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Robert Hooke
Hooke was a child prodigy that applied his technical abilities to invent ways of controlling the height and angle of microscopes. The king at the time, Charles II, only requested insect studies, but Hooke went beyond this and observed fabric, leaves, mica, flint and even frozen urine.
Opon the observation of a thinly sliced cork he discovered empty spaces contained by walls. he called them pores or cells. this term, cell, stuck and Hooke was given credit for discovering the cell. -
Anton Van Leeuwenhoek
After readign Hooke's booke Micrographia Leeuwenhoek was inspired to try his hand at science. He went on to discover blood cells, sperm cells, protists, and bacteria. Leeuwenhoek built a microscope with 250x magnification. Anton Van Leeuwenhoek went beyond Hooke's claim that cells were empty and reported "globules" in the cell. Thses "globules" were what many believe was the first sighting of nuclei. -
Henri Dutrochet
Dutrochet was the first to recognize the importance of green pigment in the use of carbon dioxide by plant cells. His experiments on osmosis recognized the role in internal plant transport and diffusion through semipermeable membranes. He was one of the first to recognize the importance of individual cells in an organism. -
Felix Dujardin
Dujardin propsed that many microscopic organisms are composed of one cell. He was also able to observe protozoa. Unlike Leeuwenhoek he made the point that cells are the basic unit of life. -
Theodor Schwann
Schwann showed that yeast were tiny plant-like organisms, and suggested that fermentation was a biological process. He examined animal tissue, specifically observing development in tadpoles. He extended Schleiden's cell theory to animals, stating that all living things are composed of cells. -
Matthias Jakob Schleiden
Schleiden studied plant structure under microscopes. He wrote “Contributions to Phytogenesis” in which he stated that the different parts of the plant organism are composed of cells. He also recognized the importance of the cell nucleus, discovered in 1831 by the Scottish botanist Robert Brown -
Rudolf Virchow
Virchow’s greatest accomplishment was his observation that a whole organism does not get sick—only certain cells or groups of cells. With this theory Virchow launched the field of cellular pathology; He stated that all diseases involve changes in normal cells. Virchow’s many discoveries include finding cells in bone and connective tissue.He believed that a diseased tissue was caused by a breakdown of order within cells and not from an invasion of a foreign organism.
