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ETYMOLOGY The word biology is formed by combining the Greek βίος (bios), meaning "life", and the suffix '-logy', meaning "science of", "knowledge of", "study of", based on the Greek verb λεγειν, 'legein' = "to select", "to gather" (cf. the noun λόγος, 'logos' = "word"). The term "biology" in its modern sense appears to have been introduced independently by :
The word itself appears in the title of Volume 3 of . BIOLOGY IN ANCIENT TIME From the very beginning people must have had knowledge about plants and animals, to assist them in hunting. For example, they had to know how to avoid poisonous plants and how to treat animals. In this sense, biology predates the written history of humans. Agriculture requires specialised knowledge on plants and animals. Ancient Orient al people knew about the pollination of Date Palm from a very early point of time. In Mesopotamia they knew that pollen could be used in fertilizing plants. A business contract of the Hammurabi period (c. 1800 BC) mentions flowers of the date palm as an article of commerce. In India texts described some aspects of bird life. In Egypt the metamorphosis of insects and frogs was described. Egyptians and Babylonians also knew of anatomy and physiology in various forms. In Mesopotamia , animals were sometimes kept in what can be described as the first zoological gardens. However, superstitious thought often blended with real knowledge. In Babylon and Assyria organs of animals were used in prediction, and in Egypt medicine included a large amount of mysticism. (sculpture)]] In the Graeco-Roman world scholars became more interested in rationalist methods. Aristotle is one of the most prolific natural philosophers of Antiquity . He made countless observations of nature, especially the Habit s and Attributes of Plant s and Animal s in the world around him, which he devoted considerable attention to Categorizing . Aristotle's successor, Theophrastus , wrote a series of books on botany, History Of Plants , which survived as the most important contribution of antiquity to botany, even into the Middle Ages . In ancient Rome, Pliny The Elder was known for his knowledge of plants and nature. Later, Claudius Galen became a pioneer in medicine and anatomy. MEDIEVAL BIOLOGY This time is often called the dark age of biology. However, some people who dealt with medical issues, was showing their interest in plants and animals as well. In the Arab world, natural science was kept alive. Many of the Greek works were translated into Arabic and the works of Aristotle were preserved. Of the Arab biologists, Al-Jahiz , who died about 868, is particularly noteworthy. He wrote ''Kitab al Hayawan'' (''Book of animals''). In the 1200's the German scholar named Albertus Magnus wrote ''De vegetabilibus'', seven books, and ''De animalibus'', 26 books. He was particularly interested in plant propagation and reproduction and discussed in some detail the sexuality of plants and animals. He was also, by the way, among the teachers of Thomas Aquinas . PERSIAN AND ISLAMIC BIOLOGY After Islam, Persia became important in the development of science. Based on Greeks and Indian science and connected to Europe they were in a good position to help science develop. There were also Arab and Turkish scientists but the most important ones were Persians. Avicenna (commemorated in the genus '' Avicennia '') was very important in biology and recorded many findings. He is sometimes regarded as the father of modern medicine. Rhazes was also very important and he was also a good biologist. THE RENAISSANCE Interestingly, as many visual artists were interested in the bodies of animals and humans, they studied the physiology in detail. Such comparisons as that between a horse leg and a human leg were made. Otto Brunfels , Hieronymus Bock (also known as Hieronymus Tragus ) and Leonhart Fuchs were three men who wrote books about wild plants; they have been referred to as the fathers of German botany. Books about animals were also made, such as those by Conrad Gesner , illustrated by, among others, Albrecht Dürer . MODERN BIOLOGY Seventeenth and eighteenth century In 1628 William Harvey explained that blood circulates throughout the body, and is pumped by the heart. Antony Van Leeuwenhoek 's invention of the microscope in about 1650 opened up the micro-world of biology. The History of Plants was greatly extended, almost into an encyclopedia, by Giovanni Bodeo da Stapel in 1644 AD. In 1658 Jan Swammerdam is the first to observe and describe red blood cells, while Leeuwenhoek was the first to describe Spermatozoa , Bacteria and Infusoria in the 1670's and 1680's. Systematizing , naming and classifying dominated biology throughout much of the 17th and 18th centuries. Linnaeus published a basic Taxonomy for the natural world in 1735 , and in the 1750's introduced Scientific Names for all his species. The discovery and description of new species, and collecting specimens became a widespread passion of scientific gentlemen. Nineteenth century Wöhler showed In 1828 that organic molecules, such as Urea , can be created by synthetic means that do not involve life, and thus provided a powerful argument against Vitalism . The first enzyme, Diastase , was described in 1833 , and the science of Biochemistry may be said to have begun. By the mid 1850's the Miasma Theory Of Disease was largely superseded by the Germ Theory Of Disease and Antisepsis became a medically important invention. Surgery and medicine was advanced in 1858 when Gray's Anatomy was first published. In about the 1880's the science of Bacteriology began to