Carl Correns

Carl Erich Correns
Carl Correns in the 1910s
Born	10 September 1864 Munich, Germany
Died	14 February 1933 (aged 68) Berlin, Germany
Nationality	German
Institutions	Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Biology

Carl Erich Correns (10 September 1864 – 14 February 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 independently of the botanists Erich Tschermak von Seysenegg and Hugo de Vries, and the agronomist William Jasper Spillman.

Correns was a student of Karl Nägeli, a renowned botanist with whom Mendel corresponded about his work with peas, but who failed to understand how significant Mendel's work was.

Carl Correns was born September 1864 in Munich. Orphaned at an early age, he was raised by an aunt in Switzerland. He entered the University of Munich in 1885. While there, he was encouraged to study botany by Karl Nägeli, a botanist whom Mendel corresponded with on the subject of his pea plant experiments. After completing his thesis, Correns became a tutor at the University of Tübingen and in 1913 he became the first director of the newly founded Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Biology in Berlin-Dahlem.

Carl Correns conducted much of the foundational work for the field of genetics at the turn of the 20th century. He rediscovered and independently verified the work of Mendel in a separate model organism. He also discovered cytoplasmic inheritance, an important extension of Mendel's theories, which demonstrated the existence of extra-chromosomal factors on phenotype. Most of Correns' work went unpublished however, and was destroyed in the Berlin bombings of 1945.