Oscar Hertwig
Oscar Wilhelm August Hertwig (* April 21, 1849 in Friedberg (Hessen), † October 25, 1922 in Berlin) was a German zoologist and anatomist. With his textbook General Biology, he opened a school of thought in biology, not the variety of forms and processes, but the common denominators of all living things were in the foreground.
Life
Oscar Hertwig was the son of a wealthy merchant to the world. Shortly after the birth parents moved to Mühlhausen in Thuringia, where Oscar and his brother Richard in 1868 passed his Abitur. Both brothers went in 1868 to Jena to study with Ernst Haeckel. 1871 deepened their microscopic technique with Max Schultze in Bonn, where they were doing a PhD Dr. med. 1874 Schultze died suddenly, and in 1875 both brothers accompanied again Haeckel on a research trip to the Mediterranean.
After several years as a freelance researcher Oscar Hertwig in 1881 was appointed full professor of anatomy at the University of Jena. In 1888 he went as a director of the Second Anatomical Institute in Berlin, where he remained until his death. After the First World War he lived in Grunewald in the Wangenheimstrasse 28 Oscar Hertwig had few students and graduate students, but won over his textbooks and monographs a large influence on the German biology.
Work
Fertilization of sea urchin ice
On the journey of 1875 Oscar Hertwig first observed on almost transparent sea urchin egg in its individual stages under the microscope, the fertilization of a female ovum by a male sperm cell. In the same year he completed his habilitation in Jena of Anatomy and Developmental History on the fertilization of animal ice.
Later he explored the fertilization process in more detail, where he fixed his microscopic preparations with osmium tetroxide. He was able to show that preserving the cores of both germ cells during fertilization and merge to Synkarion later. It is not useful to a formation of the nucleus, as has long been argued about by Eduard Strasburger. The chromosomes he considered the carriers of genetic information.
Hertwig 's epithelial
The Hertwig 's epithelial - starch (HES), the area of the fold between the inner and outer enamel epithelium of the enamel organ (Organon enameleum ) was named after its discoverer Oscar Herwig, who discovered them in 1874 amphibians.
Coelomtheorie
In the years after 1875 Oscar Hertwig could by no office Disabled - often together with his brother - research. They worked through the nervous system and the sense organs of the coelenterates and followed the fate of individual cotyledons. 1881 they published their Coelomtheorie, which evolved in many animals from the gastrula by folding of the mesoderm from the endoderm a " Coelomlarve ".
Opponents of Social Darwinism
Oscar Hertwig distanced himself from vitalism as well as from an unreflective physicalism. Nevertheless, his teacher Ernst Haeckel proved him off as vitalists because he had been critical of the theory of natural selection, the biogenetic law and the monism. Oscar Hertwig broke off all relations with Haeckel, while his brother Richard was friendly terms with him. In his last works " As a defense of the ethical, social, political Darwinism " and " The State as organism," he turned against the increasing social Darwinism.