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Gerhard Röbbelen was born in Bremen on 10 May 1929. After an apprenticeship, he studied agriculture at the University of Göttingen and biology at the University of Freiburg. In 1956, he completed his doctorate under the renowned botanist and mutation researcher Friedrich Oelkers in Freiburg. He completed his habilitation in 1961 at the University of Göttingen under Arnold Scheibe. After a research stay in the USA, he became a scientific counsellor and professor at the Institute for Plant Production in Plant Breeding at the University of Göttingen, which he headed as director from 1967. He retired in 1994.
His scientific work was characterised by an unusual breadth. Gerhard Röbbelen was one of the pioneers of Arabidopsis research. He was the founder and editor of the Arabidopsis Information Service and thus laid the foundation for its rise to become a model plant in (genome-based) plant research. He then devoted himself to basic breeding research on numerous native cultivated species using the latest technologies such as mutation induction, cell and tissue culture and molecular markers. His work on oilseed rape is particularly noteworthy, however, and has earned him an outstanding national and international reputation. It was not least to his credit, in collaboration with his staff and in close cooperation with companies in the breeding industry, that this crop is now grown on over one million hectares in Germany.
He supervised 88 young researchers as a doctoral supervisor. His achievements in the organisation of science are particularly noteworthy. He was a founding member and later President of the German Society for Genetics, President of the German Society for Fat Science, President of the European Society for Plant Breeding Research (EUCARPIA) and a member of numerous scientific organisations and advisory boards, and he was editor of the journal Plant Breeding for many years. He was awarded honorary doctorates from the University of Kiel, the University of Halle-Wittenberg and Mendel University in Brno for his scientific achievements and his services to the reorganisation of the research landscape in the new German states. He was a member of the Göttingen Academy of Sciences and Humanities and the German Academy of Sciences Leopoldina. In 2001 he was awarded the Federal Cross of Merit First Class.