Editing Cell division (section)

== History ==

[[File:1943 Device for micro-cinematography- under the direction of Kurt Michel, the first film on cell division is produced in a Zeiss laboratory with the aid of a phase-contrast microscope (6892933110).jpg|thumb|upright| Kurt Michel with his phase-contrast microscope]]

At the beginning of the 19th century, various hypotheses circulated about cell proliferation, which became observable in plant and animal organisms as a result of advances in microscopy. While the proliferation of cells on the inner side of old cells,<ref>Charles F. B. de Mirbel, 1813</ref><ref>Pierre J. F. Turpin, 1825</ref> the attachment of vesicles to existing cells,<ref>Matthias Jacob Schleiden, 1838</ref> or crystallization in the intercellular space<ref>Theodor Schwann, 1839</ref> were postulated as mechanisms of cell proliferation, cell division itself had to fight for its acceptance for decades.

The Belgian botanist [[Barthélemy Charles Joseph Dumortier]] must be regarded as the first discoverer of cell division. In 1832, he described cell division in simple aquatic plants (French 'conferve') as follows (translated from French to English):

"The development of the conferve is as simple as its structure; it takes place by the attachment of new cells to the old, and this attachment always takes place from the end. The terminal cell elongates more than the deeper cells; then the production of a lateral bisector takes place in the inner fluid, which tends to divide the cell into two parts, of which the deeper one remains stationary, while the terminal part elongates again, forms a new inner partition, and so on. Is the production of the middle partition originally double or single? It is impossible to determine this, but it is always true that it later appears double when united, and that when two cells naturally separate, each of them is closed at both ends."<ref>B. C. Dumortier: Recherches sur la structure comparée et le développement des animaux et des végétaux. Bruxelles 1832.</ref>

In 1835, the German botanist and physician [[Hugo von Mohl]] described plant cell division in much greater detail in his dissertation on freshwater and seawater algae for his PhD thesis in medicine and surgery:<ref>Hugo von Mohl: Ueber die Vermehrung der Pflanzen-Zellen durch Theilung. Tübingen 1835.</ref>

"Among the most obscure phenomena of plant life is the manner in which the newly developing cells are formed. [...] and so there is no lack of manifold descriptions and explanations of this process. [...] and that gaps that were found in the observations were filled in by overly bold conclusions and assumptions." (translated from German to English)

In 1838, the German physician and botanist [[Franz Meyen|Franz Julius Ferdinand Meyen]] confirmed the mechanism of cell division at the root tips of plants.<ref>Franz Julius Ferdinand Meyen: Neues System der Pflanzenphysiologie. Berlin 1838.</ref>
The German-Polish physician [[Robert Remak]] suspected that he had already discovered animal cell division in the blood of chicken embryos in 1841,<ref>Robert Remak: Bericht über die Leistungen im Gebiete der Physiologie. Hrsg.: Arch. Anat., Physiol. und wiss. Med. 1841.</ref> but it was not until 1852 that he was able to confirm animal cell division for the first time in bird embryos, frog larvae and mammals.<ref>Robert Remak: Ueber extracellulare Entstehung thierischer Zellen und über Vermehrung derselben durch Theilung. Hrsg.: Arch. Anat., Physiol. und wiss. Med. 1852.</ref>

In 1943, cell division was filmed for the first time<ref>{{cite book |last=Masters|first=Barry R| name-list-style = vanc |chapter=History of the Optical Microscope in Cell Biology and Medicine|date=2008-12-15|publisher=John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.|isbn=978-0470016176|doi=10.1002/9780470015902.a0003082|title=Encyclopedia of Life Sciences}}</ref> by [[Kurt Michelwith|Kurt Michel]] using a [[Phase-contrast microscopy|phase-contrast microscope]].<ref>{{Citation|last=ZEISS Microscopy|title=Historic time lapse movie by Dr. Kurt Michel, Carl Zeiss Jena (ca. 1943)|date=2013-06-01|url=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ge4k3uiB3qw| archive-url=https://ghostarchive.org/varchive/youtube/20211107/Ge4k3uiB3qw| archive-date=2021-11-07 | url-status=live|access-date=2019-04-15}}{{cbignore}}</ref>