Two editions, one remarkable scientific story

Algae have helped shape our world. They absorb carbon dioxide and produce oxygen—fundamental processes without which life as we know it would not exist. Today, algae are also helping to shape the world of tomorrow: they play a vital role in the global carbon and oxygen cycles and offer promising resources for sustainable nutrition and biotechnology.

More than 150 years ago, the German botanist Nathanael Pringsheim (1823–1894), a contemporary of Charles Darwin, brought algae to the forefront of science. His pioneering observation of sexual reproduction in algae contributed to the recognition of sexual reproduction as a fundamental principle of life.

This richly illustrated book rediscovers Pringsheim as a scientist, visionary, and patron, and as a key figure in the emergence of modern biology. At the same time, it tells the remarkable story of the Pringsheim family and traces a scientific legacy that reaches from nineteenth-century microscopy to some of the most pressing environmental questions of our own time.

And, last but not least, the book offers an unexpected perspective on algae research—the field to which Pringsheim devoted much of his scientific life and which is more relevant today than ever before.

What Pringsheim studied under the microscope in the nineteenth century has acquired new significance in the twenty-first. His microscopic world opens onto a much larger story: a story about the emergence of modern biology, the fundamental role of sexual reproduction in life, and organisms whose importance for our planet is more apparent today than ever before.