1
00:00:14,004 --> 00:00:16,183
One of the great things about science

2
00:00:16,207 --> 00:00:18,745
is that when scientists make a discovery,

3
00:00:18,769 --> 00:00:21,275
it's not always in a prescribed manner,

4
00:00:21,299 --> 00:00:24,419
as in, only in a laboratory
under strict settings,

5
00:00:24,443 --> 00:00:25,864
with white lab coats

6
00:00:25,888 --> 00:00:29,108
and all sorts of neat
science gizmos that go, "Beep!"

7
00:00:29,715 --> 00:00:31,033
In reality,

8
00:00:31,057 --> 00:00:32,486
the events and people involved

9
00:00:32,510 --> 00:00:34,879
in some of the major
scientific discoveries

10
00:00:34,903 --> 00:00:37,292
are as weird and varied as they get.

11
00:00:37,645 --> 00:00:39,226
My case in point:

12
00:00:39,250 --> 00:00:41,929
The Weird History of the Cell Theory.

13
00:00:42,633 --> 00:00:44,762
There are three parts to the cell theory.

14
00:00:44,786 --> 00:00:48,909
One: all organisms are composed
of one or more cells.

15
00:00:48,933 --> 00:00:51,449
Two: the cell is the basic
unit of structure

16
00:00:51,473 --> 00:00:53,337
and organization in organisms.

17
00:00:53,361 --> 00:00:57,484
And three: all cells come
from preexisting cells.

18
00:00:57,508 --> 00:01:01,548
To be honest, this all sounds
incredibly boring

19
00:01:01,572 --> 00:01:03,307
until you dig a little deeper

20
00:01:03,331 --> 00:01:05,976
into how the world
of microscopic organisms,

21
00:01:06,000 --> 00:01:08,014
and this theory came to be.

22
00:01:08,038 --> 00:01:11,049
It all started in the early 1600s
in the Netherlands,

23
00:01:11,073 --> 00:01:13,736
where a spectacle maker
named Zacharias Janssen

24
00:01:13,760 --> 00:01:17,260
is said to have come up
with the first compound microscope,

25
00:01:17,284 --> 00:01:19,034
along with the first telescope.

26
00:01:19,058 --> 00:01:20,871
Both claims are often disputed,

27
00:01:20,895 --> 00:01:23,285
as apparently he wasn't the only bored guy

28
00:01:23,309 --> 00:01:26,290
with a ton of glass lenses
to play with at the time.

29
00:01:26,314 --> 00:01:27,465
Despite this,

30
00:01:27,489 --> 00:01:29,852
the microscope soon became a hot item

31
00:01:29,876 --> 00:01:33,304
that every naturalist or scientist
at the time wanted to play with,

32
00:01:33,328 --> 00:01:36,195
making it much like the iPad of its day.

33
00:01:36,219 --> 00:01:37,752
One such person

34
00:01:37,776 --> 00:01:41,280
was a fellow Dutchman by the name
of Anton van Leeuwenhoek,

35
00:01:41,304 --> 00:01:43,566
who heard about
these microscope doohickeys,

36
00:01:43,590 --> 00:01:45,874
and instead of going out and buying one,

37
00:01:45,898 --> 00:01:47,729
he decided to make his own.

38
00:01:47,753 --> 00:01:50,494
And it was a strange
little contraption indeed,

39
00:01:50,518 --> 00:01:54,485
as it looked more like a tiny paddle
the size of a sunglass lens.

40
00:01:54,509 --> 00:01:56,044
If he had stuck two together,

41
00:01:56,068 --> 00:01:58,847
it probably would have made
a wicked set of sunglasses

42
00:01:58,871 --> 00:02:01,844
that you couldn't see much out of.

43
00:02:01,868 --> 00:02:04,756
Anyhoo, once Leeuwenhoek
had his microscope ready,

44
00:02:04,780 --> 00:02:05,935
he went to town,

45
00:02:05,959 --> 00:02:08,493
looking at anything and everything
he could with them,

46
00:02:08,517 --> 00:02:10,378
including the gunk on his teeth.

