Robert Remak, the first Jewish university professor (1847) in Poland, died on this date in 1865. Remak was a doctor of neurology who made important discoveries about nerve fibers and named the ectoderm, mesoderm, and endoderm germ layers of early embryos. Remak also discovered that the origin of cells was by the division of pre-existing cells. He was the father of Ernst Julius Remak, also a neurologist, and grandfather of the mathematician Robert Remak, who worked in group theory, algebraic number theory and mathematical economics, and was murdered in Auschwitz in 1942.
“The extracellular genesis of cells in animals seemed to me, ever since the publication of the cell theory [of Schwann], just as unlikely as the spontaneous generation of organisms. These doubts produced my observations on the multiplication of blood cells by division in bird and mammalian embryos and on the division of muscle bundles in frog larvae.” —Robert Remak