In Pursuit of the Gene

CHAPTER 4
Pangenes
¨ AS A YOUNG MAN, the Dutch botanist Hugo de Vries did not
seem likely to be the long-sought protégé whom Darwin hoped would rescue
his theory of pangenesis from oblivion. De Vries’s doctoral work was in
the relatively quiet backwater of plant physiology, far removed from the
speculative world of pangenes and the debate over the inheritance of acquired
traits. However, De Vries, whose father was the minister of justice
under the king of the Netherlands and whose uncle was a professor of literature
at the University of Leiden, was determined to make his mark in
some way.
Born in 1848, De Vries grew up in the botanical Eden of Haarlem,
where he acquired his lifelong habit of wandering the countryside looking
for plant specimens. By the time he finished high school he had gathered a
nearly complete collection of all the seed plants in the Netherlands. As a
student at the University of Leiden, he had been greatly impressed with
Darwin’s Origin, which he read in its German translation. After graduating,