Hugo Iltis


Hugo Iltis was a Czech-American biologist.

Life and work

Iltis was born on April 11, 1882, in Brünn, Austria-Hungary. His family was of Jewish descent, and the family name translates as "polecat". He was the son of the town physician Dr. Moritz Iltis. He became a citizen of the newly established Republic of Czechoslovakia in 1919.
He attended the lower grades and the German-language gymnasium in Brünn and then went on to study biology and botany at the University of Zurich, Switzerland, from 1900-1903 as an assistant to Arnold Dodel-Port and later Alfred Ernst. He studied botany at the University of Prague under Hans Molisch from 1903-1905 where he received his Ph.D. in 1905.
In 1906, he served as secretary for Naturforschender Verein in Brünn, which was the society through which Gregor Mendel published his papers. In 1910, he raised funds for the Mendel Memorial in Brünn, and served as secretary for the International Committee for the Mendel Memorial. He gave the commemorative speech at the unveiling of the memorial. He was also the secretary for the Mendel Centenary in 1922, a celebration of the hundredth anniversary of Mendel's birth.
He taught biology at the German-language gymnasium in Brünn from 1905 to 1938, and he also held an appointment as a Privatdozent for botany and genetics at the Deutsche Technische Hochschule in Brünn from 1911-1938. He was the founder and director of the Masaryk People's University in Brno, an adult education evening school, from 1921 to 1938. This Volkshochschule was the largest institution for adult education in Czechoslovakia with an enrollment above 2000. He founded the Mendel Museum in Brno in 1932 and curated it to 1937. The museum contained many valuable manuscripts and relics of the life and work of Mendel.
A socialist, Iltis spent much of his time from 1930-1938 combating the racist biology of the Nazis. He was a key organizer and host of the 1932 Brno congress of the World League for Sexual Reform.
With the help of Franz Boas and Albert Einstein and the Emergency Committee in Aid of Displaced Foreign Scholars, the Iltis family received a United States visa in the fall of 1938. Hugo left Czechoslovakia in December 1938 on the last plane out and traveled to England to lecture. His wife Anni Iltis and their two boys left behind their life in Brno and joined him in January 1939 in France following a harrowing train ride through Germany and France. They sailed for the U.S. from the port Cherbourg on the passenger ship RMS Aquitania.
Initially, he taught for 5 weeks at the International School, run by Peter Ray Ogden. Following a chance meeting with Dean Alvey in the grocery store, he was offered a professorship in biology at Mary Washington College in Fredericksburg, Virginia, where he taught for approximately 12 years. He was also the founder and curator of the Mendel Museum of Genetics, now housed at the University of Illinois Archives. He died at Fredericksburg on June 22, 1952. His younger son was the plant morphologist and taxonomist Hugh Iltis. His elder son was the entomologist Fred Iltis.
Later in life, to his great surprise, he learned from his wife's sister Lisi Liebscher that his wife Anni Iltis was a distant cousin of Gregor Mendel.
He was a fellow in the A.A.A.S., a member of the Genetics Society of America, the American Genetics Association, the Virginia Academy of Science, and the American Association of University Professors.
He was listed in: Köpfe Europas, Wer Ist's?, Who Knows What?, and American Men of Science''.
Archives of his work are stored in the University of Wisconsin Library Special Collections.

Works