Finding History in Old Books and Early Cell Biology Papers

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00:00:12;18 SG: Hi, my name is Sarah Goodwin and we are here today with Dr. David Morgan
00:00:17;11 who is a professor at the University of California, San Francisco
00:00:21;10 and Dave is an avid book collector. So, thank you for joining us.
00:00:26;00 DM: My pleasure. SG: We'll start with: How did you begin collecting books?
00:00:29;18 DM: Well, it started many, many moons ago. I mean, I was doing it when I was a kid actually
00:00:35;22 and I used to go to the used book stores in my home town all the time
00:00:38;25 even when I was in my early teens and I was clearly fairly obsessed with them
00:00:43;11 right from the early days. So, I've always been interested in books
00:00:48;00 but the last 15 or 20 years is when I've really
00:00:50;08 gotten going on the important old stuff that I have now.
00:00:55;14 SG: How big is your current collection?
00:00:57;16 DM: I'm not a liberty to say. My wife thinks it's way too big, that's all I can say.
00:01:03;12 It's huge. I have hundreds of things.
00:01:04;24 I have boxes in most closets. I have shelves in most rooms in the house.
00:01:09;10 And so it's a bit out of control and in fact, in the last few years
00:01:14;26 I've really tried to get a little more focused and just get a few good things
00:01:20;01 instead of filling things up with a lot of bad things.
00:01:22;09 But it is, I don't know, hundreds, thousands maybe.
00:01:26;04 SG: What types of books did you collect when you were younger?
00:01:28;19 DM: Well, believe it or not, my dad was an airplane mechanic and so I was
00:01:32;02 heavily into airplanes and so I loved books about World War II airplanes when I was a teenager.
00:01:36;26 So I have stacks of those in my basement that I still have.
00:01:40;10 But then, as the years went by, I became interested in a lot of other things as well.
00:01:44;21 SG: What was your first big find?
00:01:47;02 DM: Well, I mean, there was this transition period back int he mid-90s
00:01:50;20 when I became serious and realized I could get the really old, interesting, original things
00:01:56;15 from hundreds of years ago and so in a way those early books that I got at that stage
00:02:03;05 were kind of the highlight in a way because it was all new and exciting
00:02:06;22 and I thought it was really fun to have a book that was 400 or 300 years old.
00:02:10;05 Although, in retrospect, what I was buying back then was completely...was really not very good stuff.
00:02:15;27 I didn't know what I was doing in those early days.
00:02:18;05 And so it took...it takes many years actually to learn what to look for when looking for a book
00:02:23;29 and collecting; condition, the binding, all these other issues that you have to think about.
00:02:28;01 SG: So, let's talk about some of these books that you brought today.
00:02:31;05 DM: Yeah, I thought I'd bring along a few highlights of one of the main interests of what I do
00:02:36;08 which is collecting books in the history of cell division
00:02:41;26 and basically going back to the 1700s or so when cells were first witnessed
00:02:45;29 through microscopes and other little optical instruments
00:02:49;08 and then working up into the 1800s when the cell theory came along
00:02:53;21 and people first started realizing that cells reproduced by division.
00:02:57;03 And so there were dozens of great scientists involved in this process
00:03:02;27 of making their way from the 1700s to roughly late 1800s when all these things were found.
00:03:08;12 And I can't possibly...I have a lot of their work at home but I couldn't bring them all in.
00:03:14;00
00:03:15;28 So what I did was I brought a few of the highlights, the ones that kind of turned me on the most.
00:03:19;29 And, in a way, a lot of people like to start with Leeuwenhook,
00:03:26;24 the Dutch microscopist who first saw little animals under the microscope.
00:03:30;26 And he saw a lot of different organisms through his microscope
00:03:34;19 and little animals he called them, as I said
00:03:36;22 and in some cases he may have been witnessing cell division but he didn't really know what he was looking at.
00:03:43;14 and in fact, it's unlikely that he ever actually witnessed or reported the division of a cell
00:03:48;26 of a single celled animal.
