Thread by @AdamRutherford

Happy Easter, to my humanist, Christian and other religious friends alike. Renewal, rebirth, eggs - affirmation of life and nature. Go well.

Eggs are a big part of developmental biology, my own field, and I worked with chicks and quails once upon a time. The technique we used was windowing, where you cut a small hole in the shell and cover it with sellotape, and observe development.

This was a technique used by the Polish Jewish scientist Robert Remak in the 19th C, who discovered one of the fundamental cornerstones of biology as a result: Cell Theory.

He found that cells are only born from existing cells, which was an important step in the eventual debunking of spontaneous generation by Louis Pasteur, which had been doctrine for many centuries.

But Remak was denied a full professorship because of his Jewishness, and this idea was pinched by Rudolf Virchow, who gave it a nice Latin phrase - “Omnis cellula e cellula”, and became (more) famous off the back of this.

Virchow, btw, was an interesting fellow and not a complete cad. His public health reforms were great, and once supposedly received a challenge from the Kaiser to a duel, and chose to use an infected sausage as his weapon. Wilhelm withdrew.

Anyway. Remak is one of the great unsigned heroes of biology, a brilliant experimentalist, who was denied his place in history through antisemitism typical of that age.

His son, Ernst Remak was a successful neuroscientist, and his son a mathematician who did significant work in group theory. He was murdered in Auschwitz in 1942.

Anyway, there you go, a little bit of the story of eggs, cells, and how science is never divorced from politics.

Fool I am, it was Bismark who challenged Virchow to a duel, not Wilhelm.
Wilhelm challenged him to a duet, and they did Islands in the Stream for Queen Victoria. She was not amused #HistoryofScience