History of Cell Division

The idea that cells divide to produce new cells was built up over more than two centuries of observation, from Robert Hooke's first use of the word 'cell' in 1665 to the identification of chromosomes and mitosis in the 1870s-80s. Antonie van Leeuwenhoek's improved microscopes (1670s) let him see living cells, including the structure of bacteria, for the first time. Robert Brown (1831-33) noticed a dense body inside orchid root cells and named it the nucleus. Jan Evangelista Purkyne coined 'protoplasm' for the living substance of the cell in 1839, and Matthias Schleiden and Theodor Schwann combined plant and animal observations into the Cell Theory (1838-39), later completed by Rudolf Virchow's dictum 'omnis cellula e cellula' - every cell arises from a pre-existing cell (1858). Anton Schneider first described chromosomes as thread-like nuclear filaments in 1873, Walther Flemming coined the term 'mitosis' and described chromosome behaviour during division in 1882, and the Belgian cytologist Edouard Van Beneden, working on the roundworm Ascaris, showed in 1883 how chromosomes organise themselves during meiosis (gamete formation). Theodor Boveri (1888) identified the centrosome and helped establish the chromosome theory of heredity. Together these findings established that all …