The Birth of the Cell (review)

The Birth of the Cell. By Henry Harris. New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 2000. Pp. x + 212. $17 (paper).

In a time when we are moving beyond multi-headed light microscopes and scanning and transmission electron microscopes to molecular chemistry and genetic identification of biological activity and disease, it seems a long time ago when natural philosophers were caught up with the problems of poor optics, nationalism, and language specialization--all making it difficult to develop the cell theory, which was necessary in building our present knowledge of biology, histology, and pathology. In The Birth of the Cell, Henry Harris wonderfully describes each of the botanists and zoologists who contributed to the conclusion that all living matter is made up of cells and their matrixes. How did this evolve from the Aristotelian notion that all living matter is "seamlessly continuous"? Aristotle had in his time to contend with Leucippus and Democritus, the founding fathers of Greek atomism. The notion of logical subunits was suppressed by Aristotelian advocates through classical times and the Dark Ages. Only in the Renaissance did atomism begin to rise again and provide an underlying basic philosophy that supported the idea that uniform basic subunits must exist in all living matter. Harris states that it is this organizational concept of living tissues that was the most important factor in developing the cell theory--even more important than the mechanical improvements in the compound microscope. But in fact, starting in the early 1600s, both were necessary in developing the cell theory.

Galileo and Hooke improved microscopic optics. Grew and Malpighi first described plant and animal cells. The animal cells were much more difficult to visualize as they were smaller and had pliable, less supporting walls. At first they were described as fibers and globules, but eventually Hooke's 1665 term "cells" caught on. In the beginning, plant cells were thought to contain air, as that is how they were first seen in dried cork or stem specimens. One hundred years after Hooke, French and German investigators were still speaking of animal cells as vesicles, globules, twisted fibers, or cells. The French and German scientists seldom read the other's literature, and each claimed to have developed the concept of the "cell unit."

Harris points out that because there was no universal language for scientists to communicate with each other and because it remains difficult to determine which scientists were reading which others' work confuses the issue of who knew what when, with the result that nationalistic differences came to be magnified. Each of the major language (English, French, and German) countries pushed their own discoveries ahead of their competitors', and the lesser language countries, such as Scotland, Bohemia, Italy, and Russia, had an even harder time getting their observations and interpretations accepted in the scientific community. In the end the correct science was accepted, but it took longer if it arose from a less powerful scientific community. Sometimes a scientific observation or interpretation generated in a lesser scientific community went unnoticed, and later a scientist from a greater community made the same observation or interpretation and was given credit as the primary discoverer of that point. Harris has done his best by his wide reading, to give credit back to the first scientist by identifying earlier publication dates.

By 1800 both the French (Dutrochet and Raspail) and the Germans (Traviranus and Link) were developing the concept that a vesicle or cell was a physiologic entity with a semi-permeable membrane separating it from its surroundings. Thirty years later, when microscopes were getting better, Meyer and Dumortier saw cell division in root tip cells, longer cells dividing to become two separate cells. At this time, new cells were thought to be created by the binary fission of existing cells, to form inside pre-existing cells, or to arise out of homogeneous non-cellular material. Purkinje, a Moravian, and Müller, a German, were pointing out that both animals and...