WEBVTT 00:00:00.000 --> 00:00:13.000 (Music) 00:00:13.000 --> 00:00:16.000 One of the great things about science 00:00:16.000 --> 00:00:18.000 is that when scientists make a discovery, 00:00:18.000 --> 00:00:20.000 it's not always in a prescribed manner, 00:00:20.000 --> 00:00:24.000 as in, only in a laboratory under strict settings, 00:00:24.000 --> 00:00:28.000 with white lab coats and all sorts of neat science gizmos 00:00:28.000 --> 00:00:29.000 that go, "Beep!" 00:00:29.000 --> 00:00:30.000 In reality, 00:00:30.000 --> 00:00:34.000 the events and people involved in some of the major scientific discoveries 00:00:34.000 --> 00:00:37.000 are as weird and varied as they get. 00:00:37.000 --> 00:00:38.000 My case in point: 00:00:38.000 --> 00:00:41.000 The Weird History of the Cell Theory. 00:00:41.000 --> 00:00:44.000 There are three parts to the cell theory. 00:00:44.000 --> 00:00:48.000 One: All organisms are composed of one or more cells. 00:00:48.000 --> 00:00:53.000 Two: The cell is the basic unit of structure and organization in organisms. 00:00:53.000 --> 00:00:57.000 And three: All cells come from preexisting cells. 00:00:57.000 --> 00:01:01.000 To be honest, this all sounds incredibly boring 00:01:01.000 --> 00:01:06.000 until you dig a little deeper into how the world of microscopic organisms 00:01:06.000 --> 00:01:07.000 and this theory came to be. 00:01:07.000 --> 00:01:10.000 It all started in the early 1600s, 00:01:10.000 --> 00:01:12.000 in the Netherlands, where a spectacle maker 00:01:12.000 --> 00:01:16.000 name Zacharias Jansen is said to have come up with the first compound microscope, 00:01:16.000 --> 00:01:18.000 along with the first telescope. 00:01:18.000 --> 00:01:20.000 Both claims are often disputed, 00:01:20.000 --> 00:01:25.000 as apparently he wasn't the only bored guy with a ton of glass lenses to play with at the time. 00:01:25.000 --> 00:01:27.000 Despite this, 00:01:27.000 --> 00:01:29.000 the microscope soon became a hot item 00:01:29.000 --> 00:01:33.000 that every naturalist or scientist at the time wanted to play with, 00:01:33.000 --> 00:01:35.000 making it much like the iPad of its day. 00:01:35.000 --> 00:01:37.000 One such person 00:01:37.000 --> 00:01:41.000 was a fellow Dutchman by the name of Anton van Leeuwenhoek, 00:01:41.000 --> 00:01:43.000 who heard about these microscope doohickies, 00:01:43.000 --> 00:01:45.000 and instead of going out and buying one, 00:01:45.000 --> 00:01:47.000 he decided to make his own. 00:01:47.000 --> 00:01:50.000 And it was a strange little contraption indeed, 00:01:50.000 --> 00:01:54.000 as it looked more like a tiny paddle the size of a sunglass lens. 00:01:54.000 --> 00:01:58.000 If he had stuck two together, it probably would have made a wicked set of sunglasses ... 00:01:58.000 --> 00:02:01.000 that you couldn't see much out of. 00:02:01.000 --> 00:02:04.000 Any-who, once Leeuwenhoek had his microscope ready, 00:02:04.000 --> 00:02:08.000 he went to town, looking at anything and everything he could with them, 00:02:08.000 --> 00:02:10.000 including the gunk on his teeth. 00:02:10.000 --> 00:02:12.000 Yes, you heard right. 00:02:12.000 --> 00:02:17.000 He actually discovered bacteria by looking at dental scrapings, 00:02:17.000 --> 00:02:21.000 which, when you keep in mind that people didn't brush their teeth much, 00:02:21.000 --> 00:02:23.000 if at all, back then, 00:02:23.000 --> 00:02:27.000 he must have had a lovely bunch of bacteria to look at. 00:02:27.000 --> 00:02:29.000 When he wrote about his discovery, 00:02:29.000 --> 00:02:31.000 he didn't call them bacteria, as we know them today. 00:02:31.000 --> 00:02:34.000 But he called them animalcules, 00:02:34.000 --> 00:02:36.000 because they looked like little animals to him. 00:02:36.000 --> 00:02:39.000 While Leeuwenhoek was staring at his teeth gunk, 00:02:39.000 --> 00:02:42.000 he was also sending letters to a scientific colleague in England, 00:02:42.000 --> 00:02:44.000 by the name of Robert Hooke. 00:02:44.000 --> 00:02:48.000 Hooke was a guy who really loved all aspects of science, 00:02:48.000 --> 00:02:53.000 so he dabbled in a little bit of everything, including physics, chemistry and biology. 00:02:53.000 --> 00:02:57.000 Thus it is Hooke who we can thank for the term "the cell," 00:02:57.000 --> 00:03:00.000 as he was looking at a piece of cork under his microscope, 00:03:00.000 --> 00:03:04.000 and the little chambers he saw reminded him of cells, 00:03:04.000 --> 00:03:08.000 or the rooms monks slept in in their monasteries. 