Marie Beatrice Schol-Schwarz

Who was Marie Beatrice Schol-Schwarz?

Dr Marie Beatrice Schol-Schwarz was the Dutch phytopathologist, better known simply as Bea Schwarz, who discovered the causal fungus of Dutch elm disease while studying for her doctorate at the University of Utrecht in 1922, where she was Johanna Westerdijk's first PhD student. Born in Batavia, Dutch East Indies in 1898, most of her early professional life was spent studying pathogens afflicting the groundnut Arachis hypogaea at the agricultural research station in Bogor. Marrying in 1926, Dr Schwarz retired from research to raise a family. When the East Indies were invaded by the Japanese army in 1942, Schwarz and her husband were interned in separate camps, her husband dying soon afterwards. After liberation, Schwarz and her two sons returned to the Netherlands, where she joined the Centraal Bureau voor Schimmelcultures at Baarn, studying various fungi and writing a monograph on the genus Epicoccum.

After her second retirement, she continued to study the genus Phialophora despite her rapidly failing health. Shortly before her death in 1969, she was made an Officer in the Order of Orange Nassau in recognition of her contribution to phytopathology