Hugo de Vries was a Dutch botanist famous for his work in genetics and evolution. He was one of three biologists who helped rediscover Mendel's laws of heredity in 1900. De Vries later became famous for his now-discredited theory that evolution proceeds by rapid mutations. Nonetheless, his work provided an important impetus to new research in the rapidly developing field of genetics in the early twentieth century.

De Vries graduated from the University of Leyden in 1870 with a medical degree. Thereafter he turned his attention to botany, which he began teaching at the University of Amsterdam in the 1870s. He became full professor there in 1881 and continued teaching there until his retirement in 1918.

In 1889, De Vries published a theory of heredity that modified the English biologist Charles Darwin's theory of pangenesis. De Vries agreed with Darwin that heredity was based on particles in the cell, but he believed these...