Hugo Marie de Vries born on 16 February 1848 a Dutch biologist, was one of three men who in 1900 rediscovered Gregor Mendel’s work on genetics. De Vries was educated at the Universities of Leiden, Heidelberg and Wruzburg. He became a professor of botany at the University of Amsterdam in 1878.
De Vries conducted a series of experiments hybridising varieties of plants in the 1890s and he discovered new forms among a display of the evening primrose growing wild in a waste meadow. This led him to the same conclusions as Mendel—that inheritance of specific traits in organisms comes in particles.
He even speculated that genes (which he called pangenes) could cross the species barrier, with the same gene being responsible for hairiness in two different species of flower. In this, he was well ahead of his time. In the late 1890s, de Vries became aware of Mendel’s obscure paper of 40 years earlier, and he altered some of his terminology to match. When he published the results of his experiments in a French journal in 1900, he neglected to mention Mendel’s work, but after criticism by Correns, he conceded Mendel’s priority. He retired in 1918 from the University of Amsterdam but continued his studies with new forms. He died on 21 May 1935.
