Schwann, an animal physiologist, and Schleiden, a botanist, were students of Johannes ... Robert Hooke had coined the word “cell”—short for cellula, or “small compartment” in Latin—in the mid-17th ...

More than three decades after the German biologists Theodore Schwann and Matthias Schleiden first proposed that the cell was the basic functional unit of all living things, in 1838, many of the ...