CELLULAR LINE-UP: Cell biologist Theodor Boveri’s artistic inclinations are clear from the images he drew for his scientific monographs. The slide here (above, lower), shows chromosomes lined up along the mitotic spindle during anaphase in a sea urchin egg—a close match to the diagram in his publication (above, top). Notes marked in India ink on the edges of the slides, prepared between 1901 and 1914 and rediscovered nearly nine decades later during a cellar clean-up at the old Zoological Institute in Würzburg, Germany, where Boveri had worked, helped identify their source. “At that time there were no technicians; he prepared all these slides by himself,” says Ulrich Scheer, a professor emeritus at the University of Würzburg who found Boveri’s slides after they were thought to have been destroyed in WWII. ULRICH SCHEER, UNIVERSITY OF WURZBURG On March 16, 1945, an air raid on the city of Würzburg, Germany, killed nearly 5,000 residents and reduced most buildings to rubble. When the city was rebuilt in subsequent years, workers meticulously restored many public buildings, such as churches, cathedrals, and the University of Würzburg.
In 1992, the Zoological Institute in Würzburg, part of the Theodor Boveri Institute of Biosciences at the University of Würzburg, underwent another transition, moving quarters to a more modern, multidisciplinary facility at the university’s Biocenter. After the move, Ulrich Scheer, then chair of the zoology department, and his colleagues set out to clean the institute’s cellars, cluttered with years of academic detritus.
The basement “was pure chaos,” Scheer recalls. But as he sifted through hundreds of folders of microscope slides, a few stood out. Four of the book-shape folders contained nearly 700 century-old glass slides, prepared by the institute’s very namesake, cell biologist Theodor Boveri, and his wife and colleague Marcella O’Grady. Carefully labelled and dated by Boveri himself, the slides represent some of Boveri’s ...
