Re: which scientists have made important discoveries with cells????

Allie:
	  Your question is a bit of a judgment call since there have been 
hundreds of great scientists who have made important contributions to cell 
biology.  If I had to choose four, I would probably vote for Robert Hooke, 
Matthias Schleiden, Theodor Schwann and Rudolf Virchow.  In 1663, Hooke, a 
young man in his twenties, described the microscopic appearance of cork for 
the first time.  Wrote Hooke, "I could plainly perceive it to be all 
perforated and porous, much like a Honey-Comb, but that the pores of it 
were not regular."  These "pores" he termed "cells."  This discovery of 
cells in cork and other plants could have been of general importance or it 
could have been a minor feature of a few kinds of organisms.  The diligent 
work and close observations of hundreds of scientists revealed the presence 
of cells in all living bodies.  This led Theodor Schwann (1839), a 
zoologist, and Matthias Schleiden, a botanist, to conclude that all life is 
composed of cells.  Finally Virchow (1958), a physiologist and pathologist, 
determined that all cells arise from pre-existing cells; cells do not 
spontaneously arise from non-living matter (except the first cell). The 
work of these four and many others gave rise to the Cell Theory which still 
holds today:
		1.) every organism is made up of one or more cells
		2.) the cell is the smallest unit having the properties of life
		3.) the continuity of life arises from the growth and division of 
			single cells.    

Reference: http://www.usoe.k12.ut.us/curr/science/core/7thgrd/
student/cells/sciber/celltheory.htm