Walther Flemming

Biologist, born in Sachsenberg, WC Germany. He studied medicine at five German universities, and in 1876 became professor of anatomy at Kiel. In 1882 he gave the first modern account of cytology, including the process of cell division, which he named mitosis.

Walther Flemming (born April 21, 1843 in Sachsenberg, Germany;

He was born as the fifth child and only son of the psychiatrist Carl Friedrich Flemming (1799-1880) and his second wife, Auguste Winter.

Flemming trained in medicine at the University of Rostock, graduating in 1868.

Making use of aniline dyes he was able to find a structure which strongly absorbed basophilic dyes, which he named chromatin.

Flemming investigated the process of cell division and the splitting of chromosomes into identical halves. On the basis of his discoveries, Flemming surmised for the first time that all cell nuclei came from another predecessor nucleus (he coined the famous catch phrase omnis nucleus e nucleo).

Flemming was unaware of Gregor Mendel's (1822-1884) work on heredity, so he did not make the connection between his observations and genetic inheritance. Two decades would pass before the significance of Flemming's work was truly realized with the rediscovery of Mendel's rules. His discovery of mitosis and chromosomes is considered one of the 100 most important scientific discoveries of all times , and one of the 10 most important discoveries in cell biology (together with August Weismann's (1834-1914) discovery of meiosis, Theodor Schwann (1810-1882) and Matthias Schleiden's (1804-1881) cell theory and Thomas Hunt Morgan's (1866-1945) first genetic maps).

Flemming's name is honoured by a medal awarded by the German Society for Cell Biology (Deutschen Gesellschaft für Zellbiologie).