Léo Errera

Origins and early life

Léo Errera was born at Laeken near Brussels on 4 September 1858 into a very wealthy Brussels family of Jewish origin: his father Jacques Errera was a banker of a Venetian Jewish house, and his maternal grandfather Joseph Oppenheim, born at Frankfurt in 1810, was a Jewish merchant and banker.

Work and career

Errera was not religiously observant, and this fiche says so plainly, but he never separated himself from the Jewish community and spoke and wrote publicly in its defence, notably after the Russian pogroms, arguing against the antisemitism that was spreading through European learned society in his lifetime. He studied at the Free University of Brussels and in the German laboratories of Sachs, Pfeffer and De Bary, and returned to found in Brussels the first modern institute of plant physiology in Belgium, of which he became director.

He discovered glycogen in fungi and in plant cells, showing that the animal storage sugar was not exclusive to animals; he worked on the physics of cell walls and of surface tension in living tissue, on the localization of alkaloids in plants, and on the statistical laws of variation, and he corresponded with Darwin and with the leading botanists of Europe. He was elected to the Académie royale de Belgique and published on the philosophy and teaching of science, arguing for laboratory work over recitation.

With his family's fortune he supported research directly: he was among the funders of Adrien de Gerlache's Belgica expedition, the first to winter in the Antarctic, and Cape Errera on Wiencke Island bears his name. He died at forty-six, at Uccle, on 1 August 1905, and the botanical institute of the ULB carries his name to this day.