The Theory of the Cell State and the Question of Cell Autonomy in Nineteenth and Early Twentieth-Century Biology

Abstract

ArgumentA central thesis of the cell theory of biological organization is that plant and animal cells are, to some degree, autonomous vital units. Just how much autonomy cells possess was a matter of serious debate in the decades surrounding the turn of the twentieth century. The idea of cell autonomy was most strikingly expressed in the “theory of the cell state,” an idea based upon the metaphorical conception of higher plants and animals as social colonies of cells or elementary organisms, commonly associated with Rudolf Virchow and Ernst Haeckel. This paper explores the question of cell autonomy as it was debated within late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century embryology, cytology, and physiology. While greater evidence for cell autonomy emerged from tissue culture experiments, there arose, almost simultaneously, a tendency within physiology and biochemical studies to conceive of the cell metaphorically as a chemical factory and as a subordinate part of a larger organismal whole. I argue that while these metaphors suggested conflicting views of cell autonomy, they were highly effective devices for explaining and investigating within their respective fields: the autonomous cell-organism in embryology and morphology, the subordinate cell-factory in physiology and biochemistry.

Individuals at the Center of Biology: Rudolf Leuckart’s Polymorphismus der Individuen and the Ongoing Narrative of Parts and Wholes. With an Annotated Translation

“…This leads us to one last but crucial direction in late nineteenthcentury part-whole relations of the biological individual: cell theory and its transcendence by a ''cell state,'' a socially-derived metaphor prominent from Virchow to Haeckel and beyond (see e.g., Richards, 2002, p. 260;Weindling, 1981;Mazzolini, 1988;Jacobs, 1989;Reynolds, 2007Reynolds, , 2008. Broadly, this was a conception of the multicellular organism as a state (aggregate, assemblage, colony, or commonwealth were also referents) in which single-celled individuals were mutually dependent and (for Haeckel) co-operated in a hierarchy of sorts where physiological division of labor served the whole.…”

Non-autonomous Cellular Responses to Ototoxic Drug-Induced Stress and Death

“…Central to his dogma is the idea of cell autonomy. Virchow's vision of the cells of an organism was comparable with citizens in a society, with each cell having autonomy from the larger body (Reynolds, 2007 ). Since then, many diseases have been considered to have cell-autonomous etiologies and outcomes, with the assumption that pathology is caused by damage to a specific class of autonomous cells.…”

Ambiguous cells: the emergence of the stem cell concept in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries

“…Particularly through the influence of Rudolf Virchow (1821-1902), who since the 1850s had compared the body’s cells with citizens cooperatively forming a state (‘cell state’, ‘Zellenstaat’), it had become customary to speak metaphorically of cells as human individuals. 11 As Virchow had argued in his influential Cellularpathologie :…”