Albert von Kölliker

Albert von Kölliker, born Rudolf Albert Kölliker in Zürich in 1817 and died in 1905, was a Swiss anatomist, physiologist and histologist. He studied at Zürich, Bonn and Berlin, graduated in philosophy at Zürich in 1841 and in medicine at Heidelberg in 1842, and worked first as prosector of anatomy under Friedrich Henle. After a short professorship in Zürich he moved in 1847 to the University of Würzburg, where he stayed for the rest of his life. His early work dealt with the structure of invertebrates, and his 1844 memoir on the development of cephalopods is considered a classic. He brought microscopic methods of hardening, sectioning and staining into embryology, and he is best remembered for histology: in 1847 he showed that smooth muscle is made of nucleated cells, and in 1845 he gave clear proof that nerve fibres are continuous with nerve cells. He also separated mitochondria from muscle cells in 1888. Ennobled in 1897, he was a fellow of the Royal Society and a critic of Darwinism, proposing a saltationist theory he called heterogenesis.