Jantina "Tine" Tammes (; 23 June 1871 – 20 September 1947)
was a Dutch
botanist
Botany, also called , plant biology or phytology, is the science of plant life and a branch of biology. A botanist, plant scientist or phytologist is a scientist who specialises in this field. The term "botany" comes from the Ancient Greek wo ...
and
geneticist and the first professor of
genetics in the
Netherlands.
Early life and education
Tammes was born on 23 June 1871 in Groningen in the Netherlands. She was the daughter of
cocoa
Cocoa may refer to:
Chocolate
* Chocolate
* ''Theobroma cacao'', the cocoa tree
* Cocoa bean, seed of ''Theobroma cacao''
* Chocolate liquor, or cocoa liquor, pure, liquid chocolate extracted from the cocoa bean, including both cocoa butter and ...
manufacturer Beerend Tammes and Swaantje Pot.
She had a sister and four brothers,
and was the aunt of the international lawyer Arnold Tammes and the botanist Pieter Merkus Lambertus Tammes, namesake of the
Tammes problem in mathematics.
After graduating from the high school for girls in Groningen and taking private lessons in
mathematics
Mathematics is an area of knowledge that includes the topics of numbers, formulas and related structures, shapes and the spaces in which they are contained, and quantities and their changes. These topics are represented in modern mathematics ...
,
physics and
chemistry
Chemistry is the science, scientific study of the properties and behavior of matter. It is a natural science that covers the Chemical element, elements that make up matter to the chemical compound, compounds made of atoms, molecules and ions ...
, she enrolled at the
University of Groningen in 1890 as one of just eleven female students.
She was allowed to attend lectures but not to take any examinations, although she was awarded a teaching diploma.
Research career
In 1897 Tammes was appointed as an assistant to
Jan Willem Moll
Jan Willem Moll (3 June 1851 – 24 September 1933) was a Dutch botanist and plant physiologist who worked as a professor at the University of Groningen. A major work by him was a systematic catalog of European fungi, the ''Enumeratio systematica f ...
, professor of botany at the University of Groningen. Through his mediation she was invited in 1898 to spend several months doing research in the laboratory of
Hugo de Vries, who had just been appointed adjunct professor of plant physiology at the newly founded
University of Amsterdam. There she gained exposure to issues of
variability,
evolution and genetics.
In 1901 she was the first woman in the Netherlands to be awarded a scholarship from the Buitenzorg Fund to conduct botanic research in Java, one of the few to achieve this without being a doctoral student. However, her poor health prevented her from travelling to the Far East and Moll offered her an unpaid place in his laboratory instead.
Over the next decade Tammes published several influential works. In ''Die Periodicität morphologischer Erscheinungen bei den Pflanzen''
(The frequency of morphological phenomena in plants) she was one of the first Dutch scientists to report on variability, evolution and genetics. Then in 1907 she published ''Der Flachsstengel: Eine statistisch-anatomische Monographie''
(The Flax Stem: A statistical anatomical monograph) which used statistics and probability theory to shed light on the inheritance of genetic traits in flax.
In 1911 Tammes was granted an honorary doctorate in zoology and botany. From April 1912 she replaced Moll as head of practical microscopy. In 1919 she was appointed extraordinary professor of variability and genetics, the first professor in the Netherlands in this field of research.
From 1932 to 1943 Tammes was editor of the journal ''
Genetica
''Genetica'' is a peer-reviewed scientific journal covering research in genetics and evolutionary biology. It was established in January 1919 by Kluwer Academic (which later merged into Springer) and originally published articles in English, Dutch, ...
''. She was also active in the Dutch Association of Women In Higher Education (Vereniging van Vrouwen met Hogere Opleiding or VVAO) and an outspoken opponent of the principle of
eugenics.
Tammes died in Groningen in 1947.
See also
*
Timeline of women in science
References
Further reading
*
* contains a bibliography of Tammes' works
{{DEFAULTSORT:Tammes, Justina
Dutch geneticists
1871 births
1947 deaths
Women botanists
Women geneticists
University of Groningen alumni
Academic staff of the University of Groningen
19th-century Dutch botanists
20th-century Dutch botanists
19th-century Dutch women scientists
20th-century Dutch women scientists