Abstract
THE death was recently announced of Prof. Oscar Brefeld, the founder, and for fifty years a leader, of modern mycology. Born at Telgte in Westphalia, on August 19, 1839, the son of a wealthy pharmacist, whose business he was intended to inherit, he early took an interest in the lower plants, but it was not until 1868 that he began his mycological studies in earnest. At the outset he realised the necessity of sterilising the culture media and the apparatus, and of studying microbes and spores as individuals. For this purpose he introduced gelatine—which he replaced later by agar-agar—and devised the method. of pure culture by thinning the medium so as to grow a colony from a single cell under continuous microscopic observation. Thus he laid the foundation of all subsequent microbiological study ten years before R. Koch took up the inquiry.
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Prof. O. Brefeld. Nature 116, 369 (1925). https://doi.org/10.1038/116369a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/116369a0