De Bary, Heinrich Anton (1831–1888)

German botanist and founder of mycology (the study of fungi). He demonstrated that fungi were not spontaneously generated as many scientists believed, and showed that rusts and smuts were the cause and not the result of disease in cereals. He provided evidence that the spores from the potato blight fungus could cause potato blight in previously healthy plants and was the first to use the term symbiosis in 1879 to describe the close and mutually beneficial relationship between some plant species.

De Bary was born in Frankfurt am Main, Germany. He was educated at the Gymnasium at Frankfurt and then studied medicine at Marburg University. In 1850 he went to Berlin to study botany under Alexander Braun, and graduated 1853 with a degree in medicine, with a dissertation entitled ‘De plantorum generatione sexuali/’. He began practising medicine in Frankfurt, but soon gave this up to work as Hugo von Mohl's assistant in the botany department at Tübingen University. This led to him setting up his own botanical laboratory in Freiburg im Breisgau 1855.