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(Music)

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One of the great things about science

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is that when scientists make a discovery,

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it's not always in a prescribed manner,

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as in, only in a laboratory under strict settings,

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with white lab coats and all sorts of neat science gizmos

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that go, "Beep!"

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In reality,

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the events and people involved in some of the major scientific discoveries

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are as weird and varied as they get.

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My case in point:

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The Weird History of the Cell Theory.

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There are three parts to the cell theory.

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One: All organisms are composed of one or more cells.

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Two: The cell is the basic unit of structure and organization in organisms.

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And three: All cells come from preexisting cells.

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To be honest, this all sounds incredibly boring

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until you dig a little deeper into how the world of microscopic organisms

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and this theory came to be.

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It all started in the early 1600s,

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in the Netherlands, where a spectacle maker

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name Zacharias Jansen is said to have come up with the first compound microscope,

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along with the first telescope.

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Both claims are often disputed,

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as apparently he wasn't the only bored guy with a ton of glass lenses to play with at the time.

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Despite this,

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the microscope soon became a hot item

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that every naturalist or scientist at the time wanted to play with,

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making it much like the iPad of its day.

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One such person

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was a fellow Dutchman by the name of Anton van Leeuwenhoek,

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who heard about these microscope doohickies,

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and instead of going out and buying one,

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he decided to make his own.

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And it was a strange little contraption indeed,

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as it looked more like a tiny paddle the size of a sunglass lens.

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If he had stuck two together, it probably would have made a wicked set of sunglasses ...

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that you couldn't see much out of.

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Any-who, once Leeuwenhoek had his microscope ready,

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he went to town, looking at anything and everything he could with them,

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including the gunk on his teeth.

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Yes, you heard right.

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He actually discovered bacteria by looking at dental scrapings,

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which, when you keep in mind that people didn't brush their teeth much,

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if at all, back then,

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he must have had a lovely bunch of bacteria to look at.

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When he wrote about his discovery,

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he didn't call them bacteria, as we know them today.

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But he called them animalcules,

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because they looked like little animals to him.

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While Leeuwenhoek was staring at his teeth gunk,

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he was also sending letters to a scientific colleague in England,

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by the name of Robert Hooke.

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Hooke was a guy who really loved all aspects of science,

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so he dabbled in a little bit of everything, including physics, chemistry and biology.

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Thus it is Hooke who we can thank for the term "the cell,"

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as he was looking at a piece of cork under his microscope,

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and the little chambers he saw reminded him of cells,

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or the rooms monks slept in in their monasteries.

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Think college dorm rooms, but without the TV's, computers and really annoying roommates.

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Hooke was something of an under-appreciated scientist of his day,

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something he brought upon himself,

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as he made the mistake of locking horns with one of the most famous scientists ever,

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Sir Isaac Newton.

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Remember when I said Hooke dabbled in many different fields?

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Well, after Newton published a groundbreaking book

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on how planets move due to gravity,

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Hooke made the claim that Newton

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had been inspired by Hooke's work in physics.

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Newton, to say the least, did not like that,

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which sparked a tense relationship between the two that lasted even after Hooke died,

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as quite a bit of Hooke's research,

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as well as his only portrait, was "misplaced," due to Newton.

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Much of it was rediscovered, thankfully, after Newton's time,

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but not his portrait, as sadly no one knows what Robert Hooke looked like.

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Fast-forward to the 1800s,

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where two German scientists discovered something that today we might find rather obvious,

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but helped tie together what we now know as the cell theory.

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The first scientist was Matthias Schleiden,

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a botanist who liked to study plants under a microscope.

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From his years of studying different plant species,

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it finally dawned on him that every single plant he had looked at

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were all made of cells.

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At the same time, on the other end of Germany,

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was Theodor Schwann,

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a scientist who not only studied slides of animal cells under the microscope,

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and got a special type of nerve cell named after him,

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but also invented rebreathers for firefighters

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and had a kickin' pair of sideburns.

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After studying animal cells for a while,

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he too came to the conclusion that all animals were made of cells.

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Immediately, he reached out via snail mail,

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as Twitter had yet to be invented,

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to other scientists working in the same field,

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met with Schleiden, who got back to him, and the two started working on the beginnings of the cell theory.

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A bone of contention arose between them

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as for the last part of the cell theory,

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that cells come from preexisting cells.

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Schleiden didn't exactly subscribe to that thought,

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as he swore cells came from free cell formation,

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where they just kind of spontaneously crystalized into existence.

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That's when another scientist, named Rudolph Virchow,

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stepped in with research showing that cells did come from other cells,

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research that was actually -- hmm, how to put it? -- borrowed without permission

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from a Jewish scientist by the name of Robert Remak,

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which led to two more feuding scientists.

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Thus, from teeth gunk to torquing off Newton,

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crystallization to Schwann cells,

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the cell theory came to be an important part of biology today.

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Some things we know about science today may seem boring,

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but how we came to know them is incredibly fascinating.

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So if something bores you,

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dig deeper.

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It's probably got a really weird story behind it somewhere.