The Czech botanist, Bohumil Němec, was born 12th March 1873 in the village of Prasek near Nový Bydžov as the son of a farmer, Václav Němec, and Marie Němcová, née Ulrichová. His secondary education was at the Nový Bydžov grammar school from 1883 to 1891 and he then studied natural sciences at the Philosophy Faculty of the Czech Charles-Ferdinand University in Prague. His university studies took place at the same time as the development of basic cytological research and discoveries in which the prominent Czech zoologist, František Vejdovský, played a significant role. It was at the latter's institute that Němec worked and studied and under his tutelage that he came to grasp the bases of scientific work.
He was awarded a doctorate in 1896, became an assistant lecturer at the University Botanical Institute under L. J. Čelakovský and altered his scientific orientation from his original zoology to botany, in which his main professors were to be Čelakovský and Josef Velenovský. Němec made skilful use of the zoological grounding and especially the experimental and microtechnical methods of the Vejdovský School for his botany research and he was soon able to publish his own original work.
In 1899, he received his second doctorate in the anatomy and physiology of plants at the Philosophy Faculty of the Charles-Ferdinand University. In 1903, he was appointed assistant professor and in 1907 professor ordinarius at this faculty. His name is associated with the beginnings and development of the Institute for Plant Physiology where he worked from 1901 as administrator and from 1903 as co-director, while extending the scope of his knowledge and education, making valuable personal contacts during his frequent study attachments abroad, mostly to neighbouring Germany.
The university became Němec's long-term place of work. For the 1919/1920 academic year he was elected Dean of the Philosophy Faculty and saw to its division into the Natural Sciences Faculty and the Philosophy Faculty. His Prague university career ended in 1939 when he was prematurely pensioned off. He mostly spent the war years working on a number of extensive textbook-style works, books popularizing science and other books for the lay reader, all of which were of a very high standard. After liberation, Bohumil Němec worked from 1945 to 1949 at the Comenius University in Bratislava where he headed the Plant Physiology and Biology Institute, which he had helped to establish, and he continued with his educational and scientific activities. Retaining his remarkable mental and physical alacrity, he lived on to the age of 93 and died after a short illness on 7th April 1966.
The focus of his research was experimental cytology, which he effectively established within the framework of Czech research and for which he was a recognized international expert. He acquired his global reputation primarily on the basis of his discovery of statolitic organs in plants. During his further research on plant cells he had many other achievements that were appraised both at home and abroad. He represented Czech science with dignity and pleasure abroad at numerous international conferences and congresses. He had many scientific and personal contacts in foreign countries where he was truly honoured and respected, an expression of this recognition being the large number of honorary memberships, orders and titles that he was awarded by foreign academies and learned societies. He took a considerable share in the organization of scientific work at home. From 1901, he was an associate member of the CASA, from 1908 a full member and subsequently secretary (1921-1926) and President of its Second Class (1927-1929). He was also a member of the RBLS - an associate from 1898, a full member from 1922, and Vice-President from 1932. He played a part in the establishment of the CSNRC, becoming a founding member in 1924, its president from 1931 to 1946 and in April 1946 he was elected honorary president for life. From 1953 he became a full CSAS member, i.e. an academician.
Němec was a prominent figure in the Czech national anti-Austrian movement and in the public and political life of the First Czechoslovak Republic. After the creation of the Czechoslovak state he was appointed to the first revolutionary National Assembly for the National Democratic Party. Later, from 1926 to 1929, he became a National Assembly senator, refusing to run for this party again, however, in 1929 and leaving it in 1934, the year he was elected Chairman of the Czechoslovak National Council. During the 1935 presidential elections, the Agrarian Party fielded him against Eduard Beneš for the presidential office but he eventually gave up this candidacy before the election took place and he did not subsequently engage to any significant extent in politics.
Bohumil Němec is rightly considered to be one of the foremost Czech and world botanists.
Written by Vaclav Podany
American-Czech relations
To mention just some items: B. Němec's memoirs - 52 notebooks containing a quantity of valuable historical information on the USA and American science, e.g. Recollections of the 1926 International Botanical Congress at Cornell University in Ithaca (B. Němec was requested to give a lecture at the Cytological Section). This section also contains a survey of American universities, which B. Němec considered to be of a high quality, including dates of establishment and the method of financing American institutes of higher education and an account of the development of American biology. Out of the contacts he had with illustrious individuals, mention can be made of A. B. Wilson, Chambers, Lillie, Loeb, Lennings, Harper, Blakeslee, Osterhout, E. Smith, Sharp. Most of the information on institutes concerns the organizers, Cornell University, and the Woods Hole Biological Station. His recollections of his second trip to the USA for the International Physiological congress in Boston again refer to the Biological Station at Woods Hole and there are meditations on lifestyle in the USA in general and New York in particular. Of the people involved, special mention can be made of Benedict, A. B. Stout, Bailey, Zirkel, Morgan and Osterhout. Further in the same work there is a passage entitled Visit of the American Botanist, Orton, American universities, medical colleges of the North American Union. Sign.I, ser. no. 52, b. 3, 4, 5.
Correspondence, e.g.: S. Lilley (6), 1948, ser. no. 632, A. C. Seward (1+1), 1930, some undated, ser. no. 894, Charles Singer (8), 1946, some undated, ser. no. 909, M. J. Sirks, 4, 1935 - 1947, ser. no. 910, F. J. M. Stratton, 7+1 enclosure, 1937 - 1945, ser. no. 958. All sign. II,b. 17, 20.
American Association for the Advancement of Science, Washington (1), 1947, American Forestry Association, Washington (1), 1947, American Chemical Society, Washington (1), 1961, American Optical Company, Southbridge (1), 1949, ser. no. 1171 - 1174, American Society for Cell Biology, Durham (3+4 enclosures), 1961, American Society of Plant Physiologists, Iowa City (1), 1937, American Society of Plant Physiologists, Miami University, Oxford (1), 1946, ser. no. 1175 - 1177. Rockefeller Foundation, New York (3), 1937, Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research, New York (1), 1939, ser. no. 1350 - 1351. All sign. II, b. 23, 24.
Articles, lectures and other materials: The Pluses and Minuses of America, 1) 4 pp, 2) 11pp (different version for Czechoslovak radio), undated. Sign. III, ser. no. 1737, b. 41.
What Does America Teach Us?, 6 pp, 1936. Sign. III, ser. no. 1844, b. 43.
American Institute in Prague - report on establishment, 1931. Sign. IV, ser. no. 1995, b. 50.
4 th July in America (presented on Czechoslovak radio), 7 pp, 1934. Sign. IV, ser. no. 2090, b. 52.
Materials from congresses and conventions: International Botanical Convention, Ithaca, 16.- 23. 8. 1925. Assessment of convention, report on the University at Ithaca and on the organization of American universities, 1925. Sign. IV, ser. no. 2162, b. 55.
13 th Physiological congress, Boston and New York 19.-23. a 25.-31. 8. 1929. Information bulletins, 1929. Sign. IV, ser. no. 2163, b. 55.
Third International Congress for Microbiology, New York, 2.-9. 9. 1939. Notification to B. Němec, that he had been elected Vice-President of the congress, 1939. Sign. IV, ser. no. 2168, b. 55.
10 th International Congress on the History of Natural Sciences and General Meeting of the Academy of the History of Sciences, Ithaca - Philadelphia, 23. 8.-8. 9. 1962. Proposal for trip, justification, correspondence, assessment of significance of the proceedings and of scientific congresses in general, 1962. Sign. IV, ser. no. 2179, b. 55.