18 Facts About Hans Driesch

Hans Adolf Eduard Driesch was a German biologist and philosopher from Bad Kreuznach.

Hans Driesch is most noted for his early experimental work in embryology and for his neo-vitalist philosophy of entelechy.

Hans Driesch has been credited with performing the first artificial 'cloning' of an animal in the 1880s, although this claim is dependent on how one defines cloning.

Hans Driesch began to study medicine in 1886 under August Weismann at the University of Freiburg.

Hans Driesch travelled widely on field and study trips and lecture-tours, visiting Plymouth, India, Zurich and Leipzig where, in 1894, he published his Analytische Theorie der organischen Entwicklung or Analytic Theory of Organic Development.

Hans Driesch's interests encompassed mathematics, philosophy and physics as well as biology.

Hans Driesch married Margarete Relfferschneidt, and the couple had two children.

From 1891 Driesch worked in Naples at the Marine Biological Station, where until 1901 he continued to experiment and seek a theoretical formulation of his results.

Hans Driesch enquired into classical and modern philosophy in his search for an adequate theoretical overview and ended by adopting an Aristotlean teleological theory of entelechy.

Under the influence of his teacher Haeckel, Hans Driesch had tested the mechanistic embryological theories of another of Haeckel's students, Wilhelm Roux.

Hans Driesch studied sea urchin embryos, and found that when he separated the two cells of the embryo after the first cell-division, each developed into a complete sea urchin.

Hans Driesch's findings brought about the adoption of the terms "totipotent" and "pluripotent" cell, referring respectively to a cell that can generate every cell in an organism and one that can generate nearly every cell.

Hans Driesch's results were confirmed with greater precision, and the experiments extended, by Sven Horstadius who showed that conclusions of equivalence between sea urchin embryonic cells were an over-simplification.

Hans Driesch, believing that his results compromised contemporary mechanistic theories of ontogeny, instead proposed that the autonomy of life that he deduced from this persistence of embryological development despite interferences was due to what he called entelechy, a term borrowed from Aristotle's philosophy to indicate a life force which he conceived of as psychoid or "mind-like", that is; non-spatial, intensive, and qualitative rather than spatial, extensive, and quantitative.

Hans Driesch was awarded the chair of natural theology at the University of Aberdeen, where he delivered the Gifford Lectures in 1906 and 1908 on The Science and Philosophy of the Organism - the first comprehensive presentation of his ideas.

Hans Driesch taught at the University of Wisconsin and in Buenos Aires.

Hans Driesch became interested in parapsychology and published on such phenomena as telepathy, clairvoyance, and telekinesis.

Hans Driesch developed a deep interest in psychical research and parapsychology.