Robert Hooke had coined the word “cell”—short for cellula, or “small compartment” in Latin—in the mid-17th century, after he’d seen tiny rectangular shapes while studying slices of cork using a ...

which was when the cell theory was officially formulated. Cells were not seen as undifferentiated structures. Some cellular components, such as the nucleus, had been visualized, and the occurrence ...

Cell theory, which asserts that organisms are made of cells which themselves derive from pre-existing cells, less so. Cells (or, strictly speaking, their walls in a slice of cork) were first ...