be formed, especially through the work of Robert Koch , who introduced methods for growing pure cultures on Agar Gels containing specific nutrients in Petri dishes. He also introduced the " Koch's Postulates " for the reliable determination of when a proposed microorganism caused a specific disease. The long-held idea that living organisms could easily originate from nonliving matter ( Spontaneous Generation ) was finally discredited in a series of experiments carried out by Louis Pasteur . Schleiden and Schwann proposed the Cell Theory in 1839 : the basic unit of organisms is the cell and all cells come from preexisting cells. The British naturalist Charles Darwin seminal work '' On The Origin Of Species '' ( 1859 ) described Natural Selection , the primary mechanism for Evolution . , 1854 ]] In 1866 Genetics had its beginnings in the work of the Austria n Monk Gregor Mendel who formulated his Laws Of Inheritance . However, his work was not recognized until 35 years afterward. Three years after his publication, in 1869 Friedrich Miescher discovered what he called nuclein, which was later realized to be a crude preparation of DNA. The cytologist Walther Flemming in 1882 was the first to demonstrate that the discrete stages of mitosis were not an artifact of staining, but occurred in living cells, and moreover, that chromosomes doubled in number just before the cell divided and a daughter cell was produced. In 1887 August Weismann proposed that the chromosome number must then be halved in the case of the sexual cells, the Gametes . This was shortly proved to be the case and the process of Meiosis began to be understood. Twentieth century In about 1902, the Chromosome was identified as being the site of the genes, and its central position in heredity and development were finally realized. Linkage of genes and the Crossing Over of chromosomes during cell division were explored, particularly in Thomas Hunt Morgan 's fly lab in Columbia University. Early in the twentieth century, a unification of the idea of evolution by Natural Selection with Mendelian Genetics to produce the Modern Synthesis occurred. These ideas continued to be developed in the discipline of Population Genetics and in the second half of the century began to be applied in the new discipline of the genetics of behavior, Sociobiology , and, especially in humans, Evolutionary Psychology . By the end of the 19th century all of the major pathways of Drug Metabolism had been discovered. Then in the 1920's and 1930's the Metabolic Pathways of life, such as the Citric Acid Cycle and Glycolysis , finally began to be worked out by biochemists. This work continued to be very actively pursued for the rest of the century and into the next. In the mid-1950's the power generators of the cell, the Mitochondria , also began to be understood. Oswald Avery conclusively showed in 1943 that DNA was the genetic material of the chromosome, not its protein. By 1953 James Watson and Francis Crick showed that the structure of DNA was a double helix and showed its probable connection to replication. The nature of the Genetic Code was unraveled experimentally starting with the work of Nirenberg , Khorana and others in the late 1950's. This discovery, and others, especially the discovery of the first Restriction Enzyme in 1968 and PCR in 1983 gave rise to the vigorous science that we know today as Molecular Biology . The largest, most costly single biological study ever undertaken, the Human Genome Project began in 1988 under the leadership of James Watson, and a first draft of the human DNA sequence was announced in 2000 . By 2003 99% of the genome had been sequenced to an accuracy of 99.99%. The HapMap project to determine patterns of differences in the human genome began in 2002 and by 2005 completed its first phase work by of discovering on the order of one million SNP s in 270 people sampled from four distinct populations of people: Han Chinese, Japanese, Yoruba Nigerians, and Northern Europeans. The study of organisms, their reproduction, and the functions of their organs had come to be the study of molecules. Reductionism was triumphant. Even the methods of Scientific Classification of organisms, especially Cladistics , began in the last quarter of the century to use RNA and DNA sequences as characters. By the mid 1980's even the overall division of the tree of life into three domains (as opposed to the classical two), the Archaea , the Bacteria , and the Eukarya , based on Woese 's pioneering work on 16S RRNA sequencing, became generally accepted in the scientific community. While Cloning in plants was known for millennia it was only in 1951 that the first animal, the Tadpole , was cloned by nuclear transfer. Dolly , the sheep was cloned by transfer of a mature somatic cell nucleus into an enucleated Oocyte in 1997 . Within a few years, several other animals, including dogs, cats, horses and cattle were cloned by similar methods. In 1965 it was shown that normal cells in culture divide only a fixed number of times (the Hayflick Limit ) then aged and died. About the same time, Stem Cells were shown to be exceptions to this rule and began to be studied in earnest. Toward the end of the century, Totipotent Stem Cell s came to be recognized as crucial for the understanding of developmental biology and raised hopes for new medical applications. In 1983 the unity of much of the Morphogenesis of organisms from fertilized egg to adult began to be unraveled by the discovery of the Homeobox genes, first in the fruit fly, then in other insects and animals, including man. SEE ALSO
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