Hugo de Vries

Hugo de Vries was a Dutch botanist who was one of several scientists who independently rediscovered Gregor Mendel's long-overlooked laws of heredity around 1900, work that helped establish genetics as a modern scientific field. De Vries coined the term mutation to describe a sudden, heritable change in an organism's traits, and based largely on his own extensive breeding experiments with the evening primrose plant, in which he observed what he interpreted as new heritable variants arising abruptly, he proposed mutation theory, the idea that evolution proceeds substantially through such sudden large-scale genetic changes rather than only through the gradual accumulation of small variations that Charles Darwin's theory of natural selection had emphasized. Although later genetic research showed that most of the dramatic variants de Vries observed in evening primrose were the result of unusual chromosomal patterns specific to that plant rather than a general model applicable to all mutation, his broader insistence on discrete, heritable units of variation and his championing of Mendel's work were highly influential in the early development of genetics as a discipline. De Vries held a long academic career at the University of Amsterdam, where his botanical research combined careful experimental breeding with close attention to the statistical patterns of inheritance.