Heinrich Anton de Bary

Heinrich Anton de Bary (1831 to 1888) was a German physician and botanist who became the founding figure of modern mycology and a pioneer of plant pathology. Born in Frankfurt into a family of doctors, he studied medicine at Heidelberg, Marburg and Berlin and took his medical degree in 1853, but practiced only briefly before turning to botany. He held chairs at Freiburg, Halle and Strasbourg, where he was also the first rector of the reorganized university. His studies of the life cycles of rust, smut and potato blight fungi, including the host alternation he called heteroecism, showed that these organisms were true parasites and not products of spontaneous generation. In 1879 he coined the term symbiosis. His methods shaped bacteriology and botany, and he died in Strasbourg in 1888 after surgery for a tumor of the jaw.