Hans Stubbe

Hans Stubbe (1902 to 1989) was a German agronomist and plant breeder, born in Berlin, where his father was a school inspector. He studied agriculture and biology at the University of Göttingen and the Agricultural University of Berlin and wrote a doctoral thesis on mutagenesis in 1929 as a student of Erwin Baur. He then joined the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Breeding Research in Müncheberg, from which the Nazi government dismissed him in 1936. He worked on using X-rays to produce useful mutations in barley and made expeditions to collect germplasm of wild and cultivated plants from around Europe. After the war he became founding director of the Institute for Cultivated Plant Research in Gatersleben in East Germany, where, with Gustav Becker and Kurt Mothes, he ensured that Lysenkoism did not take root. He died in 1989 in Zingst.