Hans Winkler
Hans Karl Albert Winkler (23 April 1877 – 22 November 1945) was a German botanist. He was Professor of Botany at the University of Hamburg, and a director of that university's Institute of Botany. Winkler coined the term 'heteroploidy' in 1916. He is remembered for coining the term 'genome' in 1920, by making a portmanteau of the words gene and chromosome. He wrote: 
This may be translated as: "I propose the expression "Genom" for the haploid chromosome set, which, together with the pertinent protoplasm, specifies the material foundations of the species ..."
History of botany
Following the establishment of Mendel's laws, the gene-chromosome theory of heredity was confirmed by the work of August Weismann who identified chromosomes as the hereditary material. Also, in observing the halving of the chromosome number in germ cells he anticipated work to follow on the details of meiosis, the complex process of redistribution of hereditary material that occurs in the germ cells. In the 1920s and 1930s population genetics combined the theory of evolution with Mendelian genetics to produce the modern synthesis. By the mid-1960s the molecular basis of metabolism and reproduction was firmly established through the new discipline of molecular biology. Genetic engineering, the insertion of genes into a host cell for cloning, began in the 1970s with the invention of recombinant DNA techniques and its commercial applications applied to agricultural crops followed in the 1990s. There was now the potential to identify organisms by molecular "fingerprinting" and to estimate the times in the past when critical evolutionary changes had occurred through the use of "molecular clocks".