47
00:02:10,775 --> 00:02:13,028
Yes, you heard right.

48
00:02:13,052 --> 00:02:15,100
He actually discovered bacteria

49
00:02:15,124 --> 00:02:17,577
by looking at dental scrapings,

50
00:02:17,601 --> 00:02:19,267
which, when you keep in mind

51
00:02:19,291 --> 00:02:23,644
that people didn't brush their teeth
much -- if at all -- back then,

52
00:02:23,668 --> 00:02:27,185
he must have had a lovely bunch
of bacteria to look at.

53
00:02:27,594 --> 00:02:29,285
When he wrote about his discovery,

54
00:02:29,309 --> 00:02:32,061
he didn't call them bacteria,
as we know them today.

55
00:02:32,085 --> 00:02:34,246
But he called them "animalcules,"

56
00:02:34,270 --> 00:02:36,857
because they looked
like little animals to him.

57
00:02:36,881 --> 00:02:39,200
While Leeuwenhoek was staring
at his teeth gunk,

58
00:02:39,224 --> 00:02:42,320
he was also sending letters
to a scientific colleague in England,

59
00:02:42,344 --> 00:02:44,244
by the name of Robert Hooke.

60
00:02:44,268 --> 00:02:48,774
Hooke was a guy who really loved
all aspects of science,

61
00:02:48,798 --> 00:02:51,838
so he dabbled in a little bit
of everything, including physics,

62
00:02:51,862 --> 00:02:53,365
chemistry and biology.

63
00:02:53,776 --> 00:02:57,440
Thus it is Hooke who we can thank
for the term "the cell,"

64
00:02:57,464 --> 00:03:00,675
as he was looking at a piece of cork
under his microscope,

65
00:03:00,699 --> 00:03:04,973
and the little chambers he saw
reminded him of cells,

66
00:03:04,997 --> 00:03:08,682
or the rooms monks slept in
in their monasteries.

67
00:03:09,158 --> 00:03:10,698
Think college dorm rooms,

68
00:03:10,722 --> 00:03:14,359
but without the TVs, computers
and really annoying roommates.

69
00:03:14,836 --> 00:03:17,349
Hooke was something
of an underappreciated scientist

70
00:03:17,373 --> 00:03:18,524
of his day --

71
00:03:18,548 --> 00:03:20,187
something he brought upon himself,

72
00:03:20,211 --> 00:03:22,085
as he made the mistake of locking horns

73
00:03:22,109 --> 00:03:25,032
with one of the most famous
scientists ever, Sir Isaac Newton.

74
00:03:25,056 --> 00:03:27,887
Remember when I said Hooke
dabbled in many different fields?

75
00:03:27,911 --> 00:03:30,293
Well, after Newton published
a groundbreaking book

76
00:03:30,317 --> 00:03:32,668
on how planets move due to gravity,

77
00:03:32,692 --> 00:03:33,844
Hooke made the claim

78
00:03:33,868 --> 00:03:37,542
that Newton had been inspired
by Hooke's work in physics.

79
00:03:37,889 --> 00:03:41,275
Newton, to say the least,
did not like that,

80
00:03:41,299 --> 00:03:43,634
which sparked a tense
relationship between the two

81
00:03:43,658 --> 00:03:45,961
that lasted even after Hooke died,

82
00:03:45,985 --> 00:03:49,978
as quite a bit of Hooke's research --
as well as his only portrait --

83
00:03:50,002 --> 00:03:52,674
was ... misplaced, due to Newton.

84
00:03:52,698 --> 00:03:56,027
Much of it was rediscovered,
thankfully, after Newton's time,

85
00:03:56,051 --> 00:03:57,313
but not his portrait,

86
00:03:57,337 --> 00:04:00,123
as, sadly, no one knows
what Robert Hooke looked like.

