Samuel Gottlieb Gmelin

Samuel Gottlieb Gmelin (1744 to 1774) was a German physician, botanist and explorer from the Tübingen family of naturalists. Born in Tübingen, the son of an apothecary and surgeon, he earned his medical degree at the University of Leiden in 1763 at the age of eighteen. In 1766 he was appointed professor of botany at St Petersburg and the following year was sent to study the natural history of the Russian Empire, exploring the Don and Volga rivers and the coasts of the Caspian Sea. His Historia Fucorum of 1768 was the first work devoted wholly to marine algae and the first to apply binomial nomenclature to them. He was taken hostage in the Caucasus and died in captivity in Dagestan at the age of thirty. His account of the journey appeared in four volumes between 1770 and 1784.