Sir

May I add the names of more intellectual luminaries, whose careers were centred on Breslau/Wroclaw, to the list offered by Min-Liang Wong (“Bright light of learning snuffed out in Breslau”, Nature 410, 865; 2001).

Ferdinand Julius Cohn (1828–1898), the prominent botanist and microbiologist, father of bacterial taxonomy, was born in Breslau and became a professor at the university there. Julius Friedrich Cohnheim (1839–1884), pioneer of experimental pathology and the outstanding pupil of Rudolf Virchow, was a professor of pathology at the University of Breslau, where he published his fundamental work on the role of leukocytes in inflammation.

The fates of Cohn and Cohnheim and the city of Breslau are linked to a major event in the history of biology: in 1876, it was at Cohn's world-famous Institute of Plant Physiology that Robert Koch demonstrated the infectivity of anthrax bacilli, witnessed by Cohnheim. The pioneering studies of Koch on anthrax were published in Contributions to the Biology of Plants, the journal founded by Cohn in Breslau, along with many other major papers in bacteriology.