87
00:04:00,776 --> 00:04:02,553
Fast-forward to the 1800s,

88
00:04:02,577 --> 00:04:05,088
where two German scientists
discovered something

89
00:04:05,112 --> 00:04:07,776
that today we might find rather obvious,

90
00:04:07,800 --> 00:04:11,243
but helped tie together
what we now know as the cell theory.

91
00:04:11,267 --> 00:04:13,819
The first scientist
was Matthias Schleiden,

92
00:04:13,843 --> 00:04:16,775
a botanist who liked to study
plants under a microscope.

93
00:04:17,299 --> 00:04:19,912
From his years of studying
different plant species,

94
00:04:19,936 --> 00:04:21,245
it finally dawned on him

95
00:04:21,269 --> 00:04:23,740
that every single plant he had looked at

96
00:04:23,764 --> 00:04:26,462
were all made of cells.

97
00:04:26,866 --> 00:04:28,051
At the same time,

98
00:04:28,075 --> 00:04:30,841
on the other end of Germany
was Theodor Schwann,

99
00:04:30,865 --> 00:04:33,835
a scientist who not only
studied slides of animal cells

100
00:04:33,859 --> 00:04:35,077
under the microscope

101
00:04:35,101 --> 00:04:38,230
and got a special type
of nerve cell named after him,

102
00:04:38,254 --> 00:04:40,947
but also invented rebreathers
for firefighters,

103
00:04:40,971 --> 00:04:43,282
and had a kickin' pair of sideburns.

104
00:04:43,306 --> 00:04:45,321
After studying animal cells for a while,

105
00:04:45,345 --> 00:04:47,232
he, too, came to the conclusion

106
00:04:47,256 --> 00:04:49,423
that all animals were made of cells.

107
00:04:49,447 --> 00:04:52,276
Immediately, he reached out
via snail mail,

108
00:04:52,300 --> 00:04:54,486
as Twitter had yet to be invented,

109
00:04:54,510 --> 00:04:57,655
to other scientists working
in the same field with Schleiden,

110
00:04:57,679 --> 00:04:58,840
who got back to him,

111
00:04:58,864 --> 00:05:01,928
and the two started working
on the beginnings of the cell theory.

112
00:05:01,952 --> 00:05:03,885
A bone of contention arose between them.

113
00:05:03,909 --> 00:05:06,048
As for the last part of the cell theory --

114
00:05:06,072 --> 00:05:08,680
that cells come from preexisting cells --

115
00:05:08,704 --> 00:05:11,133
Schleiden didn't exactly
subscribe to that thought,

116
00:05:11,157 --> 00:05:14,726
as he swore cells came
from free-cell formation,

117
00:05:14,750 --> 00:05:18,611
where they just kind of spontaneously
crystallized into existence.

118
00:05:19,009 --> 00:05:21,937
That's when another scientist
named Rudolph Virchow,

119
00:05:21,961 --> 00:05:25,570
stepped in with research showing
that cells did come from other cells,

120
00:05:25,594 --> 00:05:28,239
research that was actually --
hmm ... How to put it? --

121
00:05:28,263 --> 00:05:30,030
"borrowed without permission"

122
00:05:30,054 --> 00:05:33,131
from a Jewish scientist
by the name of Robert Remak,

123
00:05:33,155 --> 00:05:36,038
which led to two more feuding scientists.

124
00:05:36,062 --> 00:05:39,195
Thus, from teeth gunk
to torquing off Newton,

125
00:05:39,219 --> 00:05:41,593
crystallization to Schwann cells,

126
00:05:41,617 --> 00:05:44,921
the cell theory came to be
an important part of biology today.

127
00:05:45,301 --> 00:05:49,515
Some things we know
about science today may seem boring,

128
00:05:49,539 --> 00:05:53,198
but how we came to know them
is incredibly fascinating.

129
00:05:53,222 --> 00:05:54,976
So if something bores you,

130
00:05:55,000 --> 00:05:56,462
dig deeper.

131
00:05:56,486 --> 00:06:00,291
It's probably got a really weird
story behind it somewhere.