00:03:50;05 And it wasn't until a little later...so he was in the late 1600s, early 1700s
00:03:54;10 It wasn't until more like the middle of the 1700s that
00:03:57;27 people actually started describing the division of single celled organisms.
00:04:01;29 And the first guy to do that probably was this fellow from Geneva called Abraham Trembley.
00:04:09;02 And he was a really interesting character who grew up in Geneva
00:04:13;17 and then in his 20s moved to Holland to become a tutor
00:04:17;07 for the children of this aristocrat who lived on this giant estate in Holland.
00:04:22;29 And on that estate Trembley basically taught these two kids
00:04:28;18 while at the same time exploring the grounds of the estate
00:04:31;08 and exploring the water of those grounds and finding little animals that lived in there
00:04:35;03 and then looking at them with a magnifying glass essentially.
00:04:38;06 One of his biggest discoveries was that he found this little organism that we now call hydra
00:04:42;17 which had been described previously but not to the extent that he did.
00:04:46;09 And in studying hydra, he was really curious about whether hydra was a plant or an animal
00:04:53;01 because it looked a little like both.
00:04:54;21 And in one of his experiments, when he wanted to figure out if it was a plant or an animal,
00:04:58;16 he decided, well, maybe if he cut it in two an animal would die probably,
00:05:04;10 whereas a plant might continue to grow or might at least survive in some way.
00:05:10;19 But he was absolutely shocked because when he cut hydra into two parts,
00:05:15;09 the two halves regenerated to form two whole organisms
00:05:18;27 which then moved around like animals.
00:05:21;11 So, it became clear that hydra was an animal that could be cut in half and regenerated.
00:05:26;06 And that was a mind boggling result at the time.
00:05:29;24 And when word started spreading, he communicated with some of the great scientists of the day
00:05:34;09 through letters of course and when word started spreading of this discovery,
00:05:38;09 it just caught on like wildfire. It was like one of the biggest things of the century,
00:05:43;16 sort of like the structure of DNA is to the 20th century, regeneration of hydra was a huge, big deal.
00:05:48;27 And so people in Britain, people in France, all over the place,
00:05:52;02 were repeating his experiments to make sure they were true and eventually,
00:05:55;14 he published this work in a journal called the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society
00:06:02;12 where he was actually invited to submit the work because everyone was so excited.
00:06:06;17 And they actually dedicated an entire issue to this one topic.
00:06:09;26 So he got the cover, essentially.
00:06:13;14 And I happen to have a copy of that special of the Royal Transactions
00:06:19;03 in which his work was first published and so it's mostly words of course
00:06:28;20 but there are some nice illustrations like this one here of a hydra bound to...stuck onto a twig of some sort.
00:06:34;27 And then in this paper, which is written in English, by the way, so it's actually totally readable
00:06:40;03 in this wonderful 18th century scientific English.
00:06:42;20 It was translated from French by someone in the Royal Society.
00:06:46;13 And the English is just a lot of fun to read
00:06:49;26 and it really captures every moment of the discovery.
00:06:53;04 Essentially every little thing is described in wonderful detail
00:06:56;19 and right up to the point where he talks about cutting it in half and observing over a period of days
00:07:02;29 how these two new hydra would regenerate from the two cut halves.
00:07:06;25
00:07:09;13 And then this article is accompanied by commentary from various other people
00:07:12;19 including, at the front there is a letter from the aristocrat, Count Bentinck was his name,
00:07:17;27 whose estate he worked on. That's here at the front end.
00:07:22;14 And then following the article are commentaries from other famous scientists.
00:07:26;12 And so the whole thing was a really major discovery in the 18th century
00:07:31;14 and created quite a stir.
00:07:33;00 And then...so this came out in about 1743, this article.
00:07:38;00 He was immediately made a fellow of the Royal Society because of this
00:07:42;05 and he won their Compley Medal which is their major award for science every year.
