University of Lorraine, Nancy, Lorraine, France
A student at the Faculties of Science and Medicine at the University of Lorraine at Nancy, René Maire was encouraged by the botanists Georges Le Monnier and Paul Vuillemin.
University of Lorraine, Nancy, Lorraine, France
A student at the Faculties of Science and Medicine at the University of Lorraine at Nancy, René Maire was encouraged by the botanists Georges Le Monnier and Paul Vuillemin.
Cortinarius mairei was named after René Maire.
https://www.amazon.com/Flore-lAfrique-du-Nord-8/dp/2720504394/?tag=2022091-20
1953
Botanist educator mycologist scientist
René Maire was born on May 29, 1878, in Lons-le-saunier, Franche-Comte, France to the family of a forest ranger. He was a native of Lorraine, a descendant of a bourgeois family from Lunéville and Metz. His mother died when he was only two years old. Maire spent his early childhood in the Franche-Comté countryside Gray. This is where the accident which deprived him of the use of an eye occurred. This accident would have an impact on his later life as a researcher.
A student at the Faculties of Science and Medicine at the University of Lorraine at Nancy, René Maire was encouraged by the botanists Georges Le Monnier and Paul Vuillemin. By the age of twenty, he had published about twenty papers. His interests led him to fieldwork as well as to laboratory observations. His favorite objects of study apart from the phanerogams were the fungi.
Maire's doctoral dissertation on the cytology of the Basidiomycetes, which he defended in Paris in 1905 is still a basic work.
René Maire displayed a precocious interest in botany and at the age of fifteen published his first observations on the vegetation of the Jura.
In 1911, after serving as a Lecturer at the Faculty of Sciences of Caen, Maire was named to the professor of botany at Algiers. He held this post at the French University of North Africa for nearly forty years.
On several voyages in the Mediterranean basin, Maire studied the phanerogams and fungi of Corsica (1902–1904), the Balearic Islands (1905), the Olympus Mountains, and the Taurus Mountains. He demonstrated the phytogeographical heterogeneity of Thessaly and Epirus and identified six stages of vegetation in that region. Maire first went to Africa in 1902. From Tangier he traversed the area south of Oran and the mountains of Tlemcen, visiting Tunisia in 1909. Permanently settled in Algiers, he explored the Djuradjura and Babor mountains, South Oran, Mount Daya, and the Tlemcen Mountains. Stationed in Thessaloniki during World War I, he spent his leaves on the island of Skíros and in Pilos. With Braun-Blanquet, who influenced his work, he published a phytogeographical sketch of Morocco (1925), after having climbed the High and Middle Atlas in 1921.
From 1931 to 1936 Maire made twenty-seven trips to Morocco. He described in detail the Mediterranean character of the Sous and examined the flora of the Moroccan coast, the Rif, Mount Zaian, Mount Tichchoukt, the summits of the High Atlas, the fir and oak forests of Tauzin, Ceuta and the Anti-Atlas, the high Dra River, the Tafilalet, and the plateau of the Lakes District. Maire held that the origins of the Moroccan flora and its autonomous evolution since the Pliocene, in conjunction with the penetration of the arcto-Tertiary floral element, explain the Iberian character of this vegetation. Maire was also active in these years in Algeria, notably in the Aurès Mountains, the phytogeographical map of which he helped to establish. From 1932 to 1935 he explored Western Sahara as far as Tindouf, as well as the Tefedest, the Hoggar, and the Tassili N’s Ajjer Mountains; he described three stages of tropical and Mediterranean vegetation in this region. The results of these gigantic botanical labors were set forth in Contributions à I’étude de la flore de l’Afrique du Nord; three volumes were prepared before Maire’s death, the remaining were completed by his successors.
A first-rate mycologist endowed with an exceptional memory, Maire studied various fungi of Europe and the Maghreb: Laboulbeniales, rusts, Pezizales, Gasteromycetes, and especially the fleshy agarics. In 1908, while traveling in Sweden, Maire encountered the work of Elias Fries, which left a lasting impression on his own work. In his study of the Russula, Maire introduced the Ariadne’s thread that permitted the discovery of the exact value of the characteristics of this difficult genus. His contributions to the mycology of the cedars of the Atlas Mountains and of Catalonia as well as to toxicology and to phytopathology are also important, and his account of the biology of the Uredinales is a model of clarity.
Several species were named in René Maire's honour, including fungi such as the beechwood sickener (Russula mairei), René Maire's ringless Amanita (Amanita mairei) from Egypt, Clitocybe mairei, Conocybe mairei, Clavicorona mairei, Cortinarius mairei, Galerina mairei, Hemimycena mairei, and Lactarius mairei, among others, as well as some North African plants such as the ornamental grass Atlas fescue (Festuca mairei).The genus Mairetis (Boraginaceae) is also named after him.
Maire's doctoral dissertation on the cytology of the Basidiomycetes, which he defended in Paris at the age of twenty-four, is still a basic work. In it, he explained why previous authors believed, wrongly, in the existence of acaryotic stages and he specified the nature of the metachromatic corpuscles. In addition, he outlined the nuclear evolution of the Ustilaginales (smuts) and the Uredinales and defined the synkaryon. The latter, which is found among the fleshy Basidiomycetes, is a caryologic unit formed from two morphologically distinct but intimately related nuclei. Finally, he demonstrated that among the Ustilaginales the budding basidiospores or sporidia have a structure identical to that of the true blastosporous fungi, such as the Saccharomyces.
Maire supported the observations of Pierre-Auguste Dangeard on the cytological characteristics that originate in the spores and the mycelium of these Ascomycetes, and he agreed with Dangeard that among the fungi, fertilization, which is proper to the higher plants, is replaced by the fusion of two nuclei in the mother cell of the basidium and of the ascus.
Maire became correspondent of the Paris Academy of Sciences in 1923 and nonresident member in 1946. He was also honorary president of the Société Mycologique de France, an organization in which he retained a lively interest.
A scientist whose devotion to work consumed all his energy, Maire was egocentric and severe about keeping to a regular schedule. There was no room in his life for anything besides his research. His personality bore the mark of his native Lorraine; he was even-tempered, rigorous, objective, easy to approach, indulgent, and accommodating - traits that made him universally popular.
There is no information on whether René Maire was ever married or had any children.
