chapter 3 Cellualr Biology.pptVIP

It wasnt until the 1830s that the widespread importance of cells was realized. In 1838, Matttuas Schleiden, a German lawyer turned botanist, concluded that, despite differences in the structure of various tissues, plants were made of cells and that the plant embryo arose from a single cell. In 1839, Theodor Schwann, a German zoologist and colleague of Schleidens, published a comprehensive report on the cellular basis of animal life. Schwann concluded that the cells of plants and animals are similar structures and proposed these two tenets of cell theory: 1). All organisms are composed of one or more cells. 2). The cell is the structural unit of life. Schleiden and Schwanns ideas on the origin of cells proved to be less insightful; both agreed that cells could arise from noncellular materials. Given the prominence that these two scientists held in the scientific world, it took a number of years before observations by other biologists were accepted as demonstrating that cells did not arise in this manner any more than organisms arose by spontaneous generation. By 1855, Rudolf Virchow, a German pathologist, had made a convincing case for the third tenet of the cell theory: Cells can arise only by division from a preexisting cell. Notes to the Difficult Sentences For 50 years, Leeuwenhoek sent letters to the Royal Society of London describing his microscopic observations - along with a rambling discourse on his daily habits and the state of his health. Leeuwenhoek was the first to examine a drop of pond water under the microscope and, to his amazement, to observe the teeming microscopic “animalcules” that darted back and forth before his eyes. He was also the first to describe various forms of bacteria, which he obtained from water in which pepper had been soaked and from scrapings of his teeth. His initial letters to the Royal Society describing this previously unseen world were met with such skepticism that the society dispatched its curator, Robert Hooke, to confirm