Friday, February 6, 2009

Quote of the Week: Cell Division

From a discussion of the 1838 cell theory proposed by Shcleiden & Schwann that appears in The Cell Cycle: An Introduction (1993) Murry & Hunt (W.H. Feeman & Co., New York):

Cell division is the only path to immortality. Nondividing cells can live for as long as a hundred years, but they always eventually die.

2 comments:

Unknown said...

who said this quote?

Stephanie Mohr said...

As I described above the quotation itself, this is from the book The Cell Cycle by A. Murray and T. Hunt (it appears on page 3, chapter 1, in the first paragraph of my version, a soft bound book published by Freeman & Co. in 1993). I phrased the citation information the way I did--referring to it as part of a discussion of cell theory as proposed by Schleiden and Schwann--as it seemed that Murray & Hunt might in this statement still be summarizing the cell theory arguments here, rather that presenting the idea as their own. Exactly where one would draw the divide between a summary of cell theory and presentation of the authors' own ideas in the paragraph is not completely clear to me. By some interpretation it might be fair to simply refer to the lines I quoted as from Murry and Hunt. But I was reluctant to potentially falsely attribute the idea itself to them. Reading the original Schleiden & Schwann work might help clear that up. I confess that I have not myself gone back to read that original work.