Vries (* 16th February 1848 in Haarlem , † 21st May 1935 in Lunteren ) was a Dutch biologist and one of the re-discoverer of of Gregor Mendel established Mendel's laws . With his writings on mutation theory , published in 1901 and 1903 , he gave evolution research new impetus. Its official botanical author abbreviation is " de Vries ".

The research focus of de Vries lay in experimental plant physiology and evolutionary research . He dealt with the respiration of plants, with insect- induced gall formation and for many years with osmosis . With this he laid the basis for the establishment of the discipline of physical chemistry.

Life

Hugo de Vries came from a respected Dutch family. His father Gerrit de Vries was Minister of Justice under Wilhelm III. ; his mother Maria Ereardina was the daughter of Caspar Jacob Christiaan Reuvens , the first professor of archeology at the University of Leiden .

Hugo de Vries showed a great passion for botany very early on , so that he already owned a complete herbarium of Dutch flora at the beginning of his biology studies in 1866 . The University of Leiden, where he studied, was more focused on plant morphology at the time, while de Vries was already interested in physiological plant studies at that time . To compensate for this deficit, he set up a laboratory in his parents' house. His doctorate on the influence of temperature on the life phenomena of plants , which he completed in 1870, had physiological studies on the subject.

His doctorate was followed by a short postgraduate course in Heidelberg with the botanist Wilhelm Hofmeister and with Julius Sachs , the founder of experimental plant physiology. After teaching natural history for four years in Amsterdam , Sachs got him a two-year scholarship in Würzburg in 1875 , during which he researched, among other things, on osmosis in plant cells. His research work on the mechanical causes of cell elongation was recognized as a habilitation thesis . After teaching for a short time as a lecturer for plant physiology at the University of Amsterdam , he was appointed associate professor for plant physiology there in 1878. From 1885 to 1918 he was director of the Amsterdam Botanical Garden .

Hugo de Vries published his "rediscovery" of Mendel's Laws in three papers in 1900, first in a note for the Paris Academy, presented on March 26th. In it he does not mention Mendel, but only in a subsequent French work and a German-language publication. In the meantime, a publication by Carl Correns (one of the other "new discoverers" of Mendel's laws) had appeared in which he mentioned Mendel. In the French work, de Vries wrote that Mendel's beautiful work was little known and forgotten, and that he himself had made the essential discoveries as early as 1886, before he became aware of Mendel's work. His recollections of how he became aware of Mendel (about a book by LH Bailey on plant breeding from 1895) are flawed. His successor Stomps later said that De Vries saw one of Mendel's 1865 preprints owned by Martinus Willem Beijerinck , shortly before he published his results in 1900. That was between July 1899 and March 1900. This was also where the criticism of de Vries's claim of independent rediscovery began (MJ Kottler 1979, C. Zirkle 1968, M. Campbell 1980), according to which he did not have a clear conceptualization of the values ​​in of the form 3: 1 (split rule) and therefore no interpretation in the Mendelian sense (this only happened in his writings from 1900). Alain Corcos and Floyd Monaghan came to the same conclusion.

The article in the Comptes Rendus was also the source from which William Bateson in England became aware of the rediscovered Mendelian laws.

Awards and honors

In 1902 he became Socio Straniero of the Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei in Rome, and in 1904 a member of the National Academy of Sciences . In 1905 he was elected as a Foreign Member of the Royal Society , which in 1906 awarded him the Darwin Medal . In 1910 he became an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh . In 1913 he was elected to the Académie des Sciences in Paris and in 1921 to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences . In 1929 he received the Linnaeus Medal . Since 1900 he was a corresponding member of the Bavarian and since 1913 of the Prussian Academy of Sciences . In 1924 he became a corresponding and in 1932 honorary member of the then Soviet Academy of Sciences . In 1933 he was elected a member of the German Academy of Sciences Leopoldina . In 1970 a moon crater was named after him.

literature

  • Werner son: Hugo de Vries. In: Ilse Jahn , Michael Schmitt (Ed.): Darwin & Co. A history of biology in portraits. Beck, Munich 2001, ISBN 3-406-44639-6 , Vol. 2, pp. 9-27.

Individual evidence

  1. de Vries H. The mutations and the mutation periods in the origin of the species. Leipzig, Veit 1901
  2. de Vries H. The mutation theory. Experiments and observations on the origin of species in the plant kingdom. 2 volumes. Leipzig, Veit & Co. 1901 and 1903
  3. De Vries: Sur la loi de disjonction des hybrides , Comptes Rendus Acad. Sci., Vol. 130, 1900, pp. 845-847
  4. ^ De Vries, Sur les unités des caractéres spécifiques et leur application à l'étude des hybrides, La Revue Générale de Botanique, Volume 12, 1900, pp 237-271, dated March 19, 1900
  5. De Vries, The law of splitting the bastards, reports of the German Botanical Society, Volume 18, 1900, pp. 83-90
  6. ^ MJ Kottler, Hugo de Vries and the rediscovery of Mendel's laws, Ann. Sci., Vol. 36, 1979, pp. 517-538
  7. C. Zirkle, The role of Liberty Bailey and Hugo de Vries in the rediscovery of Mendelism, J. Hist. Biol., Vol. 1, 1968, pp. 205-218
  8. M. Campbell, Did de Vries discover the law of segregation independently?, Ann. Sci., Vol. 37, 1980, p. 655
  9. ^ Corcos, Monaghan, The role of de Vries in the recovery of Mendel's work, 2 parts, Journal of Heredity, part 1 (Was de Vries really an independent discoverer of Mendel?), Volume 76, 1985, pp. 187-190, Part 2 (Did de Vries really understand Mendel's paper?) Volume 78, 1987, pp. 275-276
  10. ^ Fellows Directory. Biographical Index: Former RSE Fellows 1783–2002. (PDF file) Royal Society of Edinburgh, accessed April 19, 2020 .
  11. Hugo de Vries' membership entry at the Bavarian Academy of Sciences , accessed on January 23, 2017.
  12. ^ Members of the previous academies. Hugo de Vries. Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities , accessed on February 16, 2015 .
  13. ^ Foreign members of the Russian Academy of Sciences since 1724. Hugo de Vries. Russian Academy of Sciences, accessed August 24, 2015 .
  14. ^ List of members Leopoldina, Hugo de Vries
  15. de Vries (moon crater) in the Gazetteer of Planetary Nomenclature of the IAU (WGPSN) / USGS

Web links

Commons : Hugo de Vries  - Collection of images, videos and audio files