Albert von Kölliker Biography

Born as Rudolf Albert von Kölliker, the son of a banker in Zurich, Switzerland, Kölliker attended the Zurich Gymnasium and showed an early interest in botany. As a medical student at the University of Zurich from 1836 to 1839, he studied zoology under Lorenz Oken (1779-1851), anatomy under Friedrich Arnold (1803-1890), and botany under Oswald Heer (1809-1883). Both at the gymnasium and in Oken's classes, the future botanist Karl Wilhelm von Nägeli (1817-1891) was his schoolmate.

After one semester at the University of Bonn, Germany, Kölliker spent three semesters at the University of Berlin, studying comparative anatomy and physiology under Johannes Müller (1801-1858), microscopic anatomy under Friedrich Gustav Jakob Henle (1809-1885), and embryology under Robert Remak (1815-1865). While studying marine invertebrates on the North Sea coast during the winter of 1840-1841, he discovered that spermatozoa arise from cells specifically equipped to produce them, and that each spermatozoon is a single cell. These findings, published as a book in Berlin and submitted as his dissertation in Zurich, earned him his Ph.D. in 1841. The following year he received his M.D. from the University of Heidelberg with a dissertation on fly larvae.

Shortly after Henle moved to Zurich in 1840, Kölliker became his assistant, and when Henle left for Heidelberg in 1844, Kölliker became associate professor of physiology and comparative anatomy at Zurich. In 1847 he became full professor of physiology and comparative anatomy at the University of Würzburg, Germany. With Carl Theodor Ernst von Siebold (1804-1885), he co-founded Zeitschrift für wissenschaftliche Zoologie (Journal of Scientific Zoology) in 1848.

In the 1840s and 1850s, Kölliker contributed significantly to anatomy, histology, and physiology, but gradually became more interested in embryology and developmental biology. His research laid much of the groundwork for the science of cytology. In 1844, he published his studies of cell division in the eggs of the cephalopod sepia. Martin Barry (1802--1855) and Remak were also investigating cell division at this time, and the results of the three scientists were sometimes at odds. In the 1850s, wary of the doctrine of Theodor Schwann (1810-1882) that daughter cells arise freely in the zygote, Kölliker showed that the fertilized ovum is one cell and that its subsequent development is by cell division. In 1861, he published Entwicklungsgeschichte des Menschen und der höheren Tiere (History of the Development of Humans and Higher Animals), the first important book on comparative embryology since Aristotle's On the Generation of Animals.

Kölliker accepted evolution but opposed Charles Darwin (1809-1882) on the issue of whether evolutionary changes appear gradually or abruptly. In Über die Darwin'sche Schöpfungstheorie (On the Darwinian Theory of Creation), published in 1864, Kölliker argued that teleology, or Aristotelian final causality, the idea that nature moves toward a pre-established goal, is not supported by empirical science. Thomas Henry Huxley (1825-1895) defended Darwin against Kölliker, who probably saw more teleology in Darwin than was really there. Kölliker's insistence on sudden evolution prefigured the theories of Hugo de Vries (1848-1935) that mutations occur so unexpectedly that a single generation could bring forth a new species.

In 1841, Kölliker suggested that the cell nucleus might be the locus of inheritance. A meticulous researcher who wanted to see everything first hand, he spent much of the next 40 years investigating this hypothesis, Finally, in 1885, following the work of Wilhelm Roux (1850-1924), he published an article in Zeitschrift für wissenschaftliche Zoologie claiming that inherited traits are transmitted within the cell nucleus.

Kölliker retired from teaching in 1897, published his autobiography, Erinnerungen aus meinem Leben (Memories from my Life) in 1899, and remained moderately active in research until his death in Würzburg from lung disease.