00:07:47;14 And then in the year after that he published this incredible book
00:07:53;26 that came out about a year after the article in the Philosophical Transactions
00:07:56;25 in which he summarized everything he had done with hydra over a period of two or three or four years.
00:08:01;14 And so this book contains all kinds of wonderful observations
00:08:06;13 in French of every little experiment, every observation he made about hydra
00:08:11;12 beginning with the basic description of the organism
00:08:14;00 all the way through these incredible experiments in which he cut it in pieces
00:08:17;12 and analyzed regeneration and analyzed all kinds of other features of its behavior.
00:08:21;15 But this book is not just great for the science but also because
00:08:26;05 it is one of the most beautiful scientific books ever, certainly in the 18th century.
00:08:30;28 It's considered one of the classics because it contains so many beautiful illustrations as well
00:08:35;19 because he recruited and friend of his to do these copper engravings of the hydra
00:08:40;21 and those copper engravings are now considered
00:08:43;16 to be among the most gorgeous scientific illustrations ever done.
00:08:47;28 So you can see all these really delicate, little hydra diagrams
00:08:52;12 that were drawn on copper plates, of course. These are copper engravings
00:08:56;20 and so this artist by the name of Leone was responsible for producing these engravings
00:09:03;24 and so this book is just filled with gorgeous engravings of hydra in various states,
00:09:09;14 illustrations of the famous experiment where he cut the hydra in pieces.
00:09:16;15 Way back here there's a figure showing the two halves of a hydra that's been cut
00:09:21;27 and then following the tail half as it begins to regenerate a head essentially.
00:09:26;03 In fact, this figure has all kinds of fun other experiments
00:09:30;14 where he actually turned the hydra inside out
00:09:32;28 by inverting the inner cells to come out onto the outer cells
00:09:36;08 and then observed what happened to those cells.
00:09:38;03 So he was doing lots of really interesting and innovative and creative experiments
00:09:43;20 And what's really fun about the book is it also includes illustrations of him at work
00:09:47;24 including this really classic engraving here showing Trembley at work
00:09:52;29 with the two students at the other side of the table
00:09:55;28 and with little jars of hydra all sitting on the windowsill behind him
00:10:00;06 and the grounds of the estate in the window outside.
00:10:04;00 So, it really captures this amazing moment in scientific history
00:10:09;11 when this guy was doing all these experiments essentially all by himself.
00:10:12;24 He communicated a lot by letter with some of the famous scientists of the day
00:10:16;10 as I said but he was basically working on his own and just having a great time.
00:10:21;12 for years, studying these organisms.
00:10:24;25 And so in way, this book...part of the appeal of this book in fact,
00:10:27;23 is that it is sort of a relic of a different era in science.
00:10:32;07 when it was completely unfettered by all the modern issues
00:10:37;13 that have sort of taken over in science.
00:10:41;01 Issues of funding and institutions and career-ism
00:10:44;25 and all the other issues that now influence how science is done.
00:10:49;10 This guy was doing pure, unfettered science and so this is a great relic from that era.
00:10:54;05
00:10:55;17 So Trembley...but the amazing thing about his was that this wasn't all he did.
00:10:58;28 He actually also looked at a lot of other little animals in the ponds of the estate
00:11:04;00 and that's where we get to cell division.
00:11:05;22 So this was a bit of a side track form cell division
00:11:08;21 but it's the foundation for what came next
00:11:10;26 which was that he started looking at protozoans as well
00:11:13;28 that he also called little animals essentially
00:11:16;00 that were essentially little single celled ciliates
00:11:19;21 like Vorticella and Stentor and some of the other large single celled protozoans
00:11:25;18 that are big enough that you can actually see them through a magnifying glass
00:11:28;01 cause he didn't actually use microscopes.
00:11:30;01 He used really fancy high powered magnifying glasses.
00:11:33;03 And so when he started looking at protozoans, he witnessed them dividing.
