• Hans and Zacharis Janssen

    Were the inventors of the first compound microscope
  • Robert Hooke

    English physicist Robert Hooke looked at a sliver of cork through a microscope lens and noticed some "pores" or "cells" in it. Robert Hooke believed the cells had served as containers for the "noble juices" or "fibrous threads" of the once-living cork tree. Hooke was the first person to use the word "cell" to identify microscopic structures when he was describing cork.
  • Franscesco Redi

    he is an italinan physican, who did an experiment to determine if rotten meat would turn into flies he found out that only flies can produce more flies this is an important discovery because it helped disprove the theory of spontaneous generation.
  • Anton Van Leeuwenhoek

    Anton Van Leeuwenhoek was the first to see and describe bacteria.
  • John Needham

    From 1745 to 1748 John Needham, a Scottish clergyman and naturalist, showed that soup that had been exposed to the air contained many micro organisms. He claimed that there was a "life force" present in the molecules of all inorganic matter, including air and the oxygen in it, that could cause spontaneous generation to occur.
  • Lazzaro Spallanzani

    From 1765 to 1767 Lazzaro Spallanzani, an Italian abbot and biologist, tried variations on John Needham’s soup experiments. He determined that soup in a sealed container was sterile and that micro organisms that caused the soup to spoil had entered from the air.
  • Robert Brown

    Robert Brown discovered the cell nucleus.
  • Matthias Schleiden

    Theodor Schwann and Matthias Jakob Schleiden created what is called the cell theory. The cell theory states that all living things are made up of one or more cells.
  • Rudolf Virchow

    Rudolf Virchow published his now-famous aphorism omnis cellula e cellula ("every cell stems from another cell"). He also stated that all diseases involve changes in normal cells.
  • Theodor Schwann

    Schwann proposed that all organisms are composed of cells. Together with Matthias Schleiden he formulated the cell theory of life. Schwann also discovered the cells, now known as Schwann cells, that form a sheath surrounding nerve axons and conducted experiments that helped disprove the theory of spontaneous generation.