Laurens Gerhard Marinus Baas Becking

Lourens Gerhard Marinus Baas Becking (4 January 1895 in Deventer – 6 January 1963 in Canberra, Australia) was a Dutch botanist and microbiologist. He is known for the Baas Becking hypothesis, which he originally formulated as "Everything is everywhere, but the environment selects".

Biography Baas Becking was born in Deventer on 4 January 1895. In between completing his studies in Utrecht and submitting his thesis, Baas Becking worked in the laboratory of Thomas Hunt Morgan in the United States. In 1923, Baas Becking accepted the position of professor at Stanford, where he taught economic botany and plant physiology. and prefect (director) of the Hortus Botanicus Leiden. It was in Leiden that Baas Becking formulated the hypothesis known by his name. In 1934 he published the book Geobiology

Although his family moved to Java in 1940, the Battle of the Netherlands prevented his leaving, and he remained in the Netherlands during the five-year occupation. During this time, he was twice imprisoned for trying to escape to England. During his imprisonment, Baas Becking studied the typhoid fever spreading through his prison camp.

Baas Becking hypothesis

Based on his research in California's salt lakes, as well as work by others on salt lakes worldwide, Baas Becking (1934) Baas Becking attributed the first half of this hypothesis to his colleague Martinus Beijerinck (1913). Some years before, Schewiakoff (1893) also theorized about the cosmopolitan habitat of free-living protozoans.

The application of this hypothesis to microorganisms, specifically to the dependence of their geographic distribution over the earth on their metabolic properties, formed the basis of Baas Becking's research program at the Hortus Botanicus Leiden.

Baas Becking's hypothesis is often misquoted, with the "but" missing or replaced with "and".