00:11:38;11 And his descriptions of that protozoan division were published
00:11:43;22 a couple of years later also in the Philosophical Transactions.
00:11:46;05 And so I have copies of those as well of papers in which...
00:11:50;00 There are basically two papers; one from 1744 and one from 1747
00:11:55;07 in which Trembley describes the reproduction...
00:11:59;18 he describes these little animals and then describes how they divide.
00:12:02;29 And he actually illustrates the division of some of them.
00:12:06;01 So, for example, these communal Vorticellides, like this guy right here,
00:12:13;00 which are pretty well understood organisms at this point.
00:12:18;04 They have this little bell shaped head on them with a little tail.
00:12:20;29 And they divide by longitudinally dividing down the middle essentially.
00:12:26;18 And then they form into these communal, multi-cellular gatherings essentially.
00:12:32;12 In a way, these two papers here are really the first description anywhere
00:12:37;03 in detail of cell division of any sort.
00:12:39;22 And so these are kind of the foundation stone for studies of cell division.
00:12:44;12 Although, ironically, as you know, he did not know he was looking at cells
00:12:48;05 cause this was the 1740s
00:12:50;04 and at that point cells were considered something that
00:12:52;14 were probably existing in a lot of plants.
00:12:55;16 Their importance as the fundamental building block of all organisms
00:12:59;05 was not even close to appreciated.
00:13:00;28 So it's an interesting case of someone looking at something
00:13:03;28 and describing it in detail but not knowing.
00:13:06;15 Not having any idea really of what he was seeing
00:13:08;27 which I always like to think about as a lesson for today as well.
00:13:12;10 Because a lot of us in the lab are busily describing things in detail
00:13:16;14 and not really understanding them in a way that
00:13:20;01 we will possibly be able to understand hundreds of years from now.
00:13:24;10 After Trembley, the next real wave of cell division work
00:13:28;00 came from various people mostly working in the early 1800s.
00:13:31;27 Another really fun paper came along in 1824 from a pair of French scientists
00:13:38;16 called Prevost and Dumas who were the first to describe the cleavage of the frog egg.
00:13:44;28 And so their illustrations that accompany their paper in this French journal
00:13:51;04 really provide a gorgeous illustration of the various stages
00:13:55;14 in frog development all the way from a fertilized eggs,
00:13:59;00 all the way through the various divisions up to the embryo.
00:14:02;22 And so their description is clearly the first really clear description of how
00:14:08;01 the fertilized egg subdivides into parts as it becomes an embryo.
00:14:14;06 But here again, this is 1824 . This is before the cell theory really kicked into gear.
00:14:19;04 And so they didn't appreciate either what they were looking at.
00:14:22;01 They had no idea that they were seeing
00:14:23;09 the formation of cells during each of these subdivisions processes.
00:14:27;14 And so it wasn't until maybe 10 years later or less
00:14:31;16 that people started realizing...thinking about...
00:14:34;04 I mean, cells became much more important at that point as a building block
00:14:38;00 and it was soon there after that people started describing what appeared to be
00:14:44;08 cell reproduction in multicellular organisms.
00:14:47;01 And so that was another big, major event or landmark in the history.
00:14:51;25 And the person whose generally regarded as the first person to witness
00:14:56;09 cell division in a multicellular organism is this Belgian scientist by the name of Dumortier.
00:15:01;27 This is an unusual copy because it's presented by the author Dumortier to a colleague.
00:15:07;12 So there's his signature.
00:15:09;27 And he published this rather large article in 1832
00:15:15;08 in which he described a lot fo different organisms, both animal and plant,
00:15:21;05 in which he was just describing various aspects of their biology
00:15:24;23 and in one minor, little segment of the paper,
00:15:27;23 he talks about this particular filamentous algae called Silkweed or Conferva,
00:15:34;05 in which he was observing cell division at the very tip of the filament.
00:15:37;22 And he provides a nice little illustration of that cell division process
