Julius Kühn

Julius Kühn (1825 to 1910) was a German agronomist and one of the pioneers of plant pathology. The son of a landowner, he gained experience of farming and botany on his father's land, trained at Bonn from the age of thirty and took a doctorate at Leipzig on diseases of beet and canola. In 1862 he became professor of agriculture at the University of Halle. Over his career he published more than 70 papers on mycology and plant pathology, collected and characterized smut fungi from material distributed in well known exsiccatae, and wrote the 1858 work Die Krankheiten der Kulturgewächse. In 1898 the botanist Paul Wilhelm Magnus named the rust fungus genus Kuehneola in his honour.