Albert Frey-Wyssling

Who was Albert Frey-Wyssling?

Albert Friedrich Frey-Wyssling ForMemRS was a Swiss botanist who pioneered submicroscopic morphology and helped initiate the study of molecular biology.

Frey-Wyssling was born Albert Frey in Küsnacht, where his father worked at the teacher training college of the Canton of Zürich teaching chemistry, geology, and anthropology. One of his grandfathers and several of his aunts were also teachers, and as a result thought that his own talent would be to teach. He entered the Realgymnasium in Zürich after six years of elementary school, and passed the graduation examination in 1919. He then went on to the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology to join the faculty of natural sciences, intending to specialize in botany. Although during this time Zürich was home to some great botanists, he realized his specific talent was not in taxonomy but rather the study of plants through the fundamental sciences of chemistry, physics, and mathematics. When he needed to choose a field for his thesis, he decided upon the Department of General Botany and Plant Physiology. Influenced by his teacher, he used methods of crystallography to find a common species of crystals in plant cells.