Carl Nägeli

Carl Wilhelm von Nägeli (26 or 27 March 1817 to 10 May 1891) was a Swiss botanist who studied cell division and pollination and became known as the man who discouraged Gregor Mendel from further work on genetics. Born in Kilchberg near Zürich, the son of a physician, he began studying medicine at the University of Zürich in 1836 but soon switched to botany, studying under Lorenz Oken and Oswald Heer and later under A. P. de Candolle at Geneva. He worked with Matthias Schleiden at Jena, became extraordinary professor at Zürich in 1849, held the chair of botany at Freiburg from 1852 to 1856 and ended his career as professor of general botany and microscopy at Munich from 1857 until his retirement in 1889. In 1846 he and Hugo von Mohl were the first scientists to distinguish the plant cell wall from the cell's inner contents, in 1857 he first described microsporidia, the cause of pebrine disease in silkworms, and in 1858 he coined the terms meristem, xylem and phloem. He rejected natural selection in favour of orthogenesis, and his correspondence with Mendel from 1866 to 1873 proved unproductive.