At the beginning of the 20th century, Hugo De Vries recovered from obscurity the laws of heredity that johann gregor mendel had formulated some 34 years earlier. Independently Karl Correns and Erich Tschermak von Seysenegg rediscovered Mendel’s work simultaneously. De Vries also advanced the study of plant physiology by identifying such processes as plasmolysis, or osmosis in plant cells.
De Vries was born on February 16, 1848, in Haarlem, Netherlands. His parents were Maria Everardina Reuvens, who hailed from a family of scholars, and Gerrit De Vries, who was a representative of the Provincial State of North Holland, a member of the Council of State, and the minister of justice under William III. De Vries studied medicine at the University of Leiden from 1866 until 1870, when he moved to the University of Heidelberg, where he studied under Wilhelm Hofmeister. Reading works by Julius von Sachs and charles robert darwin influenced him tremendously, and in 1871, when he moved on to the University of Wurzburg, he had the opportunity to study under Sachs, with whom he maintained a longstanding professional relationship.
Later that year, De Vries accepted a position teaching natural history at the First High School in Amsterdam while continuing to do research in Sachs’s laboratory in the summers. In 1875, he landed a position with the Prussian Ministry of Agriculture in Wurzburg, writing monographs on red clover, potato, and sugar beets, as well as on the processes of osmosis in plant cells. This post lasted two years, until he moved to the University of Halle as a privatdo-cent, lecturing on the physiology of cultivated plants. De Vries resigned this position in favor of a lectureship in plant physiology at the University of Amsterdam later in the year of 1877. His appointment represented the first academic position in the field of plant physiology in the Netherlands, and De Vries stayed on at the University of Amsterdam for the remainder of his career. In 1878, the university promoted him to the position of assistant professor of botany, and in 1881, he ascended to the status of full professor.
In 1886, De Vries commenced his research in plant genetics when he noticed that some species of evening primrose differed from others and sought to explain this distinction. He reported his early findings in the 1889 book Intracellular Pangenesis. He continued to work with plant breeding until 1900, when he formulated the laws of heredity that restated Mendel’s work from 1866, though De Vries discovered Mendel’s papers only after he had formulated his own version of the same ideas. De Vries developed the theory of mutation, which held that there existed mutation periods that represented the process of evolution. De Vries described progressive mutants as productive characteristic transformations, whereas retrogressive mutants represented changes that did not benefit the continuation of the species. De Vries published this work in 1901 through 1903 in the book The Mutation Theory, which appeared in 1910 and 1911 in an English translation.
In 1896, the University of Amsterdam named De Vries a senior professor of botany, and in 1904, he served as a visiting lecturer at the University of California at Berkeley. In 1912, he visited the Rice Institute in Houston, Texas, to participate in its opening ceremonies. De Vries retired in 1918, though he continued to work in the fields that made him famous, plant genetics and plant physiology. De Vries died on May 21, 1935, in Lunteren, Netherlands.