00:15:43;04 right here in this figure 15 of the first plate.
00:15:46;25 So down there...what he says in the accompanying text is that
00:15:50;02 that cell 'a' at the end of the tip elongates
00:15:53;02 and then a wall forms right through the middle of it.
00:15:56;02 And he then speculated that perhaps this is how cells are produced, by division,
00:16:01;10 which was actually a fairly heretical notion at the time
00:16:04;16 and later in the 1830s when Schleiden and Schwann and all the rest of
00:16:08;09 the big, German, famous cell biologists came along, most people did not believe in cell division.
00:16:13;24 They thought that cells were reproduced by essentially being
00:16:17;05 crystallized in the medium surrounding other cells
00:16:19;17 or perhaps they formed inside cells and were then ejected.
00:16:23;08 And so there was a lot of disagreement about how new cells formed
00:16:27;07 and this was the first clear evidence that they formed by division.
00:16:29;14 And it was then. that a lot of other people started following up on this
00:16:34;22 and seeing cell division in other organisms
00:16:36;13 Then, eventually, of course...it took maybe 20 or 30 years
00:16:40;19 before it became clear that all cells divide by cell division
00:16:44;00 and so by the end of the 1850s, essentially,
00:16:47;09 a number of scientists were proclaiming that that must be the way of all cells.
00:16:52;00 And then there was just one last little highlight I thought we should always mention
00:16:55;14 because anyone who knows anything about cell division,
00:16:57;08 and often times you see this guy in research talks because he is very famous for what he did
00:17:02;21 and that's a scientist by the name of Walter Flemming
00:17:05;19 who is essentially credited with sorting out how mitosis works and how
00:17:11;04 duplicated chromosomes or sister chromatids are segregated on the mitotic spindle.
00:17:15;23 And he has a ton of really outstanding work in the late 1800s.
00:17:20;26 But his major discovery was...well, before he came along, people had seen chromosomes
00:17:26;28 and they had seen these interesting behaviors that chromosomes do during mitosis
00:17:30;07 but to most people these chromosomes looked just like blobs that were sort of nondescript
00:17:34;27 and then this big blob of chromosomes would separate into
00:17:38;15 two blobs of chromosomes going to opposite ends of the cell.
00:17:41;06 It was not clear at all, of course, at that point,
00:17:43;19 that chromosomes were the source of the heritable material
00:17:46;27 because genetics hadn't even been really discovered at that point.
00:17:49;19 But people realized that those chromosomes must have something to do with inheritance.
00:17:55;01 There must be some indication.
00:17:56;29 But understanding how they separated was really unclear
00:18:01;04 until Walter Flemming came along
00:18:03;07 and he appears to have been really technically skilled with
00:18:06;12 various stains and fixation methods
00:18:08;07 that allowed him to see duplicated chromosomes as individual threads.
00:18:13;24 In fact, the word mitosis comes from the word for thread
00:18:16;24 because he was the first to see chromosomes, sister chromatids, as separate chromatids.
00:18:22;04 And that allowed him to realize that, during mitosis, chromosomes are longitudinally split
00:18:28;08 and moved to opposite poles of the cell
00:18:30;02 and so it's not like some of them go in one direction
00:18:32;11 and some of them go in the other.
00:18:33;24 It's actually that every chromosome is split down the middle and moves to opposite poles
00:18:37;23 and that of course really set the stage for genetics and inheritance a few years later.
00:18:43;04 And so as I said he published an awful lot of different work on this subject.
00:18:48;08 And I can't bring it all. I have a lot of it at home in various journals and so on.
00:18:54;04 But I brought along the one that really started, really established this idea
00:18:58;27 of longitudinal division.
00:19:00;07 It was published in this journal called Archive for Microscopic Anatomy in Germany
00:19:05;22 which was published in these huge annual volumes. This is just one volume.
00:19:11;20 They're all enormous. They're filled to the brim with beautiful illustrations
00:19:15;24 of all sorts of different aspects of microscopic anatomy
