After completing secondary school he travelled to the University of Copenhagen to study law but found himself more suited to the biological sciences into which he transferred.
He developed and used techniques to achieve the micromanipulation of single yeast cells and spores in order to investigate them on a genetic level.
In his 1917 doctoral thesis The Chromosomes: Their Numbers and General Importance, Winge presented his hypothesis of plant hybridization, which has motivated much research.
[7] Polyploidy has attracted scientific study for almost a century, since de Vries first described the Gigas ‘mutant’ of Oenothera lamarckiana, which was later shown to be a tetraploid ... Winge ... subsequently observed that different chromosome numbers within genera followed an arithmetic progression of multiplication (within the Asteraceae, for example, some species are 2n
Successful attempts to create ‘synthetic’ polyploids confirmed this hypothesis and helped to demonstrate potential mechanisms by which polyploidy could arise naturally ...[8]Winge was elected foreign member of the Royal Society in 1947.