13 Facts About Wilhelm Roux

Wilhelm Roux was a German zoologist and pioneer of experimental embryology.

Wilhelm Roux attended university in Berlin and Strasbourg and studied under Gustav Albert Schwalbe, Friedrich Daniel von Recklinghausen, and Rudolf Virchow.

Wilhelm Roux's doctoral thesis on the embryological development of blood vessels was a seminal early study in biophysical modelling, a milestone in the study of the cardiovascular system.

For ten years Wilhelm Roux worked in Breslau, becoming director of his own Institute of Embryology in 1879.

Wilhelm Roux was professor at Innsbruck, Austria from 1889 to 1895, then accepted a professorial chair at the Anatomical Institute of the University of Halle, a post he retained until 1921.

Wilhelm Roux's research was based upon the notion of Entwicklungsmechanik or developmental mechanics: he investigated the mechanisms of functional adaptations of bones, cartilage, and tendons to malformation and disease.

Wilhelm Roux's methodology was to interfere with developing embryos and observe the outcome.

Wilhelm Roux's investigations were performed mainly on frogs' eggs to research the earliest structures in amphibian development.

Wilhelm Roux's goal was to show Darwinian processes at work on the cellular level.

In 1885 Wilhelm Roux removed a section of the medullary plate of an embryonic chicken and tamed it in a warm saline solution for 13 days, establishing the principle of tissue culture which would later be taken up by Ross Granville Harrison and Paul Alfred Weiss.

In 1888, Wilhelm Roux published the results of a series of defect experiments in which he took 2 and 4 cell frog embryos and killed half of the cells of each embryo with a hot needle.

Wilhelm Roux reported that they grew into half-embryos and surmised that the separate function of the two cells had already been determined.

In 1913, Wilhelm Roux was named an honorary member of the American Association for Anatomy.