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The unseen world: reflections on Leeuwenhoek (1677) 'Concerning little animals'

Lane, N; (2015) The unseen world: reflections on Leeuwenhoek (1677) 'Concerning little animals'. [Review]. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B-Biological Sciences , 370 (1666) 10.1098/rstb.2014.0344. Green open access

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Abstract

Leeuwenhoek's 1677 paper, the famous ‘letter on the protozoa’, gives the first detailed description of protists and bacteria living in a range of environments. The colloquial, diaristic style conceals the workings of a startlingly original experimental mind. Later scientists could not match the resolution and clarity of Leeuwenhoek's microscopes, so his discoveries were doubted or even dismissed over the following centuries, limiting their direct influence on the history of biology; but work in the twentieth century confirmed Leeuwenhoek's discovery of bacterial cells, with a resolution of less than 1 µm. Leeuwenhoek delighted most in the forms, interactions and behaviour of his little ‘animalcules', which inhabited a previously unimagined microcosmos. In these reflections on the scientific reach of Leeuwenhoek's ideas and observations, I equate his questions with the preoccupations of our genomic era: what is the nature of Leeuwenhoek's animalcules, where do they come from, how do they relate to each other? Even with the powerful tools of modern biology, the answers are far from resolved—these questions still challenge our understanding of microbial evolution. This commentary was written to celebrate the 350th anniversary of the journal Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society.

Type: Article
Title: The unseen world: reflections on Leeuwenhoek (1677) 'Concerning little animals'
Open access status: An open access version is available from UCL Discovery
DOI: 10.1098/rstb.2014.0344
Publisher version: http://doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2014.0344
Language: English
Additional information: Copyright © 2015 The Authors. Published by the Royal Society under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/, which permits unrestricted use, provided the original author and source are credited.
Keywords: Leeuwenhoek, animalcule, protozoa, bacteria, eukaryote, tree of life
UCL classification: UCL
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences > Faculty of Life Sciences
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences > Faculty of Life Sciences > Div of Biosciences
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences > Faculty of Life Sciences > Div of Biosciences > Genetics, Evolution and Environment
URI: https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/1491916
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