entered the most productive epoch of his life. He tackled the subjects of
inflammation, cancer, kidney disease, and the anatomy of the skin, nails,
bone, cartilage, and connective tissue.^18 Lacking electricity,
photomicroscopy, and projection of images, Virchow invented the “table
railroad,” a track that passed microscopes from student to student so they
could peruse what the master wanted them to examine. He implored his
scholars to “see microscopically” and to adopt his view that the cell was
the fundamental unit of life.
After almost a decade in Würzburg, Virchow returned to Berlin in 1856
with great fanfare and to a purpose-built pathology institute. His time in
Würzburg had resulted in several quantum leaps in the understanding of
cellular function and behavior. Sometimes adopting the ideas of other
German researchers, the influential Virchow made ever-increasing claims
about the primacy of the cell, at first (in 1852), declaring that any new cell
can only arise from the division of a cell already present; in 1854 he
wrote, “There is no life except through direct succession.” Finally, in 1855,
in The Archiv, Virchow powerfully concluded, Omnis cellula a cellula
(Every cell comes out of a preexisting cell).
It is perhaps impossible to convey the solemnity of the statement,
Omnis cellula a cellula, other than to compare it to a book that would be
published four years later, in 1859, by Charles Darwin—On the Origin of
Species. When we greet a stranger, we ask, “Where are you from?” It is
natural to ask about someone’s origin and upbringing. The most insightful
and ingenious researchers have always been able to delve more profoundly
than their brethren, to see further and connect the philosophical dots.
Virchow, like Darwin, combined imagination and years of scientific
struggles to formulate an overarching idea about our beginnings. Each of
us is a conglomeration of cells, dividing again and again and again,
achieving specialization and unique functionality. Embryologists, in time,
would discover that every animal starts its journey as a single cell,
multiplying its number of cells through division; the only exception is at
the spark of life, when two cells (the egg and the sperm) combine to form
one.
The original cells in the morula (from the Latin word for mulberry) are
“indeterminate,” able to become any cell in any organ of the body. These
are the original stem cells, almost supernatural in their ability to respond
and adapt and transfigure. All our lives our cells are responding and