Historical Perspective

• Robert Hooke discovered cells in 1665, when he cut through a cork and mountain it in his crude microscope
• Anton van Leeuwenhoek observed the first living cells in rainwater using a crude microscope and named them animalcules that signifies little animals
• Robert Brown discovered the nucleus in 1831
• Dujardin observed the materials inside the cell and called sarcode in 1835
• Johannes Purkinje gave the name protoplasm to the complex materials inside the cell in 1839
• Matthias Schleiden and Theodor Schwann established the cell theory and claimed that cells is the function of all living things
• Rudolf Virchow proposed that living things are made up of cells, and cells come from existing cells, which debunked the spontaneous generation theory in 1855
• Matthias Schleiden discovered that all plants are composed of cells in 1838
• Theodor Schwann discovered that animals are composed of cells in 1839
• Walther Flemming showed that cells ensure continuity by a mechanism of mitosis
• Henrich Waldeyer discovered the precise partitioning of the chromosomes in 1890
• Oscar Hertwig discovered that the development of an embryo starts with the fusion of two nuclei, the egg and the sperm in 1875