Naturalist physician and German-Estonian biologist born in Piep, Estonia and naturalized German, considered one of the founders of embryology. Son of a noble family of German origin in Westphalia, he studied in Tallinn and at the universities of Tartu, Dorpat, Berlin, Vienna and Würzburg and was professor at the University of Königsberg (1817-1834), initially assistant and later professor of zoology (1821) and anatomy (1826).
He left Königsberg (1834) to live in the city and became a professor at the St. Petersburg Academy of Sciences (1834-1867), where he studied zoology (1834-1846) and then physiology (1846-1862).
He was one of the leaders of the criticisms of Charles Darwin (1809-1882) and presented the epistle De ova mamalium et hominis generis (1827), inaugurating comparative embryology and overturning the theory of pre-training. The following year he published the German version Über Entwickelungsgeschichte der Thiere (1828).
He traced the multiplication and differentiation of cells to embryonic development in animals, and discovered the different stages of development of the blastula, a form embryonic initial, resulting from the segmentation of the egg, and the notochord, cell structure in the shape of a rod, which gives rise to the primitive axis of the embryo, and also called the notochord.
With Heinz Christian Pander and from the work of Caspar Friedrich Wolff (1734-1794), he discovered the development of the embryo and defined the ectoderm, mesoderm and endoderm. He rediscovered the mammalian egg and contributed much to the creation of modern embryology and the discoveries of the laws of biogenetics, and he died in Dorpat, Estonia.
Source: Biographies - Academic Unit of Civil Engineering / UFCG
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