Awards

De Bary was born in 1831, the son of a Frankfurt doctor. He showed a pronounced thirst for research at an early age, through which he became acquainted with the plants found along the Main and examined unicellular algae with his microscope at an early age. He already had an extensive herbarium at an early age, which he later left to the Strasbourg Botanical Institute. Through his early contact with the then director of the Senckenberg Institute in Frankfurt, Georg Fresenius, De Bary developed his interest in algae and fungi as well as working with a microscope. At the age of 21, he wrote a treatise on the phycomycete Achyla, which testifies to De Bary's excellent powers of observation. He showed that the Saprolegnia hawkmoths have two terminal flagella, while the Achyla hawkmoths have two lateral flagella. With this work, he also disproved the well-known botanist Nathanael Pringsheim (1823-1894), who had stated that the Saprolegnia hawkmoths had only one flagellum. In 1849-1859, De Bary studied medicine in Heidelberg and Marburg. From 1850 he studied in Berlin, where he received his doctorate in 1853. His dissertation was entitled “De platarum generatione sexualii”. After working as a doctor for just one year, de Bary decided to pursue a career as a botanist and habilitated at the University of Tübingen in 1854 under Hugo von Mohl (1805-1872).

In 1855, at the age of just 24, he was appointed associate professor at the University of Freiburg i. Br., where he became full professor and director of the botanical garden in 1859. In 1867 he accepted an appointment at the University of Halle, before moving to the newly founded Kaiser Wilhelm University in Strasbourg in 1872. A new institute was built there according to his plans, which he moved into in 1882. In addition, the university's new botanical garden was rebuilt with spacious greenhouses according to his specifications.

Many of de Bary's students later became famous botanists themselves, including Frederick Orpen Bower (1855-1948), Oskar Brefeld (1839-1925), Francis Darwin (1848-1925), (son of Charles Darwin), William Gibson Farlow (1844-1919), Karl Ritter von Goebel (1855-1932), Pierre- Marie-Alexis Millardet (1838-1902), Andreas Franz Wilhelm Schimper (1856-1901), the lichenologist Hermann Maximilian Carl Ludwig, Count of Solms-Laubach (1842-1915), the Alsatian Ernst Stahl (1848-1917) and Sergei Nicolaevic Vinogradskij (1856-1953).