Cell: The Unit of Life

Aristotle (384-322BC), was the one who first recognised that animals and plants consists of organised Unit III: Cell biology and Biomolecules 118 structural units but unable to explain what it was. In 1660’s Robert Hooke observed something which looks like ‘honeycomb with a great numbers of little boxes’ which was later called as ‘cell’ from the cork tissue. In 1665, He compiled his work as Micrographia. Later, Anton Van Leeuwenhoek observed unicellular particles which he named as ‘animalcules’. Robert Brown (1831-39) described the spherical body in plant cell as nucleus. H. J. Dutrochet (1824), a French scientist, was the first to give an idea on cell theory. Later, Matthias Schleiden (German Botanist) and Theodor Schwann (German Zoologist) (1833) outlined the basic features of the cell theory. Rudolf Virchow (1858) explained the cell theory by adding a feature stating that all living cells arise from pre-existing living cells by ‘cell division’.