History of Cell Biology (November 2014)

Although egg cells are visible to the naked eye, the history of cell biology is closely coupled to that of microscopy. In nearly 350 years, cell research has produced an extraordinary rich panorama of studies, concepts and representations. Robert Hooke's 1665 analogy to monk cells, the transition from ‘cellular tissue’ to single ‘cells’ around the year 1800, Schleiden and Schwann's identification of the cell as the elementary unit of life, the prominent status it gained during cytology's expansion to the other fields of biomedical inquiry, Schultze's definition as ‘a clump of protoplasm containing a nucleus’, the worlds of endocellular and ultrastructural organization, the ‘compartimentalization’ of the cell in the 1950s and 1960s, its role as map for biochemical and molecular research, all these are just few of the many historical answers to the question ‘what is a cell and what is it good for?’