Annals of morphology THEODOR BOVERI (1862–1915) To commemorate the centenary of his death and contributions to the Sutton–Boveri hypothesis

Abstract

One hundred years ago, only 3 days after his 53rd birthday, there died a man who was regarded during his lifetime already such a giant in biology as to rank with Aristotle, von Baer, Darwin, Wallace, Mendel …. Their respective contributions to epigenesis, natural selection, and segregation made it possible to formulate in the late 19th century a science relating “the origin of species” to the origin of the “individual” organisms, their structure and function to that of their parts, their parts to that of their cells, and mitosis to the propagation of their cells. In working out the developmental and cytological details of these processes Boveri achieved his greatness, taking advantage of innate drive, better instrumentation (microscope, microtome), ideal “model” organisms (sea urchin, Ascaris), methods of their study and preservation, and the rediscovery, in 1900, of Mendel's results allowing him to relate mendelism to chromosomal structure and function in what E.B. Wilson subsequently called the Sutton–Boveri hypothesis. When war began in 1914, Boveri married to an American, and father of a 14-year-old girl, was already mortally ill, infested with one of his favorite experimental organisms, Ascaris. Given his health problems and attachment to his native Bavaria, Boveri had declined (1913) the directorship of the nascent Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Biology in Berlin; but two of his recommended appointees there (Warburg, Spemann) became future Nobel Prize winners. Even before the war, Boveri's renown was such that distinguished foreigners, for example, the Americans E.B. Wilson, Marcella O'Grady, Nettie Stevens, Theophilus Painter, a.o., came to the University of Würzburg to work with him, Wilson dedicating all three editions of his rightly celebrated text “The Cell in Development and Heredity” [1896; 3rd Edition, 1925] to Boveri. Boveri's approach to genetics was primarily morphological; however, he was quick to unite mendelian inferences with chromosomal structure, and embryonic development with evolutionary theory. In retrospect, Boveri is perhaps best known for his formulation of a theory relating chromosomal anomalies to malformations, tumor formation and cancer. © 2016 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.