A university makes plans

In 1870 the Biology Section at Stuttgart Polytechnic separated teaching into two independent disciplines: zoology and botany were taught by two different people for the first time.
This classical approach hardly changed at Universität Stuttgart until 1969, when illness and retirements led to a severe shortage of key staff.

That year the experimental physicist Heinz Pick took the initiative and devised a plan for Biology as part of a general expansion of teaching staff. This so-called Pick Plan also envisaged a new profile for the subject – with a focus on molecular biology.

But there was opposition to this plan. As the university also offered courses for future secondary school teachers, many considered it important that classical organismic biology should also be covered, and a counter-proposal was drawn up.
A third possibility, which was also one of the options to be voted on at the Senate meeting of 29 April 1970 was to move all of Biology at Stuttgart to the former Agricultural College at Hohenheim (also in Stuttgart).

When the majority voted for the Pick Plan, new appointments were made to the Chair of Zoology and the newly created Chair of Animal Physiology, and also to the Chair of Botany. The latter had been headed by Karl-Wolfgang Mundry, the tobacco mosaic virus specialist, since 1972 . His chair was originally named "Cell Biology II" to distinguish it from zoology. Yet it was only when it was renamed "Molecular Biology and Plant Virology" after he was given emeritus status that the name properly reflected its research focus.

In the years that followed, the ambitious Pick Plan was implemented less and less. Drastic cost-cutting measures forced the university to abandon the strict plan in order to be able to fill the few remaining professorships.
It was only during a second reorganisation of Biology at Stuttgart in the 1980s that many new institutes were founded. Mundry had a major influence on the design of the new course of Technical Biology.