Ferdinand Cohn was a German biologist born in the nineteenth century in Breslau, under German Kingdom. He is best known as the father of bacteriology and microbiology. A child prodigy, he entered the University of Breslau to study botany at the age of 16. However, because of his Jewish background he was not allowed to take his final examination. So he shifted to more liberal University of Berlin and gained his doctoral degree at the age of nineteen. Subsequently, he went back to Breslau to take up a teaching job at the Breslau University and remained there till his retirement. However, he became more famous as a researcher. He first started working with algae and established that protoplasm contained the basic characteristics of all life. He then went on to establish the existence of sexual process in those unicellular organisms. Later he concentrated on bacteria and classified them under four groups. His discovery of endospores in Bacillus subtilis is another of his important achievements. During his lifetime, he published more than 150 research reports. Under him, the University of Breslau became an innovative center for plant physiology and microbiology.
