Everything about Walther Flemming totally explained
Walther Flemming (born
April 211843 in
Sachsenberg,
Germany; died
August 41905 in
Kiel) was a founder of the study of
cytogenetics.
He was born as the fifth child and only son of the
psychiatrist Carl Friedrich Flemming (1799-1880) and his second wife, Auguste Winter. He did his basic studies at the
Gymnasium der Residenzstadt, where one of his colleagues and lifelong friends was writer
Heinrich Seidel (External Link
).
Flemming trained in
medicine at the
University of Rostock, graduating in
1868. Afterwards. he served in 1870-1871 as a military physician in the
Franco-Prussian War. From
1873 to
1876 he worked as a teacher at the
University of Prague. In 1876 he accepted a post as a professor of
anatomy at the
University of Kiel, where he stayed until
1901, shortly before his death, and where he became the director of the Anatomical Institute.
Making use of
aniline dyes he was able to find a structure which strongly absorbed
basophilic dyes, which he named
chromatin. He identified that chromatin was correlated to threadlike structures in the
cell nucleus— the
chromosomes (meaning
coloured body), which were thus named later on by German anatomist
Wilhelm von Waldeyer-Hartz (1836-1921). The Belgian scientist
Edouard Van Beneden (1846-1910) had independently observed them, too.
Flemming investigated the process of
cell division and the distribution of chromosomes to the daughter nuclei, a process he called
mitosis from the Greek word for thread. However, he didn't yet realize the splitting into identical halves, the daughter chromatids. He studied mitosis both
in vivo and in stained preparations, using as the source of biological material the
fins and
gills of
salamanders. These results were published in
1882 in the seminal book
Zellsubstanz, Kern und Zelltheilung (1882; Cell Substance, Nucleus and Cell Division). On the basis of his discoveries, Flemming surmised for the first time that all cell nuclei came from another predecessor nucleus (he coined the phrase
omnis nucleus e nucleo, after
Virchow's omnis cellula e cellula).
Flemming was unaware of
Gregor Mendel's (1822-1884) work on
heredity, so he didn't make the connection between his observations and genetic inheritance. Two decades would pass before the significance of Flemming's work was truly realized with the rediscovery of Mendel's rules. His discovery of mitosis and chromosomes is considered one of the 100 most important scientific discoveries of all times
(External Link), and one of the 10 most important discoveries in
cell biology (External Link) (together with
August Weismann's (1834-1914) discovery of
meiosis,
Theodor Schwann (1810-1882) and
Matthias Schleiden's (1804-1881)
cell theory and
Thomas Hunt Morgan's (1866-1945) first
genetic maps).
Flemming's name is honoured by a medal awarded by the
German Society for Cell Biology (Deutschen Gesellschaft für Zellbiologie).
Further Information
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