00:03:08.000 --> 00:03:14.000 Think college dorm rooms, but without the TV's, computers and really annoying roommates. 00:03:14.000 --> 00:03:17.000 Hooke was something of an under-appreciated scientist of his day, 00:03:17.000 --> 00:03:19.000 something he brought upon himself, 00:03:19.000 --> 00:03:23.000 as he made the mistake of locking horns with one of the most famous scientists ever, 00:03:23.000 --> 00:03:24.000 Sir Isaac Newton. 00:03:24.000 --> 00:03:27.000 Remember when I said Hooke dabbled in many different fields? 00:03:27.000 --> 00:03:30.000 Well, after Newton published a groundbreaking book 00:03:30.000 --> 00:03:32.000 on how planets move due to gravity, 00:03:32.000 --> 00:03:34.000 Hooke made the claim that Newton 00:03:34.000 --> 00:03:37.000 had been inspired by Hooke's work in physics. 00:03:37.000 --> 00:03:40.000 Newton, to say the least, did not like that, 00:03:40.000 --> 00:03:45.000 which sparked a tense relationship between the two that lasted even after Hooke died, 00:03:45.000 --> 00:03:47.000 as quite a bit of Hooke's research, 00:03:47.000 --> 00:03:52.000 as well as his only portrait, was "misplaced," due to Newton. 00:03:52.000 --> 00:03:55.000 Much of it was rediscovered, thankfully, after Newton's time, 00:03:55.000 --> 00:04:00.000 but not his portrait, as sadly no one knows what Robert Hooke looked like. 00:04:00.000 --> 00:04:02.000 Fast-forward to the 1800s, 00:04:02.000 --> 00:04:07.000 where two German scientists discovered something that today we might find rather obvious, 00:04:07.000 --> 00:04:10.000 but helped tie together what we now know as the cell theory. 00:04:10.000 --> 00:04:13.000 The first scientist was Matthias Schleiden, 00:04:13.000 --> 00:04:16.000 a botanist who liked to study plants under a microscope. 00:04:16.000 --> 00:04:20.000 From his years of studying different plant species, 00:04:20.000 --> 00:04:23.000 it finally dawned on him that every single plant he had looked at 00:04:23.000 --> 00:04:26.000 were all made of cells. 00:04:26.000 --> 00:04:29.000 At the same time, on the other end of Germany, 00:04:29.000 --> 00:04:30.000 was Theodor Schwann, 00:04:30.000 --> 00:04:34.000 a scientist who not only studied slides of animal cells under the microscope, 00:04:34.000 --> 00:04:37.000 and got a special type of nerve cell named after him, 00:04:37.000 --> 00:04:41.000 but also invented rebreathers for firefighters 00:04:41.000 --> 00:04:42.000 and had a kickin' pair of sideburns. 00:04:42.000 --> 00:04:45.000 After studying animal cells for a while, 00:04:45.000 --> 00:04:49.000 he too came to the conclusion that all animals were made of cells. 00:04:49.000 --> 00:04:51.000 Immediately, he reached out via snail mail, 00:04:51.000 --> 00:04:54.000 as Twitter had yet to be invented, 00:04:54.000 --> 00:04:56.000 to other scientists working in the same field, 00:04:56.000 --> 00:05:01.000 met with Schleiden, who got back to him, and the two started working on the beginnings of the cell theory. 00:05:01.000 --> 00:05:03.000 A bone of contention arose between them 00:05:03.000 --> 00:05:05.000 as for the last part of the cell theory, 00:05:05.000 --> 00:05:08.000 that cells come from preexisting cells. 00:05:08.000 --> 00:05:11.000 Schleiden didn't exactly subscribe to that thought, 00:05:11.000 --> 00:05:14.000 as he swore cells came from free cell formation, 00:05:14.000 --> 00:05:18.000 where they just kind of spontaneously crystalized into existence. 00:05:18.000 --> 00:05:21.000 That's when another scientist, named Rudolph Virchow, 00:05:21.000 --> 00:05:25.000 stepped in with research showing that cells did come from other cells, 00:05:25.000 --> 00:05:29.000 research that was actually -- hmm, how to put it? -- borrowed without permission 00:05:29.000 --> 00:05:32.000 from a Jewish scientist by the name of Robert Remak, 00:05:32.000 --> 00:05:35.000 which led to two more feuding scientists. 00:05:35.000 --> 00:05:38.000 Thus, from teeth gunk to torquing off Newton, 00:05:38.000 --> 00:05:41.000 crystallization to Schwann cells, 00:05:41.000 --> 00:05:44.000 the cell theory came to be an important part of biology today. 00:05:44.000 --> 00:05:48.000 Some things we know about science today may seem boring, 00:05:48.000 --> 00:05:52.000 but how we came to know them is incredibly fascinating. 00:05:52.000 --> 00:05:55.000 So if something bores you, 00:05:55.000 --> 00:05:56.000 dig deeper. 00:05:56.000 --> 00:06:00.000 It's probably got a really weird story behind it somewhere.