© N.R.FULLER, SAYO-ART LLC
In the mid-1950s, Sam Clark Jr. of the School of Medicine at Washington University in St. Louis looked through his electron microscope at newborn-mouse kidneys and spotted something he’d never seen before. As he later described it, there appeared to be membrane-bound structures within the cytoplasm of the kidney cells. Intriguingly, these structures seemed to contain altered mitochondria.1
Soon after Clark published his observations, several independent researchers supported his findings. These included the Albert Einstein College of Medicine’s Alex Novikoff, who used the term cytolysome for the structures. “Within these cytolysomes remarkable events are in progress . . .” he and his colleague Edward Essner wrote in 1962.2 “Cytoplasm has somehow found its way inside the droplets and is apparently in the process of digestion.”
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