Albert Ludwig Sigesmund Neisser
Neisser was born in the Silesian town of Schweidnitz (now Świdnica, in Poland), the son of a well-known Jewish physician, Dr. Moritz Neisser. After he completed the elementary school in Münsterberg, Neisser enrolled in the St. Maria Magdalena School in Breslau (now Wrocław, in Poland). In this school, he was a contemporary of another great name in the history of medicine, Paul Ehrlich. He obtained the Abitur in 1872.
Albertine Necker de Saussure
Albertine Necker de Saussure was the daughter of the Genevan scientist Horace-Bénédict de Saussure (1740-1799), a noted physicist, geologist, meteorologist, and Alpine explorer, and Albertine-Amélie Boissier (1745-1817). Horace-Bénédict taught his three children at home, ensuring that they received the best education available at the time. She learned English, German, Italian, and Latin, and her father also trained her in science. She supported her father's schooling in her later writings. Although a Calvinist, her religious views were broadminded and tolerant.
At age 19, Albertine married a noted botanist who was the son of Louis Necker and the nephew and namesake of Louis XVI's finance minister, Jacques Necker. The French Revolution ended Necker's military career and, in 1790, he began teaching as a demonstrator in botany at the l'académie de Genève, a job he had obtained because of his wife's surname. She initially wrote her husband's botany lectures for him, and she educated her own children in a wide range of subjects, including science. They lived in Cologny, and she became a close friend of her husband's cousin, the prominent writer and intellectual Germaine de Staël.