Friedrich Wettstein, Ritter von Westersheim (24 June 1895 in

Prague Prague ( ; ) is the capital and List of cities and towns in the Czech Republic, largest city of the Czech Republic and the historical capital of Bohemia. Prague, located on the Vltava River, has a population of about 1.4 million, while its P ...

– 12 February 1945 in Trins, Tirol) was an Austrian botanist.

Academic career

Fritz Wettstein was the son of Richard Wettstein. From 1925 he was professor at

Göttingen Göttingen (, ; ; ) is a college town, university city in Lower Saxony, central Germany, the Capital (political), capital of Göttingen (district), the eponymous district. The River Leine runs through it. According to the 2022 German census, t ...

, in 1931 in

Munich Munich is the capital and most populous city of Bavaria, Germany. As of 30 November 2024, its population was 1,604,384, making it the third-largest city in Germany after Berlin and Hamburg. Munich is the largest city in Germany that is no ...

and in 1934 director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Biology in Berlin-Dahlem. Wettstein made a major contribution to botanical and genetical science. He worked especially on cytoplasmic inheritance in

mosses Mosses are small, non-vascular flowerless plants in the taxonomic division Bryophyta (, ) '' sensu stricto''. Bryophyta ('' sensu lato'', Schimp. 1879) may also refer to the parent group bryophytes, which comprise liverworts, mosses, and ho ...

and fireweed. Following

Erwin Baur Erwin Baur (16 April 1875, in Ichenheim, Grand Duchy of Baden – 2 December 1933) was a German geneticist and botanist. Baur worked primarily on plant genetics. He was director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Breeding Research (then in Mü ...

at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institut, Berlin-Dahlem, he investigated hybrids and polyploids of mosses, and advanced the understanding of the relationships and characteristics of polyploid forms.

Political implications

Wettstein has been criticised because at international scientific conferences before the

war War is an armed conflict between the armed forces of states, or between governmental forces and armed groups that are organized under a certain command structure and have the capacity to sustain military operations, or between such organi ...

he defended

National Socialist Nazism (), formally named National Socialism (NS; , ), is the far-right totalitarian socio-political ideology and practices associated with Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party (NSDAP) in Germany. During Hitler's rise to power, it was frequen ...

racial ideas.Research Program: History of the Kaiser Wilhelm Society in the National Socialist Era
(PDF file, 320 kB)

Works

*''Morphologie und Physiologie des Formwechsels der Moose auf genetischer Grundlage'' (1924) *''Über plasmatische Vererbung sowie Plasma-und Genwirkung'' (1930) *''Genetik'' (1932) *''Karl von Goebel'' (1933)

References

Bryologists Academic staff of the University of Göttingen Academic staff of the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich 20th-century Austrian botanists Austrian geneticists 1895 births 1945 deaths Max Planck Institute directors {{Austria-botanist-stub