Noël Bernard: 'Fransk botaniks største håb'

During his short but productive career, Noël Bernard (1874–1911) shed much light on the nature of the endophytic fungi found in orchids and their importance to their survival. His major discovery was the symbiotic germination of orchid seeds. On the 3 May 1899, at the age of 25 and still studying for his doctorate, while walking in the Fontainebleau Forest near Melun, where he was doing his military national service, he discovered a dead, rotting infructescence of the achlorophyllous Neottia nidus-avis (bird’s-nest orchid).

According to Joseph Arditti (2022), Bernard’s discovery of orchid mycorrhiza is one of the five most important orchid discoveries, the other four being the early writings by Theophrastus on orchids in Europe, the establishment of the family Orchidaceae by Lindley, Lewis Knudson’s method for asymbiotic seed germination, and Gavino Rotor’s first orchid micropropagation. In a letter to Joseph Magrou, the French physicist Jean Perrin (1870–1942), winner of the 1926 Nobel Prize, gives us a clear glimpse into the rich potential of Noël Bernard:

‘I recently saw Jacques Loebb, a physiologist at the Rockefeller Institute. […] We spoke a lot about Noël, whom he admires a lot. I told him that Bernard was probably the greatest hope of French botany and that his death had perhaps been a bigger social loss than that of [Marie] Curie or [Henri] Poincaré’.