Edouard van BenedenDied 28 Apr 1910 at age 64 (born 5 Mar 1846).Edouard Joseph Louis-Marie van Beneden was a Belgian embryologist and cytologist best known for his discoveries concerning fertilization in sex cells and chromosome numbers in body cells. From 1883, he experimented with the worm Ascaris megalocephala, an intestinal worm found in horses. His studies showed that sexual fertilization results from the union of two different cell half-nuclei. Thus a new single cell is created with its number of chromosomes derived as one-half from the male sperm and the other half from the female egg. Van Beneden also determined that the chromosome number is constant for every body cell of a species. His theory of embryo formation in mammals became a standard scientific principle. |
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