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SELF-MADE THINGS
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Wednesdays听27 July听to 24听August听2005 9.00-9.30pm |
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In this five-part series, Jonathan Miller returns to his roots in medicine and tells the story of how we came to understand reproduction & heredity. Disposing with the idea of an external, perhaps听even supernatural,听vitalising force, he describes how we have arrived at the picture of ourselves and all organisms as Self-Made Things.
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Programme 3
This week, Jonathan Miller describes eighteenth and nineteenth century efforts to identify the cell as the underlying structure of living things.
It's sometimes suggested that the English microscopist Robert Hooke discovered the cell in the mid-seventeenth century, but as Simon Schaffer tells Jonathan, the 'cells' that Hooke saw in sections of cork were empty, and Hooke only called them 'cells' because they reminded him of monkish cells in a monastery.
The question of how to describe bodily structures before a conceptual framework existed was a real problem for those biologists trying to understand the inner processes of life.
Janet Browne explains how French scholars used a terminology of fibres and textiles to describe what they saw through the microscope. Paul Nurse argues that, in their efforts to identify and describe the basic units of life, nineteenth century biologists borrowed the concept of the atom from physics, and tried to apply it to the living world.
The major embryological breakthroughs came in Germany. Nick Hopwood describes how Christian Pander and Karl Ernst von Baer created a new language of 'germ layers' to describe the early embryo.
Although the German duo, Schleiden & Schwann, are often credited with the actual discovery of the cell, historians like Robert Olby give them credit for focussing attention on the cell, even though their descriptions of cell division as a process of crystallisation or precipitation were eventually shown to be wrong.
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