Today, February 12th, was Charles Darwin’s birthday. On the very same day in 1809, Abraham Lincoln was born in a Kentucky log cabin, a long way from the Shropshire mansion of the Darwin family in England. We’ll leave the Lincoln festivities to Japanese car companies with their Presidents Day promotions. It is for biologists though to celebrate Darwin Day as the metaphorical birthday of modern biology. As the Drosophila geneticist Theodosius Dobzhansky put it, “Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution.”
We are inordinately fond of Charles Darwin but our corner of biology has its own birthdays, if not for people than for things. Did you know that cell biology has its own birth certificate? It is dated March 1945 but we think that’s close enough to celebrate on Darwin Day.
It was brought to our attention by a book review in Molecular Biology of the Cell by Thoru Pederson of the University of Massachusetts Medical School. Pederson was reviewing Carol L. Moberg’s Entering an Unseen World, an account of the early days at the Rockefeller Institute (later University) where the electron microscope was first developed into an instrument for biological imaging. There was a world war raging but in March 1945, Albert Claude, Ernest Fullam, and Keith Porter managed to pull all the elements together and publish a detailed image of something never seen before—the internal structure of a cell. (It is plate 10 here).
As Pederson writes in MBoC, “When the Radio Corporation of America had an electron beam–based instrument ready for testing, Porter took no chances. Instead of a thin section, he grew some fibroblasts … on a plastic film and put the whole preparation under the beam, supported by a wire mesh. The result was one of the most iconic micrographs in the history of cell biology, in which every organelle and membrane system hitherto suspected was vividly manifest.”
Before this micrograph, biologists were as limited as ancient astronomers were without telescopes, according to Claude. “The cell was as distant from us as the stars and galaxies.” The EM changed that. It showed for the first time the substructures that made up the cell including the mitochondria, the Golgi apparatus, and what Porter would later call the “endoplasmic reticulum.” These organelles had been inferred through experiment but suddenly they were visible.
It was George Palade, another of the Rockefeller whiz kids, who called this first EM of a cell “the birth certificate” of a new science—cell biology. In her book, Mosberg notes that when Palade, Claude, and Christian de Duve won the 1974 Nobel Prize in Medicine, the citation said that, “There are no earlier Prize Winners in this field, simply because it is one that has been newly created, largely by the Prize Winner themselves.”
Only three living scientists at a time can win a Nobel so there were certainly others—Keith Porter for one—who could have been substituted in that golden circle. Still, Claude-Fullam-Porter’s 1945 EM reminds us that discoveries, not discoverers, are what influence the direction of science. Through EM and through all the microscopy and imaging innovations that have followed, we can see the stars and galaxies of the cellular universe. Happy Darwin Day.
About the Author:
John Fleischman was the ASCB Senior Science Writer from 2000 to 2016. Best unpaid perk of the job? Working with new grad students and Nobel Prize winners.
