1665-1831 - Cell - The book of science

Cell
Units of life
Meditation on purpose
Commentary

Robert Hooke, Antonie van Leeuwenhock, Robert Brown cell biology

Cell

Robert Hooke discovered cork cells
in 1665 and named them
after the small rooms in a monastery.
Antonie van Leeuwenhoek described
the blood cells of salmon in 1719
and called their nuclei lumen.
Robert Brown described orchid cells
in 1831 and observed an opaque area
that he called the areola or nucleus.

Units of life

The cell is the common
smallest unit of life
of all known living things.
Some plants and creatures
have only one cell;
humans have trillions.
Cells are complex.
Cells in a body are specialized
to perform complementary roles.
Each cell in a colony
of a single-celled organism
behaves exactly the same
but different single-celled organisms
are specialized to perform
complementary roles in their ecosystem.
Therefore, the purpose of a cell,
other than its own perpetuation,
is to support the system of which it is a part.

Meditation on purpose

What came first—the organism or its purpose?
If these were synchronic, then it would be possible
anything that appears spontaneously has its own purpose,
which is not to say that anything we create justifies itself.
What would it mean if we were to say
that a new organism could appear without a purpose?
That it could appear but not survive?
That it must soon develop a purpose?
Possibly purpose is only our rationalization for its function,
good or bad, in the system of which it is a part.

The microscope was the key invention for discovering and describing cells. The cell is still being discovered. It didn’t stop with discovery of nuclei, or the Golgi apparatus, or the flagella, cilia, or pili, or the ribosomes, mitochondria, centrioles, chloroplasts, peroxisomes, or lysosomes, or the endoplasmic reticula. We are still working out how these things work.