Josef Gottlieb Kölreuter

Josef Gottlieb Kölreuter (born April 27, 1733, Sulz, Württemberg [Germany]—died Nov. 12, 1806, Karlsruhe, Baden) was a German botanist who was a pioneer in the study of plant hybrids. He was the first to develop a scientific application of the discovery, made in 1694 by the German botanist Rudolph Jacob Camerarius, of sex in plants.

Kölreuter was educated at the universities of Berlin and Leipzig, and at Tübingen, where he received his medical degree. Beginning in 1761 he published a series of papers on sex in plants and became a professor of natural history and curator of the Botanical Gardens at Karlsruhe (1764). Cultivating plants with the purpose of studying their fertilization and development, he performed experiments, particularly with the tobacco plant (Nicotiana), that included artificial fertilization and the production of fertile hybrids between plants of different species. The experimental results he obtained foreshadowed the work of the Austrian biologist Gregor Johann Mendel. Kölreuter recognized the importance of insects and wind as agents of pollen transfer in plant fertilization. He applied the sexual system of classification of the Swedish botanist and naturalist Carolus Linnaeus to lower plant forms. His work was not recognized or appreciated until long after his death.