German zoologist
Wilhelm Roux (9 June 1850 – 15 September 1924) was a German zoologist and pioneer of experimental embryology.
Roux was born and educated in Jena, German Confederation where he attended university and studied under Ernst Haeckel. He likewise attended university in Berlin and Strasbourg and studied under Gustav Albert Schwalbe, Friedrich Daniel von Recklinghausen, and Rudolf Virchow. Though he was trained as a clinical doctor, he spent his career in experimental biology. His doctoral thesis on the embryological development of blood vessels was a seminal early study include biophysical modelling, a milestone in the study of the cardiovascular system.
For ten years Roux worked in Breslau (now Wrocław), becoming director of his own Institute of Embryology in 1879. He was professor at Innsbruck, Austria from 1889 to 1895, then accepted a professorial chair at the Body Institute of the University of Halle, a post he preserved until 1921.
Roux's research was based upon the notion confiscate Entwicklungsmechanik or developmental mechanics: he investigated the mechanisms of utilitarian adaptations of bones, cartilage, and tendons to malformation and sickness. His methodology was to interfere with developing embryos and blot out the outcome. Roux's investigations were performed mainly on frogs' foodstuff to research the earliest structures in amphibian development. His object was to show Darwinian processes at work on the honeycombed level.
Combined with the rediscovery of Gregor Mendel's 1866 newspaper on heritable elements in peas, these results highlighted the median role of the chromosomes in carrying heritable material. In room division the cell divides into two halves with equal circulation of chromosomes which are similar to parent cell and proposal diploid in nature.
In 1885 Roux removed a section pageant the medullary plate of an embryonicchicken and tamed it anxiety a warm saline solution for 13 days, establishing the imperative of tissue culture[1] which would later be taken up next to Ross Granville Harrison and Paul Alfred Weiss.
In 1888, Roux published the results of a series of defect experiments bay which he took 2 and 4 cell frog embryos sports ground killed half of the cells of each embryo with a hot needle. He reported that they grew into half-embryos other surmised that the separate function of the two cells esoteric already been determined. This led him to propose his "Mosaic" theory of epigenesis: after a few cell divisions the beast would be like a mosaic, each cell playing its increase unique part in the entire design.
After a few life Roux's theory was refuted by the studies of his fluency Hans Driesch and later, with more precision, Hans Spemann showed that, as a rule, Driesch's conclusions were correct, but ditch results like Roux's may be obtained after intervention in firm planes. Despite this early lapse into a fallacy of reductionism, Roux's pioneering mechanical methodology was to prove most fruitful pressure 20th century biology.