Inline videos. See also:Category: Articles with embedded Videos..

Carl Correns

From Biocrawler, the free encyclopedia.

(Redirected from C. Correns)

Carl Erich Correns (September 10, 1864, in Munich - February 14, 1933) was a German botanist and geneticist, who is notable primarily for his independent discovery of the principles of heredity, and for his rediscovery of Gregor Mendel's earlier paper on that subject, which he achieved simultaneously but independent of the biologists Erich Tschermak von Seysenegg and Hugo de Vries.

[edit]

Education

Correns studied botany at the University of Munich in 1885 and was encouraged while there by Carl Nageli, a botanist who Mendel corresponded with on the subject of his pea plant experiments. After completing his thesis, Correns became a tutor at the University of Tubringen and in 1913 he became the first director of the newly founded Kaiser Wilhelm Institut fur Biologie in Berlin-Dahlem.

[edit]

Key experiments and findings

In 1892, while at the University of Tubringen, Correns began to experiment with trait inheritance in plants. He focused mainly on the hawkweed plant experiments that Mendel carried out, not being aware of the pea plant results. Correns published his first paper on January 25th, 1900, which cited both Charles Darwin and Mendel, though without fully recognising the relevance of genetics to Darwin's ideas. In Correns' paper, "G.Mendel's Law Concerning the Behavior of the Progeny of Racial Hybrids", he restated Mendel's results and his law of segregation and law of independent assortment. He undertook experiments with the four o'clock plant (Mirabilis jalapa) to investigate non-Mendelian inheritance in variegated plants. In 1909 he established this as the first conclusive example of extrachromosomal inheritance. Most of Correns' work went unpublished, and was destroyed in the Berlin bombings of 1945.

[edit]