Story of the term “Stem Cell”

Author: Deepanshu S. (IG: @quantum.man)

SCG ID: 1606201902

German biologist Ernst Haeckel was a major supporter of Darwin’s theory of evolution. He drew numerous phylogenetic trees to represent the evolution of organisms from common ancestry. He called these phylogenic trees “Stamm bäume”. He used this term in his book Anthropogenie, first in 1868. Then he used the term in two senses –

1. Unicellular ancestor of all multicellular organisms.

2. Fertilized egg that give rise to all cells.

[In 3rd edition of his book – (Haeckel,1877)]

During late 19th century, August Weismann proposed theory of the continuity of the germplasm (Weismann, 1885).

Inspired by Weismann’s theory, Theodor Boveri and Valentin Häcker decided to find out the earliest germ cells in animal embryos, which would presumably carry the germ-plasm. Boveri proposed that cells along the germline lineage between the fertilized egg and committed germ cells be called stem cells (Boveri, 1892b).

Many years later, Edmund B. Wilson, a pioneering American zoologist and geneticist, popularized the term stem cell in the English language by reviewing Häcker’s and Boveri’s work in his book “The Cell Development and Inheritance” (Wilson, 1896).

Due to the wide readership and influence of Wilson’s book, he is generally credited as having coined the term stem cell (Maienschein, 2003; Shostak, 2006).

Reference:

DOI: 10.1016/j.stem.2007.05.013