00:19:20;18 all the way from tissues down to single cells and division and so on.
00:19:23;29 And I actually...one of my big mistakes as a book collector is that I
00:19:29;09 for some reason bought 72 volumes of this journal.
00:19:33;06 And so my dining room currently has a long book shelf in it
00:19:38;28 which has 70 versions of this thing taking up an awful lot of space.
00:19:44;15 So these books are filled with lots of nice illustrations
00:19:47;04 and this is where Wlater Flemming published a lot of his major work.
00:19:51;23 And what's fun about Flemming is that he was obviously very meticulous
00:19:56;10 about his illustrations, as he had to be to describe this longitudinal splitting.
00:20:00;02 It was important to be able to really show clearly what was going on.
00:20:03;05 So his images and his illustrations tend to be among the most striking in the entire journal.
00:20:08;04 And in fact, among the most striking of all cell biologists of the time.
00:20:12;12 You know, you can flip through a journal like this and as soon as you come to
00:20:15;15 the most gorgeous, beautiful illustrations of the book you know you've found the Flemming.
00:20:20;09 OK, here's the illustration that established the idea of longitudinal splitting.
00:20:24;17 Essentially, these two pictures right here show chromosomes not as individual rods but
00:20:31;17 as a pair of lines that are longitudinally split.
00:20:35;07 And you can see in a lot of other illustrations
00:20:37;10 how he really emphasized this splitting of the chromatids in two.
00:20:42;13 And so those illustrations really are the beginning of our modern understanding of mitosis.
00:20:48;13 And that of course is why so many people love to
00:20:51;06 use Flemmings illustrations as illustrations of mitotic principles.
00:20:57;06 I would say the interesting thing about learning about the history of a field like this
00:21:03;05 is that it really helps us understand what we are doing today.
00:21:05;27 A lot of students, especially young people, and I was the same way to some extent,
00:21:09;19 don't really find history very interesting
00:21:11;27 because they think it's all old stuff that's been sorted out.
00:21:14;17 But, I found, by going through all of these old papers and going through the old work,
00:21:19;07 I can see issues there that are exactly the same as what we deal with today.
00:21:22;12 Issues like how to do a good experiment, what meticulous observations are worth,
00:21:28;12 and how important good description is as well,
00:21:30;03 not just experiments but good description which a lot of people poo-poo these days.
00:21:34;23 But also issues like controversies between famous scientists in one camp and
00:21:41;21 famous scientists in another and how, in the end,
00:21:44;02 sometimes the greatest scientists in a generation can actually be wrong.
00:21:47;24 That's always an interesting thing to observe and there's plenty of examples of that in this history.
00:21:52;25 But in the end, the important thing is to appreciate what a great experiment is
00:21:58;03 Even in the old days, Abraham Trembley was sitting in this house
00:22:02;09 in the countryside of Holland and was doing really beautiful experiments
00:22:05;18 that were driven by pure creativity and curiosity
00:22:09;12 and we somehow have to capture that in the science we do today as well.
00:22:14;16

This Talk

Speaker: David Morgan

Audience:

General Public
Educators of H. School / Intro Undergrad
Student
Educators of Adv. Undergrad / Grad
Researcher
Educators

Recorded: April 2012

Talk Overview

David Morgan has been collecting books since he was a child. He currently focuses his collecting on early cell biology papers, particularly those describing cell division. In this talk, he shares with us some of his beautiful 18th and 19th-century biology books and the history of cell biology that they illustrate.

About the interviewer After completing graduate school at UCSF, Sarah Goodwin became the Director of iBiology.org.

Speaker Bio

David Morgan

David Morgan is a Professor in the Departments of Physiology and Biochemistry & Biophysics at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF). He received an undergraduate degree in animal physiology from the University of Calgary in 1980, followed in 1986 by a PhD from UCSF, with Richard Roth. Following postdoctoral studies with William Rutter and… Continue Reading