López Marmolejo Clere Mishell

A unifying concept: the history of cell theory.

3rd century bC: Aristotle talked about the “spontaneous generation”, that doctrine says that
water or land have the potential to generate some different kinds of living beings.
17th century: Early on this century, there is the invention of the microscope, which made
posible meet the world of microscopic life.
1658: Athanasius Kircher (1601– 1680) a Jesuit priest, demonstrated that in decayed
tissues, maggots and other living beings are developed.
By the same time Jan Swammerdam (1637–1680) a Dutch naturalist described oval red-
blood corpuscles, and also discovered that a frog embryo is made up of globular particles.
1665: An English physicist and a great microscopist as well, Robert Hooke, published the
first important work dedicated to microscopical observation, Micrographia, and showed the
relevance of the microscope for naturalists. He described the microscopic units that integrate
the structure of a slice of cork and took the term ‘‘cells’’ or ‘‘pores’’ to talk about those units
and he thought about the cork cells like they were passages for fluids involved in plant
growth.
October 9th, 1676: Antoni van Leeuwenhoek (Dutch,1632–1723) concluded, on a letter to
the Royal Society that the particles he saw under the microscope were living beings, that
because he saw they were motile, and he assumed that motility equals life. He also
described lots of particular forms of those microorganisms including protozoa and other
unicellular organisms, and he called them “animacules”.
18th century: Lazzaro Spallanzani (1729–1799) said no to the aristotelian doctrine of
“spontaneous generation”. Spallanzani and others researches showed that an organism
derives from another organism and that there’s a wall between life and non-life.
1781: Felice Fontana (1730–1805), an Italian Abbot, noticed the nucleus in epithelial cells;
even so, early in 18th century, this structure had probably been observated in animal and
plant cells.
19th century: Louis Pasteur (1822–1895) refuted oficially the “spontaneous generation”
theory.
1831: The nucleus was recognized as an essential constituent of living cells by Robert
Brown (1773– 1858) a Scottish botanist, who also introduced the term. While working with
orchids, he observed on their leaves “a single circular areola, generally somewhat more
opake than the membrane of the cell... This areola, or nucleus of the cell as perhaps it might
be termed, is not confined to the epidermis, being also found not only in the pubescence of
the surface... but in many cases in the parenchyma or internal cells of the tissue”, so, in
those cells, Brown recognized the general occurrence of the nucleus and it looks like he
thought about the plant organization in matters of cellular components.
1830’s: Achromatic microscopes were introduced, making posible obtain more precise
histological observations. Tissuepreservation and -treating techniques were improved as
well.
1838: Matthias Jakob Schleiden (1804–1881), a German botanist, came up with the idea
that all the structural elements of plants are composed of cells or their products.
 López Marmolejo Clere Mishell

1839: The zoologist Theodor Schwann (1810–1882) came up with a similar conclusion to
that of Schleiden, but this time, the conclusion was made for animals. Schwann said “the
elementary parts of all tissues are formed of cells” and “there is one universal principle of
development for the elementary parts of organisms... and this principle is in the formation of
cells”. Both ideas of Schleiden and Schwann are contemplated to represent the official
formulation of the ‘cell theory’.
1850’s: Robert Remak (1815–1865), Rudolf Virchow (1821–1902) and Albert Kölliker
(1817–1905) said no to the ‘free cell formation’ theory that was made by Schwann who said
that the first phase of the generation of cells was the formation of a nucleus of
‘‘crystallization’’ within the intracellular substance (that he called ‘‘cytoblast’’), and then the
subsequent progressive enlargement of that condensed material become a new cell. So,
they showed that cells are made through the scission of pre-existing cells.
Virchow’s aphorism omnis cellula e cellula or “every cell from a pre-existing cell” turned into
the base of the theory of tissue formation. By that time, diseases started to be seen as an
alteration of cells in the organism, and Virchow talked about his pathogenic concept
“cellularpathologie”.
1865: Karl Deiters (1834) died in 1863, two years later, a book written by him was published,
the book had awesome descriptions and drawings of nerve cells that he studied by using
histological methods and microdissections made with thin needles under the microscope,
he said that nerve cells have a soma, dendrites and a nerve prolongation (axon) with no
branching.
1867: The fifth edition of Köllike’s most important book on histology was published, on that
edition he proposed that sensory and motor cells of the right and left halves of the spinal
cord were linked “by anastomoses” (direct fusion).
1870: Oilimmersion lens were introduced and the microtome technique and the use of new
fixing methods and dyes that improved microscopy were developed.
1872: Joseph Gerlach (1820–1896) a German histologist, expanded Köllike’s idea and he
said that in all of the central nervous system, nerve cells set up anastomoses with each
other through a network formed by the minute branching of their dendrites. So, the network
or reticulum was an essential element of grey matter that supply a system for anatomical
and functional communications, a protoplasmic continuum from where nerve fibres were
originated.
1873: The ‘black reaction’ was developed by Camillo Golgi (1843-1926) when he said to a
friend “I am delighted that I have found a new reaction to demonstrate, even to the blind, the
structure of the interstitial stroma of the cerebral cortex. I let the silver nitrate react with
pieces of brain hardened in potassium dichromate. I have obtained magnificent results and
hope to do even better in the future.” That supplied, for the first time, a total view of a nerve
cell and its processes, that even when they were far away from the cell body could be
followed and analysed. He discovered that dendrites are not fused in a network. He thought
that the branched axons stained by his black reaction formed a gigantic continuous network
along which the nervous impulse propagated. But he was on a mistake.
Late on 1800’s: The principal organelles were identificated.
Walther Flemming (1843–1905) called “chromatin” to the structures that with the nucleus,
the nucleolus and a stainable substance could be seen and also some others structures
(ribbons, bands and threads) that appeared during cell divisision and in 1882 introduced the
 López Marmolejo Clere Mishell

term “mitosis” and described its processes. He also said that each half chromosome moves
to the opposite pole of the mitotic nucleus, that after he observed the longitudinal splitting of
salamander chromosomes during metaphase.
1886: Wilhelm His (1831–1904) who was a Swiss embryologist presented the idea that the
nerve-cell body and its prolongations form an independent unit. By thinking about how the
axons terminate at the motor plate and how sensory fibres originate at peripheral receptors
such as the Pacinian corpuscles, he came up with the idea that a separation of cell units
might be true of the central nervous system. So the nervous system started to be seen, like
any other tissue, as a sum of anatomically and functionally independent cells, which interact
by contiguity ahead that by continuity.
1887: August Forel (1848–1931) a Swiss psychiatrist, came to the same conclusion as His.
1888: Wilhelm Waldeyer (1836–1921) introduced the term “chromosomes”.
1891: Waldeyer bringed on the term ‘‘neurons’’ to talk about independent nerve cells. Since
there, when the cell theory was applied to the nervous system it was known as the ‘neuron
theory’.
1897: The word ‘‘ergastoplasm’’ (endoplasmic reticulum) was bringed on.
1898: The mitochondria was named by Carl Benda (1857–1933) and already observed by
many authors.
Camilo Golgi discovered the intracellular apparatus that has his name.
Also, Santiago Ramón y Cajal (1852-1934) made neuroanatomical investigations that were
useful to the foundations of the basic concepts of modern neuroscience. He used as a base
the Golgi’s “black reaction”.