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roger bacon used a convex lens as a magnifying glass around this time
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leonardo da vinci used glass lenses to study small objects
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hans and zacharias janssen make the first compound microscope with two lenses inside a tube. these had issues with colour distortion known as spherical aberration
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robert hooke further developed the compound microscope
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marcello malpighi said that all plants were made of chambers
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nehemiah grew wrote an illustrated book on the microscopic anatomy of plants
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anton van leeuwenhoek described unicellular organisms called 'animalcules' from looking at a drop of stagnant rainwater
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leeuwenhoek discovered bacteria from observations of saliva
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rene dutrochet said all animals and plants are made of cells
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robert brown saw that orchid cells had a structure in them which he called the nucleus
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matthias schleiden and theodor schwann theorised that all living matter consists of cells and that the cell is the basic unit of living organisms
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johannes purkinje used the word protoplasm for the contents of a cell
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rudolf virchow said "where a cell exists there must have been a pre-existing cell, just as animal arises only from animal and the plant only from a plant"
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carl zeiss and ernst abbe made the firsst oil immersion microscopes, which could magnify images over 1000x
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walther fleming described mitosis from observations on living and stained cells
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august weismann said that all the cells living today can trace their ancestry back to ancient times
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ernst ruska made the first electron microscope. details of internal cell structures were revealed
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fritz zernicke made the phase contact microscope that enabled sustained living cells to be viewed more clearly
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x-ray crystallography used hard x-rays to produce diffraction images of crystallised biological molecules including proteins. an image of crystalline dna helped watson and crick reveal the structure of dna in 1953
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paul kirkpatrick and albert baez built the first x-ray microscope to use soft x-rays allowing non crystalline structures to be viewed
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first synchroton became operational in the usa
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marvin minsky made the first cofocal microscope which was laser based and produced tree dimensional images
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first synchroton operational in europe
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winfried denk made the first two photon fluorescence microscope
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international linear collider will be the largest synchroton ever built